Share 
The last winner of the Powerball jackpot was on May 2. Forty-one drawings later, the jackpot is $856 million – and this run is on pace to be an exact replica of the streak that set a game record last September. Here’s why Powerball droughts keep getting longer, and why that’s less about luck than it looks.
The Powerball jackpot has climbed to an estimated $856 million for Saturday night’s drawing, with a cash option of $372 million. It is the largest Powerball prize of 2026, and if it is claimed, it would be the largest US lottery prize won this year and the eighth-largest jackpot in the game’s 34-year history.
But the number that actually matters this weekend is a much smaller one: 42.
Get a Free Ticket on First Play
Order Tickets on Your Phone
Use Promo Code: USABETS
Get a Free Ticket on First Play
Order Tickets on Your Phone
Use Promo Code: USABETS
$10 in Bonus Lottery Credits (Min. $5 Deposit)
Available on iOS & Android
To Claim: Click CLAIM OFFER
$10 in Bonus Lottery Credits (Min. $5 Deposit)
Available on iOS & Android
To Claim: Click CLAIM OFFER
The Powerball streak, and why 42 is the number to watch
Wednesday’s drawing came and went without a jackpot winner. That made it 41 consecutive drawings without someone matching all six numbers, a run stretching back more than three months, when, on May 2, tickets in Florida and Texas split a modest $20 million.
Saturday, Aug. 8, will be the 42nd drawing of this jackpot run.
That is not an arbitrary milestone. On Sept. 6, 2025, tickets in Missouri and Texas split $1.79 billion on what Powerball itself announced as “the 42nd drawing since the jackpot was previously won,” a game record at the time for the longest jackpot run ever.
The parallel is almost eerie. That record run started after a May 31, 2025, win in California and ended 98 days later. This one started after a May 2 win and, if it remains untouched through Saturday, will also have covered 98 days. Same number of drawings. Same number of days. Roughly the same stretch of calendar.
The difference is that a 42-drawing run no longer sets any records at all. It got beaten three and a half months later.
The longest jackpot runs in Powerball history
| Rank | Drawings | Run ended | Jackpot | Winner |
| 1 | 47 | Dec. 24, 2025 | $1.817 billion | Arkansas |
| 2 | 42 | Sept. 6, 2025 | $1.787 billion | Missouri / Texas |
| T-3 | 41 | Apr. 6, 2024 | $1.326 billion | Oregon |
| T-3 | 41 | Nov. 7, 2022 | $2.04 billion | California |
| T-3 | 41 | Oct. 4, 2021 | $699.8 million | California |
The current run sits at 41 and counting, already tied for third. A miss on Saturday moves it into a tie for second. A miss on Monday, Aug. 10, would push it to 43, the second-longest in Powerball history, behind only the 47-drawing marathon that ended on Christmas Eve.
Notice what every entry on that list has in common: all of them ended after August 2021.
Why Powerball droughts keep breaking records
Two structural changes explain most of it, and neither has anything to do with a cold streak.
October 2015: The matrix change
Powerball went from 59 white balls and 35 red to 69 white and 26 red in October 2015. The odds of hitting the jackpot moved from 1 in 175,223,510 to 1 in 292,201,338, making it a 67% harder target. That was the entire point. Longer droughts build bigger jackpots, and bigger jackpots sell more tickets.
August 2021: Monday nights
Powerball added a third weekly drawing on Aug. 23, 2021, going from 104 drawings a year to 156.
That second change is the one that quietly inflates the record book, and the dates in the table above give it away; every one of the longest runs in Powerball history ended after Monday drawings arrived. A 47-drawing run today takes about three and a half months. The same 47 drawings that existed before Monday nights would have taken nearly five and a half months.
Every drawing-count record set since 2021 is, in part, an artifact of counting faster.
So the honest version is this: Droughts are genuinely harder to break than they were a decade ago because the odds got worse on purpose. But the records falling every few months are partly a scoreboard problem, not a probability anomaly.
The math of a rollover
Here is the part that makes 41 straight misses feel less like a curse.
There are 292.2 million possible combinations of numbers. A drawing produces only a jackpot winner if somebody’s ticket lands on the one that gets drawn. And at a typical mid-range jackpot, Powerball sells somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 million tickets nationwide.
Run that math, and the chance of no winner in a given drawing looks like this:
- 50 million tickets sold: Roughly an 84% chance nobody wins
- 75 million tickets: 77%
- 100 million tickets: 71%
- 150 million tickets: 60%
Even at the frenzied sales volume a near-billion-dollar jackpot generates, the most likely single outcome of any individual drawing is still that nobody wins. String 41 of those together and you get exactly what we have: not a statistical scandal, just Tuesday.
The flip side is that rollovers feed themselves. Bigger jackpot, more tickets, better odds that someone hits. Every drawing in this run has been slightly more likely to end it than the one before.
What happened in Wednesday’s Powerball drawing
The Aug. 5 winning numbers were 14, 20, 59, 60, 61, with a red Powerball of 25 and a 2x Power Play multiplier.
No ticket matched all six. One player in Ohio matched all five white balls for $1 million, no Power Play, so no $2 million upgrade. Twenty players around the country hit four white balls plus the Powerball for $50,000, and three more who had paid the extra dollar for Power Play turned that same combination into $100,000.
Where the $856 million Powerball jackpot ranks
At $856 million, Saturday’s prize passes the $842.4 million a Michigan lottery club called The Breakfast Club won on New Year’s Day 2024, moving into eighth place on the Powerball all-time list.
It also clears two Mega Millions prizes that were sitting just above it earlier this week, the $810 million won in Texas in September 2024, and the $803 million claimed in Bradenton, FL, on July 28. That moves this jackpot from 19th to 16th on the all-time US lottery list. Win it Saturday, and it becomes the largest American lottery prize of 2026, passing that Bradenton ticket.
Powerball has produced five jackpot-winning drawings in 2026: North Carolina in January, Arkansas in March, Delaware in April, a shared Indiana-Kansas prize in late April, and the Florida-Texas split on May 2. The biggest was $250.8 million, won in Arkansas on March 2, which gave that state its second jackpot in roughly 10 weeks after the record $1.817 billion Christmas Eve prize.
How to play Powerball before Saturday night
The drawing is Saturday, Aug. 8, at 10:59 p.m. EDT in Tallahassee, FL.
You can purchase tickets via online lottery and at various convenience and grocery stores.
Roughly a dozen states plus Washington D.C. let you buy Powerball directly from the state lottery’s own website or app, including Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia and D.C. Massachusetts joined the list on July 27, launching iLottery with Powerball and Mega Millions available online to players 21 and older. New York and Maryland offer subscriptions only.
Services like Jackpocket, Jackpot.com, and Lotto.com buy a physical ticket on your behalf and hold it for you. Jackpocket, now owned by DraftKings, operates in 17 jurisdictions. But the courier map has tightened sharply: Texas criminalized online and courier ticket sales outright in 2025; Indiana banned them the same year; and California, Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin all prohibit them by statute. Only New York and New Jersey have full licensing regimes. Courier apps also close orders earlier than state cutoffs, so build in extra time.
Tickets are $2, plus $1 for Power Play and another $1 for Double Play where it is offered. Idaho and Montana bundle Power Play in, so the floor there is $3. The game is sold in 45 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah still sit it out, and, as of July 21, the UK National Lottery sells into the same jackpot pool.
Sales cutoffs are set on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis and land earlier than most players expect. Washington closes at 6:45 p.m. local time; Georgia runs the latest at 10 p.m. EDT; and most states shut off between 8:59 and 9:59 p.m. EDT. Courier apps close earlier still. The 10:59 p.m. drawing time is not your deadline and never was.
The odds of matching all six numbers are 1 in 292,201,338. The odds of winning any prize at all are 1 in 24.9.
Forty-one drawings is a long time for nobody to get lucky. It is also, by the current math of this game, completely normal, which is the strange thing about a record that keeps needing to be rewritten.
Good luck out there.
