Share 
The Powerball jackpot is back over $700 million.
Wednesday’s drawing is worth an estimated $716 million, or $307.2 million in cash, according to Powerball. The numbers are drawn at 10:59 p.m. EDT from the draw studio in Florida.
Nobody hit the jackpot Monday. The winning numbers were 18, 26, 49, 50 and 54, with a Powerball of 1. Two tickets matched all five white balls for $1 million, one sold in Florida and one in Georgia.
So the roll keeps going. And with it comes the usual ritual of everybody asking which numbers are “due.”
Here’s the short answer before the long one: the balls don’t keep score.
Click to claim promo USABETS Click to claim promoWhen is the next Powerball drawing?
Tonight, Wednesday, Oct. 28. Powerball draws three times a week: Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. If nobody wins, the next shot is Saturday night. Halloween, fittingly.
This run started after an Illinois ticket sold at a Hy-Vee Gas in Quincy won $1.04 billion on Aug. 12. That’s the eighth-largest Powerball jackpot ever and the biggest of 2026. Wednesday is the 33rd drawing since.
Stephen Durrell, the Kansas Lottery executive director and chair of the Powerball Product Group, said in a news release:
“Large jackpots continue to capture the imagination of players across all participating lotteries. It’s exciting to see another jackpot climb past the $700 million mark.”
At $716 million, this one sits just outside Powerball’s all-time top 10. It would need to reach $768.4 million to pass the No. 10 spot, the 2019 jackpot won in Wisconsin.
Two other wrinkles. It’s the first run where players in the UK have been feeding the prize pool from the start, since Powerball launched there July 21. And it’s chasing a back-to-back pattern Powerball last saw in 2025, when $1.787 billion and $1.817 billion jackpots hit in consecutive cycles.
What are the most common Powerball numbers?
The Texas Lottery tracks how often every number has been drawn since Oct. 7, 2015. That’s when Powerball moved to its current format, five white balls from 1 to 69 and a red Powerball from 1 to 26. Through Monday, that covers 1,425 drawings.
The white balls drawn most often:
- 21: 128 times
- 61: 126 times
- 64: 125 times
- 28: 121 times
- 32: 120 times
The coldest white ball is 13, drawn just 78 times. Make of that what you will.
On the red ball, 14 leads with 68 appearances, followed by 4 at 66 and a tie between 21 and 24 at 63. The least-drawn Powerball is 16, at 40.
Yes, 21 sits near the top of both lists.
Do hot numbers actually win more?
No.
In a perfectly even world, every white ball would have been drawn about 103 times over those 1,425 drawings. So 21 is running about 24% ahead of its share, and 13 is running about 24% behind. That sounds like a pattern. It’s what randomness looks like over a sample this size.
Every drawing starts fresh. The machine doesn’t know 21 has been hot for a decade. Each white ball has the same shot every single time, and so does each red one.
What matters, a little, is avoiding the numbers everybody else plays. Picking popular combinations doesn’t lower your odds of winning. It just raises the chance that you’d split the jackpot with someone else if you did.
What are the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot?
The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million. The odds of winning any prize at all are 1 in 24.9.
Put the jackpot odds another way. Buy one ticket for every drawing, three a week, every week of the year. On average, you’d hit the jackpot once every 1.87 million years.
What does a Powerball winner actually take home?
First, the basics. A ticket costs $2. Powerball is sold in 45 states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and now the UK.
And if you do win, the $307.2 million cash option is before taxes. The mandatory 24% federal withholding alone would knock it down to about $233.5 million, according to Forbes, with more owed at the top federal rate and in states that tax lottery winnings.
Are you more likely to get struck by lightning than win Powerball?
By a lot.
The National Weather Service puts the odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year at 1 in 1.22 million. That makes it about 239 times more likely than hitting the jackpot with a single ticket.
Want a casino comparison? Slot odds vary by machine and casinos don’t post them. But the three-reel Megabucks machine has long been pegged at about 1 in 49.8 million, according to the Las Vegas Advisor. Even that is almost six times better than Powerball’s jackpot odds.
Or deal yourself five cards. The odds of a royal flush on the deal are 1 in 649,740. You’re about 450 times more likely to see one of those than to hit the Powerball jackpot.
Then there’s the golf course. The average golfer’s odds of making a hole-in-one are 12,500 to 1, according to the National Hole-in-One Registry. That’s more than 23,000 times better than one Powerball ticket.
Now for some good news. Powerball isn’t the longest shot out there.
Know a little something about basketball? The NCAA puts your odds of a perfect March Madness bracket at 1 in 120.2 billion. That’s about 411 times worse than a single Powerball ticket.
And if you just flip a coin on every game? The NCAA puts those odds at 1 in 9.2 quintillion. That’s a 9 followed by 18 digits.
Next to that, a single Powerball ticket is about 31.6 billion times more likely to win.
Feeling better yet?
So take the swing on that next par 3. Pick 21 if you like it. Pick your kid’s birthday. Pick a quick pick.
The balls still won’t keep score.
Play for fun and set a budget before the hype sets it for you. If gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER.
