The Powerball jackpot has risen to $1.4 billion ahead of Wednesday’s draw

Though scooping the $1.1 billion prize pot would have been a fairy-tale way for someone to round out the long weekend, the absence of a lucky Powerball winner on Monday means that the jackpot has ballooned to an estimated $1.4 billion ahead of Wednesday night’s draw.

The $1.4 billion sum — a calculation based on the winner taking 30 payouts over almost three decades, rather than a smaller lump-sum payment — is staggering, obviously, but a multitude of factors have actually made billion-dollar prizes a lot more common in recent years. Indeed, a winner on Wednesday night would take home the third-biggest Powerball jackpot of the 2020s, and only the fourth-largest overall.

Since January 2021, an impressive five Powerball games have now reached or exceeded the $1 billion mark, with one lucky winner in California picking up a $2.04 billion prize in the largest US lottery win of all time. However, the trend of bigger pots in Powerball and Mega Millions competitions has been growing for the last decade or so, as ticket prices have doubled, rising interest rates have affected annuities, odds have shifted, and both major multistate draws ditched rules that restricted where they could sell their tickets.

Still, with the allure of billionaire-level wealth, it’s little surprise that the lottery still has so many of us in a vice grip, some 60 years on from when the modern version of the game landed in the US. In 2023, 50% of the population reported playing at least once a year, with Americans spending over $113 billion on lotteries last year — reportedly more than they spent on books, movies, concerts, and sports tickets combined.