Mega Millions or Powerball Lottery – Which is The Biggest?

With jackpot prize amounts for both of the big American lotteries climbing to levels which make the whole world notice, we decided to do a side by side comparison of the two games.

World record lottery jackpots

Scan the top 10 record lottery jackpots and the only entries on the list are either of these two. You can even expand that to the top 30 and it will still just be the USA Powerball and Mega Millions. So they don‘t just like big cars and supersized burgers, their lotteries follow suit and in some style it must be said.

No wonder that the global media picks up and reports when an American lottery jackpot starts heating up. In turn, people from all over the world want to try their luck in these massive drawings – and they can, with the aid of online ticket vendors.

How do they get so big!

Each game has the starting jackpot prize amount set at a minimum of $40 million. Not bad at all, but almost ‚small change‘ when you compare it to the world record Powerball jackpot prize of 1.586 billion dollars.

Getting from 40 million to there requires two things: Time and no one matching the winning numbers. You see, each time a Powerball and Mega Millions jackpot is NOT won, the jackpot amount rolls over to the next drawing and a percentage of ticket sales for the forthcoming draw are added on top. There‘s two draws each week and after a period of no lucky winners, things start to get interesting, very interesting!

If we decide between the two Americans based on record jackpots, Powerball is the only one which boasts a billion+ top prize. On the top ten list, Powerball has 6 entries, while Mega Millions has four.

Things could be about to change, just recently the current Mega Millions jackpot prize broke $500 million – but then again, Powerball is following ‚on its heals‘ and nearing 300 million...

Two for one?

I guess in some respects it is somewhat strange that America doesn‘t just operate one big nationwide lottery game. Instead there are two of these titans, both offered in 44 states. But then again, it all goes back to earlier days, for example the Powerball started out as Lotto America and was only available in 6 states at launch. The roots of the Mega Millions can be traced back to the Big Game, which also launched in six US states.

Each game has gradually grown its reach and a massive expansion in 2010 saw a cross selling agreement which catapulted things to their current standings, there was even a lot of talk of a possible merger and who knows, it still might be on the cards.