What Are the Odds of Winning the US Powerball?

An iGaming journalist working in the industry since 2015, I’m highly passionate about all types of online gambling, including the lottery. My core values are quality, accuracy, honesty and transparency. This, I apply to all of the content I provide at OnlineLottoBaba.

My goal is to make it easy for you to understand all the important aspects of playing the lottery online and to guide you to the best sites where the lottery can be played in a safe environment.

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The odds of winning the US Powerball jackpot is 1 in 292,201,338 (1 in 292 million) or 0.00000292%. If you bought one ticket to each draw and lived to be a modest 10,000 years, on average it would take you 187 lifetimes to win the jackpot.

Not very encouraging, is it? Yet, every other month sees a new winner of the Powerball jackpot. Perhaps the odds aren’t that bad after all? You just have to be lucky!

Now, let’s take a deeper dive into the US Powerball and its odds.

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The Odds of All Prizes in the US Powerball

The enormous jackpot of the US Powerball isn’t the only prize you can get your hands on. The lottery offers a total of nine prize tiers in which the odds of winning are as follows:

Prize Tier	Prize in USD	Prize in INR	Odds
1	Jackpot (min. $20 million)	₹150 Crore	1 in 292,201,338
2	$1 million	₹8 Crore	1 in 11,688,054
3	$50,000	₹38 Lakhs	1 in 913,129
4	$100	₹7,500	1 in 36,525
5	$100	₹7,500	1 in 14,494
6	$7	₹525	1 in 580
7	$7	₹525	1 in 701
8	$4	₹300	1 in 92
9	$4	₹300	1 in 38

As can be seen, the odds of winning the second prize in the US Powerball aren’t nearly as bad as the jackpot and $1 million (or approximately ₹7.5 Crore) is most definitely a neat prize to claim.

What Are the Odds of Winning Any Prize?

The odds of winning any prize in the US Powerball are 1 in 25. In other words, for every 25 tickets that you buy, one is expected to be a winner. With such odds, it better be the jackpot!

Do the Odds Change When Playing the PowerPlay Feature?

No. PowerPlay is an optional play feature of the Powerball lottery, which is offered only by some online lottery sites in India. What this feature does is that it increases the amount you win from all prize tiers except the jackpot (from x2 up to x10). The feature does not increase your odds of winning by any means.

How Do the Odds in US Powerball Compare to Other Lotteries?

Overall, the odds of winning the US Powerball are higher than those of other lotteries. It’s especially true for the jackpot which is the second hardest to win among all international lotteries you can play online.

Here’s a table comparing the odds of winning the US Powerball (the jackpot as well as any win) with five other commonly played lotteries:

Lottery	Jackpot Win	Any Win
US Powerball	1 in 239 million	1 in 25
EuroMillions	1 in 140 million	1 in 26
France Lotto	1 in 19 million	1 in 6
Austria Lotto	1 in 8 million	1 in 12
Mega-Sena	1 in 50 million	1 in 2,300
SuperEnaLotto	1 in 622 million	1 in 20

If you’re interested in learning how the odds compare to more lotteries, you can find a full odds comparison here.

Can I Improve My Odds of Winning the US Powerball?

The odds of the Powerball lottery can’t be improved by themselves. They are fixed and based on the pool of numbers you have to choose (5 normal ones out of 69 and 1 Powerball number out of 26) and the numbers you have to match in order to win.

However, one of the keys to winning the lottery is simply buying more tickets. The more lines of unique numbers you play, the more likely it is that any of these will be matched. Not rocket science, we know.

Another way of improving your odds of winning the US Powerball is to play the lottery in a syndicate. This means that you and other players are buying one or several shares of a big pool of tickets. If any of the tickets win, the prize is evenly distributed between all shareholders.

For instance, instead of playing a single line to the US Powerball at ₹300, you could buy one of 40 shares to a syndicate for the same price and get as many as 60 lines played. Your odds of winning would be 60 times better than playing individually. However, whenever one of the 60 lines win, the prize would be shared with all 40 shareholders. In other words, you win less for a heavily increased chance of winning.

Best Numbers to Play to Win the US Powerball

Let us start by saying there is no such thing as the best numbers to play. Winning the US Powerball is all about luck and your odds of winning are the same regardless of the numbers you pick.

However, if you’re superstitious, there are statistics that tell us that some numbers have better odds than others. With 69 numbers in play, the true odds of a specific number being pulled is 5 in 69 (since 5 numbers are picked for each draw) or, in other words, 7.24%.

See the latest us Powerball results and winning numbers here

Now, based on statistics fetched from lottonumbers.com, the most commonly picked numbers in 700 draws that took place between October 2015 and March 2022 were the following:

61 – drawn 68 times (9.7% of all draws)
32 – drawn 67 times (9.5% of all draws)
23 – drawn 65 times (9.3% of all draws)
21 – drawn 65 times (9.3% of all draws)
63 – drawn 62 times (8.8% of all draws)

As you can see, the odds are significantly higher than the average of 7.24%.

As for the Powerball number, the odds of a specific number being pulled is 1 in 26 or 3.8%. However, statistics from the same period of time show that the number 24 was drawn 41 times, the odds being 5.8%.

How Are the Jackpot Odds Calculated in the US Powerball?

The odds of winning the jackpot in the US Powerball are 1 in 292,201,338. The math behind this is based on the 5 normal numbers that are picked out of a pool of 69 and the one Powerball number that is picked out of a pool of 26. All of which have to be matched in order to win.

The odds calculations are a bit advanced, but we have done our best to break them down and explain them in an easy-to-understand way. Here’s how the odds are calculated:

We start by determining all the possible combinations the 5 normal numbers can make.

The math is: (69 x 68 x 67 x 66 x 65) / (5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) = 11,238,513

Explanation: there are 69 different numbers that can be picked. However, when the first number has been picked, there are only 68 left and when two have been picked, there are only 67, etc. This first multiplication (69 x 68 x 67 x 66 x 65) gives us the possible combinations of 5 picked numbers appearing in the exact order (1,348,621,560)

However, in the Powerball it doesn’t matter in which order the numbers are drawn as long as you match them. So, we calculate the number of possible orders that can appear, which is done by 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120. We then divide all the possible combinations of the five numbers with the 120 different orders that can appear to get 11,238,513 as odds.

Now we have to add in the odds of the Powerball number as well.

The math is: 11,238,513 x 26 = 292,201,338

Explanation: The odds of hitting the Powerball number are 1 in 26 since only one number is drawn out of a pool of 26. In other words, there are 26 different combinations of the Powerball number. To get the final odds of hitting all the numbers to win the jackpot, we simply multiply the possible combinations of the 5 normal numbers with the possible combinations of the Powerball number.

Tada! We get 292,201,338 which are all of the possible number combinations in the US Powerball. So, when you play the lottery, you have a 1 in 292,201,338 shot to pick the right combination.