Powerball

The ticket

You pick five white numbers from 1 to 69 and one red Powerball from 1 to 26, or you let the terminal pick them for you. One play costs $2. The drawings are on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, from the game's draw studio in Florida, according to Powerball's own FAQ, and the same page says the game is now sold by all 48 U.S. lotteries, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands among them.

Each of those lotteries runs its own sales. Some sell tickets over the internet, but only to their own residents, and the age limit, the claim rules and the deadline to cash a ticket (from 90 days to a year) are set by the lottery that sold it. So what you can do, and how, depends on where you live and where you bought.

The prize chart

These are the prizes and odds from the official prize chart, on a $2 play without the Power Play.

Match	Prize	Odds
5 white + Powerball	Jackpot	1 in 292,201,338
5 white	$1,000,000	1 in 11,688,053.52
4 white + Powerball	$50,000	1 in 913,129.18
4 white	$100	1 in 36,525.17
3 white + Powerball	$100	1 in 14,494.11
3 white	$7	1 in 579.76
2 white + Powerball	$7	1 in 701.33
1 white + Powerball	$4	1 in 91.98
Powerball only	$4	1 in 38.32

The overall odds of winning anything are 1 in 24.87, and most of those wins are the $4 for matching the red ball. The jackpot number is plain counting: there are 11,238,513 ways to choose five balls from 69, times 26 red balls, which comes to 292,201,338 combinations. Every one of them is as likely as every other, including 1-2-3-4-5 (nobody believes that one, but it's true).

Where your $2 goes

I read a lottery ticket the way I read any price: what does it pay, how often, and what's left over for the house. Multiply each fixed prize by its chance and add them up and you get about 32 cents for every $2 ticket. That is all the small prizes are worth to you, on average, over time.

The other $1.68 is buying a shot at the jackpot. For that to be a fair price on its own, the jackpot would have to pay $1.68 times 292,201,338, which is about $491 million, in cash, after nothing is taken out and with nobody to share it with. For the drawing on Wednesday 28 October 2026, the Powerball site advertises a $716 million jackpot with a cash value of $307.2 million. That headline is a 30-year annuity figure, and the cash is what's actually in the pool.

So even a jackpot that makes the evening news is well short of the fair price before tax, and taxes come next. Big jackpots also sell more tickets, which raises the chance that someone else holds your numbers and you split it. I don't say that to talk anyone out of $2. I say it so you know you're paying for the fun of the draw and not making a bet the arithmetic likes.

Power Play

For an extra $1 a play, Power Play multiplies every prize except the jackpot by 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X or 10X, whichever multiplier is drawn that night. The 10X only goes in the machine when the advertised jackpot is $150 million or less, and the $1 million prize for five white balls becomes a flat $2 million with Power Play, whatever the multiplier.

The prize chart gives the multiplier odds. With the 10X in play, 2X comes up 24 times in 43, 3X 13 times, 4X three times, 5X twice and 10X once, which averages about 2.77. Without the 10X the average is about 2.60. Run those against the small prizes and the extra dollar is worth roughly 46 to 50 cents back on average.

That makes the Power Play dollar the best-priced dollar on the ticket, which tells you something about the other two. If I were buying a Powerball ticket I'd add it, because it buys more of the prizes you might actually win. It does nothing for the jackpot.

Double Play

Double Play is a different add-on, also $1 a play, and it enters your same numbers in a second drawing held right after each main one. Its top prize is $10 million in cash, Power Play doesn't apply to it, and only some lotteries offer it: the Double Play page lists 30. The page doesn't publish the expected value, and I haven't worked out its prize chart here, so I won't put a price on it.

If the numbers come up

A jackpot winner chooses between the annuity, which Powerball pays as 30 payments over 29 years with each one 5 percent bigger than the last, and the lump sum. The advertised numbers are estimates until sales close for the drawing. The choice between the two is its own subject, and it's on the annuity or lump sum page. What gets taken out of either is on the lottery taxes page.

The ticket is the claim. Sign the back, keep it somewhere safe, and cash it with the lottery that sold it, before that lottery's deadline. The FAQ is plain that lotteries never email or phone to tell you that you've won (unless you entered one of their promotions), so anyone who does is running one of the lottery scams.

For how Powerball compares with the other big game, there is a page on Mega Millions, and the odds of every game in one place are on lottery odds. If the $2 has turned into $20 a draw, or you're buying more when the jackpot gets big, read the responsible gambling page before the next one. The odds are the same on a small jackpot as on a $700 million one. Only the crowd changes.