Powerball’s $1.7B jackpot could make Christmas Eve unforgettable : NPR

A convenience store employee retrieves a Powerball lottery ticket for a customer Monday, Dec. 22, 2025, in Portland, Oregon.

Jenny Kane/AP

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Jenny Kane/AP

A Christmas Eve Powerball drawing could add new meaning to the holiday cheer as millions of players hope to cash in the $1.7 billion prize, which comes after months without a jackpot winner.

The 4th largest jackpot ever recorded in the United States comes after 46 consecutive drawings with no one claiming to hold all six numbers. The last competition with a jackpot winner took place on September 6. The game’s odds are high and people are decorating rooms and handing out $2 – and sometimes more – for tickets before Wednesday night’s live drawing.

This is a sign that the game is working as expected. Lottery officials made the odds more difficult in 2015 as a mechanism to snowball jackpots, while making it easier to get small prizes.

The Christmas holidays should not impact the drawing process in the event of a winning ticket, a Powerball spokesperson said.

Here’s what you need to know about Wednesday’s drawing:

Christmas Eve cha-ching

That note placed in a stocking or under the tree could be worth a billion dollars – but with some caveats.

Powerball is played in 45 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most of these areas require players to be 18 years or older, although some states have stricter requirements. In Nebraska, players must be at least 19 years old, and in Louisiana and Arizona, people cannot buy tickets until they are 21.

Winning tickets must also be redeemed in the states where they were purchased. And players cannot purchase tickets in Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada or Utah.

Aside from that, lottery officials say it’s possible that a lucky Powerball ticket could be a gift that keeps on giving.

Charlie McIntyre, executive director of the New Hampshire Lottery, said Tuesday, “Just think about the stories you can tell future generations about the year you woke up a billionaire at Christmas.” »

A range of prices can be offered

Wednesday’s $1.7 billion jackpot has a cash value of $781.3 million.

A winner can choose to receive the entire amount as an annuity, with immediate payment then annual payments over 29 years which increase by 5% each time. However, most winners usually choose the cash value versus a lump sum.

The odds are high for the top prize, but there are smaller prizes that players can collect.

In the latest drawing, players from Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin each won $1 million. There are also prizes outside of the jackpot, ranging from a few dollars to $2 million.

One woman told Powerball officials that she had already planned her $1 million win: “We’re going to pay off our cars and our credit cards and get a bigger house!”

And Thomas Anderson of Burlington, North Carolina, said he plans to use his $100,000 Powerball win from earlier this month to go back to school, according to Powerball.

Big Odds for Billion Dollar Jackpots

Lottery officials set the odds at 1 in 292.2 million in hopes that jackpots will roll over with each of the three weekly drawings until the pool swells enough for more people to notice and play.

The odds were significantly better, at 1 in 175 million. But the game was made more difficult in 2015 to create unusual bounties. The higher odds helped set the stage for back-to-back record draws this year.

The last time someone won the Powerball pot was on September 6, when players from Missouri and Texas won $1.787 billion, the second-largest prize in U.S. history.

In the United States, more than a dozen lottery jackpots have exceeded $1 billion since 2016. The largest U.S. jackpot on record was $2.04 billion in 2022.

Learn more about these unfavorable odds

It’s hard to explain what a probability of 1 in 292.2 million means. Even reduced by half, they remain difficult to digest.

In the past, a math teacher described the odds of flipping a coin and getting heads 28 times in a row.

Tim Chartier, a mathematics professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, on Monday compared the odds of a winning lottery ticket to selecting a marked dollar bill from a pile 19 miles high.

“It’s true that if you buy 100 tickets, you have 100 times the chance of winning. But in this case, ‘100 times the chance’ hardly moves the probability needle,” Chartier said. “Using the time analogy, buying 100 tickets is like making 100 guesses to name the second choice over nine years. Possible – but extremely unlikely.”