The Largest Single-Ticket Lottery Win in Each Country

The biggest jackpots ranked answers a question about advertised prize pools. This answers a harder one: what is the largest sum a single ticket has ever collected in each country?

The difference is not pedantic. Europe's largest jackpot ever — SuperEnalotto's €371,133,424.51 on 16 February 2023 — was split 90 ways, paying €4,123,707.71 per share. It is a record jackpot and nobody's record win.

Every row below is a confirmed single-ticket result. Countries we could not verify are named at the end rather than filled in.

The table

Game pages for several of these: Powerball, EuroMillions, Eurojackpot, SuperEnalotto, Australian Powerball, Lotto Max, Mega-Sena, SA Lotto, Mark Six, Toto.

The US row is not what it looks like

$2.04 billion is the number everyone repeats, and no one received it.

• Advertised annuity: $2,040,000,000 over 30 graduated years
• Cash option: $997.6 million — 48.9% of the headline
• After the 37% top federal rate alone: roughly $629 million, before state tax

California charges no state tax on lottery prizes, so that is close to the real figure. Mechanics in the advertised jackpot vs what you get and annuity vs lump sum; run a case through the after-tax prize calculator.

Now read the next rows. Ireland's and France's €250,000,000 are cash, and EuroMillions prizes are paid tax-free in both. Those winners banked appreciably more than three-quarters of what the American record-holder banked, from a headline one-eighth the size.

Sort this table by money actually received rather than by headline and it reorders dramatically. That is the most useful thing on this page.

Why so many rows read €250m and €120m

Because those are caps.

EuroMillions stops growing at €250 million — a ceiling reached on 13 June 2025 after being ratcheted up in €10m steps from €190m under the rules introduced in February 2020. Eurojackpot starts at €10 million and rolls to a maximum of €120 million.

That is why Ireland, France and Austria share an identical record to the euro, and why Germany, Czechia and Norway share another. Six national records that are really two rules. It also explains American dominance: Powerball and Mega Millions have no cap, so they simply keep climbing.

Spain: the biggest lottery that cannot top this list

Spain's Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad distributes billions of euros every December and will never produce a giant single-ticket win, because it is a raffle rather than a jackpot game. 100,000 five-digit numbers are issued across many identical series, and each full billete splits into ten €20 décimos. El Gordo pays €4,000,000 per series — €400,000 per décimo. See Lotería de Navidad.

So Spain deliberately spreads an enormous pool across a very large number of modest winners, and its actual single-ticket record comes from EuroMillions instead. Bigger lottery does not mean bigger individual prize: the many-winners-or-one choice is independent of pool size, and it is the same trade-off in lower-division prizes are the real returns.

Syndicates blur the question

Three rows above are syndicate tickets: Ireland's €250m (a Co. Cork family), France's €250m (five friends) and Finland's €90m (fifty players from Siilinjärvi, about €1.8m each). Each is a single ticket by any reasonable definition and emphatically not a single winner.

Italy's €371.1m is the mirror image — one huge jackpot, 90 shares, no large individual win at all. For how pooling changes both the odds and the outcome, see do syndicates win more?, the largest syndicate wins and the syndicate split calculator.

Records that get misreported

Four corrections worth having, since each circulates widely:

• The UK record is the anonymous £195,707,000 of 19 July 2022, not Joe and Jess Thwaite. The Thwaites won £184,262,899 on 10 May 2022 and held the record for about ten weeks.
• Australia's A$200m of 1 February 2024 was split two ways, and the A$150m of 19 December 2019 three ways. The single-ticket record is the separate A$150m of 23 May 2024.
• Brazil's R$1.09bn Mega da Virada of 1 January 2026 was split six ways, about R$181.9m each — less per winner than the 2019 single-ticket record above it.
• Germany's domestic Lotto 6aus49 record is about €42.6 million (October 2020). The nine-figure German entry above is Eurojackpot. See Lotto 6aus49.

What we could not verify

Netherlands — dropped. The best candidate is a €38.4m Staatsloterij prize from 10 May 2013, but its only citation is a dead domain, and Staatsloterij sells fifth-lot shares, so single-ticket status cannot be established.

South Korea — ₩40.72 billion on Lotto 6/45 draw 19, 12 April 2003, taken by a single winner reported as a police officer from Chuncheon. The draw number, date and amount agree across Dong-A Ilbo's tenth-anniversary retrospective and two reference compilations, but Donghae Lottery's current site serves no historical draw data, so no operator page confirms it. It is the one entry on this page resting on press reporting alone, and it is listed here rather than in the table for that reason. At roughly US$37.5 million gross — about ₩31.7bn after Korea's 22% withholding — it would sit near the bottom of the table if confirmed. See Lotto 6/45.

Netherlands, India, Mexico, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates — the obstacle is consistent: operators publish jackpot totals but not reliable ticket counts, and winner announcements disappear from archives within a few years.

Two rows in the table were promoted here after being checked directly against operator data rather than news coverage. Greece was confirmed by enumerating all 3,111 Tzoker draws through OPAP's own draws API: draw 2865 paid €19,890,009.46 to exactly one category-1 winner, and no OPAP LOTTO draw has ever exceeded €7.5 million, so Tzoker is decisively the Greek record. Singapore was confirmed by enumerating every Toto draw from 1997 to August 2026 through Singapore Pools' results endpoint and sorting by Group 1 share. Note that Singapore's largest Hongbao pool, S$19,416,912 on 11 February 2022, split eight ways at S$2,427,114 each — a bigger jackpot and a much smaller win, the distinction this whole page turns on.

Everywhere else, including India, Mexico, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates, the obstacle is consistent: operators publish jackpot totals but not reliable ticket counts, and winner announcements disappear from archives within a few years.

Checking a claim like this yourself

1. Annuity or cash? A US figure is almost always annuity, and roughly half of it is real money.
2. How many tickets? "Record jackpot" and "record win" diverge the moment the answer exceeds one.
3. Taxed or not? European prizes are generally paid in full; US prizes are not — lottery tax by country.
4. Was it capped? An identical figure across several countries is a rule, not an achievement.

See also the biggest unclaimed prizes, and which countries let you claim anonymously — which is why most rows above carry no name.