Every Lottery Jackpot Over $500 Million, Ranked

Almost every jackpot on this list is a US jackpot, and almost every figure on it is larger than the money the winner actually received. Both facts are structural rather than accidental, and both are explained below the table.

The ranking uses advertised annuity values, because that is what was reported at the time. The cash column further down is the sum the winner could take instead.

The table

Every jackpot advertised at or above US$500 million, from Wikipedia's lottery jackpot records, which aggregates operator announcements.

Note the rows in bold. The $1.586bn Powerball of 13 January 2016 was split three ways between tickets in California, Florida and Tennessee, so no individual received anything close to $1.586bn. The same applies to the 2012 and 2015 entries. A "record jackpot" and a "record win" are different things — the second is covered in the largest single-ticket win in each country.

Annuity versus cash: the distinction that halves the list

US jackpots are advertised as a 30-year graduated annuity. The alternative is a single cash payment, and it runs at roughly 45–57% of the advertised number.

That last row is the instructive one. The 2018 jackpot was smaller than the 2023 one, but its cash option was larger. The cash-to-annuity ratio tracks prevailing interest rates: the annuity is funded by buying securities, so when yields are low the operator must set aside more cash to fund the same stream of payments. The percentage is a bond-market number, not a lottery number.

The mechanism is set out in the advertised jackpot vs what you get, and the discount-rate arithmetic for choosing between the two in annuity vs lump sum. Run your own figures through the lump sum vs annuity calculator.

Then tax. US prizes face 24% federal withholding, a top marginal federal rate of 37%, and state tax on top in most states. Applying the top federal rate alone to the record $997.6m cash option leaves roughly $629m before any state tax — about 31% of the advertised $2.04bn. Use the after-tax prize calculator for a specific jurisdiction and lottery tax by country for the rules.

Europe: smaller headline, comparable cheque

European jackpots are advertised as cash and, in most participating countries, paid tax-free. A €250m EuroMillions jackpot is €250m in the bank.

EuroMillions also runs a jackpot cap: once it is reached the jackpot stops growing and the excess rolls down to the next prize tier. Under the rules introduced in February 2020 the cap has been ratcheted upward in €10m steps, and per Wikipedia's EuroMillions article it reached €250 million on 13 June 2025. If you have read that the ceiling is €240m, that was true until the most recent step.

The largest EuroMillions jackpots won:

Because these are cash and tax-free in the UK, Ireland, France and Austria, a €250m EuroMillions win is worth more in the hand than the $1.602bn Mega Millions jackpot of August 2023, whose winner faced a $794.2m cash option before federal tax. The headline is a fraction of the size; the cheque is comparable. That inversion is the single most misreported thing about lottery records.

Europe's largest jackpot of any kind is Italy's SuperEnalotto at €371,133,424.51 on 16 February 2023 — but it makes the point about records better than any other row on this page, because it was split 90 ways on a system-play entry, paying €4,123,707.71 per share. The largest European jackpot ever taken by one ticket is SuperEnalotto's €209,160,441.54 of 13 August 2019, bought at a bar in Lodi, Lombardy (SuperEnalotto). See SuperEnalotto odds.

Why the US owns the top of the table

Three design choices, none of them luck:

1. Long odds. Powerball's jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338; Mega Millions' are 1 in 290,472,336 since its April 2025 redesign. Longer odds mean more rollovers, and rollovers are what build ten-figure jackpots. See how lottery odds are calculated and Powerball odds.
2. No cap. EuroMillions stops at €250m. Powerball does not stop.
3. Annuity advertising. Roughly doubling the headline at no cost, as the table above shows.

A jackpot record is therefore a statement about game design, not about generosity. The share of stakes actually returned to players is a separate and much duller number — see the payout ratio league table.

Reading a record responsibly

Four questions answer most of it. Is the figure annuity or cash? How many tickets shared it? Is it taxed? What currency? Two jackpots reported as "$1.6 billion" and "€250 million" can leave their winners with similar sums, and a "$1.586 billion record" can mean three people receiving a little over $100m each after cash discount and tax.

For a sense of what the odds behind these numbers actually mean, picturing one in 292 million is the more useful article and the odds visualiser the more useful tool.