Mega Millions promised $800 million jackpots after increasing the ticket price to $5. Seven wins in, the average is $418 million.

When Mega Millions raised its ticket price from $2 to $5 in April 2025, the argument for the increase was jackpot sizes. The game projected that average jackpots under the new format would exceed $800 million, against roughly $450 million before.

Seven jackpots have now been won under the new rules with $5 and they have averaged $417.6 million.

The comparison is the right one

It matters which average is being measured, because there are two and they say different things. The projection quoted a figure near $450 million for the old format, and our own records put the average jackpot at the moment it was won at $431.8 million across 45 wins between October 2017 and April 2025. Those match closely enough to confirm we are measuring the same thing.

On that basis, the new format has not delivered. The seven post-change jackpots ranged from $60 million to $980 million and averaged slightly less than the old game did.

What did improve is the floor of the wins, not the ceiling

The change is doing something, just not the advertised one. The average advertised jackpot across every drawing rose from $215.7 million to $280 million, about 30%, because the game now resets to a far higher starting jackpot after a win.

So a player walking past a Mega Millions sign on an ordinary Tuesday sees a bigger number than they used to. What has not happened is the run of billion-dollar headlines the price rise was sold on. The game's all-time record of $1.602 billion still belongs to the $2 era, and nothing since April 2025 has passed $980 million. Compare that to Powerball, which stayed at $2 and had three billion dollar plus jackpots since April 2025. Those include September 6, 2025 at $1.787 Billion, December 24, 2025 at $1.817 Billion, and August 12, 2026 at $1.04 Billion.

Seven jackpots is a small number

We would not call this settled, and the reason is in the spread. Jackpot outcomes are wildly variable: the seven completed runs for each jackpot since the change lasted 4, 20, 40, 5, 28, 2 and 38 drawings, producing prizes two orders of magnitude apart.

One $1.5 billion+ run would lift the post-change average by more than $150 million by itself. The honest statement is that the projection has not materialized in the first sixteen months, not that it cannot. Anyone citing this should cite the sample size with it.

What the extra $3 actually bought

The jackpot was the headline and it is the part that has underdelivered. The rest of the redesign is real and mostly reaches the bottom of the prize table: the minimum prize rose from $2 to $10, a multiplier is now built into every ticket instead of costing extra, and jackpot odds improved slightly from 1 in 302.6 million to 1 in 290.5 million.

Those changes matter more than they sound, because almost everyone who wins anything wins a small prize. We set out the full list of what changed in is Mega Millions worth $5 a ticket, and the case for the game now rests on that lower-tier improvement rather than on the jackpot promise.

Per-dollar, the trade is still unfavorable on jackpot size alone. The old $2 ticket bought about $108 million of average advertised jackpot per dollar spent. The $5 ticket buys about $56 million.

How we did this. Figures come from our own draw records for every Mega Millions drawing from October 31, 2017, when the previous 5/70 format began, through August 26, 2026, split at April 8, 2025, the first drawing under the $5 ticket. "Average jackpot when won" is the mean advertised annuity across drawings that produced at least one jackpot winner: 45 before and 7 after. "Average advertised" is the mean across all drawings in each period. The projected figures are those published by Mega Millions when the change was announced. Advertised means the annuity amount promoted before the drawing, not the cash value.