In a move set to shake up the lottery landscape, Mega Millions announced a “mega” overhaul to its popular game, promising better odds, bigger prizes—and significantly more expensive tickets.
Tickets will increase from $2 to $5 when the “new and improved” game launches in April 2025, Mega Millions said in a Monday statement.
This is the second price increase since the game launched in 2002—the previous adjustment was in 2017, when the lottery introduced a $40 million starting jackpot.
For the $5 ticket, players gain access to a game redesigned to be more exciting and significantly enhance player benefits—or so Mega Millions claims.
“We are creating a game that both our existing players and people new to Mega Millions will love and get excited about playing,” said Joshua Johnston, lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium.
Mega Millions claims its improvements to the game will not only give players better odds of winning the jackpot but also increase the frequency of bigger jackpots—think billion-dollar-plus.
The revamped game will start with bigger initial jackpots that will grow faster, ensuring more frequent billion-dollar jackpots.
A crucial change is that players who win will always win more than the cost of the ticket, addressing one of the long-standing criticisms of lottery games where players win back only a fraction of their ticket prize.
Lastly, every ticket will have a built-in automatic multiplier of 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or even 10x, which applies to all non-jackpot wins. This means matching five white balls could win players up to $10 million instead of the current maximum of $1 million.
“We expect more billion-dollar jackpots than ever before, meaning creating more billionaires and many more millionaires as the jackpots climb, plus this game will continue the important legacy of supporting great causes everywhere Mega Millions is played,” Johnston said.
Mega Millions grew out of The Big Game, a lottery game that launched in six states—Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Virginia—in 1996. As its popularity increased, more states joined, and the game was rebranded as Mega Millions in 2002.
In January 2010, an additional 23 state lotteries joined Mega Millions in an unprecedented deal with Powerball. Currently, Mega Millions is played in 45 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The lottery prides itself on producing six billion-dollar jackpot winners since 2021.
“Since the last change in 2017 more than 1,200 players have become millionaires, an average of 3 millionaires per week,” Mega Millions said.
The biggest prize Mega Millions ever handed out was a $1.6 billion jackpot to a Florida resident in 2023—the third biggest jackpot ever after Powerball’s massive $2 billion prize in 2022 and its $1.7 billion jackpot in 2023.
Mega Millions is drawn at 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday and Friday evenings.