Powerball Jackpot Won: New Jersey Ticket Sweeps the Grand Prize!

The All-Important Winning Numbers

By now, you'll know that if you didn't purchase your tickets in New Jersey, that jackpot isn't yours. However, there were still over 1.1 million prizes won on the night, including millions' worth of non-jackpot prizes. The winning numbers were 15-34-41-53-56, and 21 for the Powerball Number. The Power Play multiplier was 2x.

Interestingly, for such a high-jackpot draw, no players managed to land the runner-up prize of $1 million (or $2 million with Power Play), so this draw really was a 'winner-takes-all' scenario.

 

The Winner's Next Steps

There are no details available yet regarding this win, not even the location of the purchase, or whether it was a Quick Pick ticket. We'll have another article up once they come to claim their prize! However, it could be some time before that happens, as the New Jersey Lottery allows players one year in which to claim before their tickets expire. NJ winners can also choose to remain fully anonymous, although for a win this size, we'd expect to get some comments from the winner in the press release when they come to claim, even if they do choose to remain anonymous.

New Jersey is unusual in that players must select whether they would prefer to receive the jackpot prize as the full annuity or the one-time cash option on their play slip at the point of purchase! Therefore, it may already be known to the lottery which option the winner has taken. For reference, the full annuity is worth $847 million, while the cash option is valued at $363.1 million – both numbers are before tax.

 

A Historic Win for New Jersey

This latest Powerball jackpot is the 13^th to have been won in New Jersey and is the biggest by far. The previous NJ Powerball records belonged, depending on how you count it, to a single ticket in 2016 that won $429.6 million, while in 2013 three tickets, two of which were sold in NJ, won shares of a $448.4 million jackpot.

Despite the jackpot's enormous size, it's only the second-biggest lottery prize won in New Jersey – the record is held by a $1.13 billion Mega Millions jackpot won by an anonymous ticketholder. They took the cash option of $537.5 million.

To give you an idea of the size of the Powerball jackpot, the winner could take the cash option and pay out $38 to every last New Jersey resident. Incredible!

 

The Lottery Scene Going Forwards: What Next?

Standard procedure – the Powerball jackpot has been reset to its starting value of $20 million. Still a life-changing sum, a fantastical amount of money, but it's hard not to feel underwhelmed when just yesterday it was approaching $1 billion. To sweeten Powerball's deal, the 10x Power Play multiplier will be thrown into the draw pool until the jackpot passes the $150 million mark.

Lottery fans who enjoy chasing the biggest jackpot around will no doubt be pivoting to Mega Millions, the game that currently has the biggest jackpot in the world: $505 million. It will be interesting to see what impact the influx of players will have on the Mega Millions jackpot – the next draw will be on Friday 6th of November (tomorrow, at the time of writing).

 

Getting Involved

If you'd like to take part in either of those lotteries, there's a good chance you can do so online – check out our Tickets Page to get started, and good luck! If you're in a state where online play isn't supported, you'll need to head down to your nearest lottery retailer to grab a ticket.