Did adding the UK make Powerball jackpots grow faster?

Powerball has now run one full jackpot cycle with British players added to the pool. It reset to $20 million on August 15 after an Illinois ticket took the $1.04 billion prize, and after ten drawings the advertised jackpot stands at $190 million for Monday, September 7. That is faster than the game had been growing prior, and the difference is measurable.

Since January 2025 the jackpot has been won ten times before this cycle, so there are ten prior runs to compare against, each starting from the same $20 million jackpot reset point. At the tenth drawing, each of those ten cycles ranged from $129 million to $178 million. The median was $142 million. The current cycle for the 10th drawing was at $173 million, $31 million, or about 21%, above that median, and only the run that went through Christmas 2025 reached a higher figure at the same point.

Draw by draw against the last ten cycles

The current cycle sits above the prior median at all nine drawings after the Powerball jackpot reset, and by the tenth it has opened a wider gap than at any earlier point. The closest seasonal match is the cycle that reset on September 8, 2025, in the same late-summer window a year earlier. That one reached $160 million at drawing ten. This one is $13 million ahead of it.

Where the extra money shows up

Powerball draws three times a week, and Saturday drawings sell far more tickets than Monday or Wednesday. That shows in the increase of each jackpot after each draw day. Taking only the drawings where the jackpot started between $80 million and $180 million, the prior ten cycles added a median $18.5 million on a Saturday and $12.3 million on a weekday. The largest Saturday increase in that range across all ten cycles was $22.3 million, in the week before Christmas.

Both Saturday steps in the current cycle are larger than any Saturday step in the previous ten. The weekday steps are ordinary, a little above the median and inside the old range. If the UK is adding to the pool, that is where it would show up. According to the terms Allwyn published at launch, US and UK players feed the same headline jackpot while the lower prize tiers stay separate, so extra UK sales land in the jackpot and nowhere else. Whether British buying is also heaviest on Saturdays is not something Allwyn has published, and the step sizes are the only evidence here.

Adding the UK was like adding California and Texas combined

The scale of the change is easy to lose in the daily numbers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the United Kingdom had 69.3 million people at mid-2024. The Census Bureau's July 2025 estimates put California at 39.4 million and Texas at 31.7 million, or 71.1 million put together. The UK is, within 3%, the two largest Powerball states combined.

Powerball is sold in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Leaving the two territories aside, the states and DC hold 327.6 million people, and the UK adds 21% to that. It is the largest single expansion of the game's audience since the multi-state pooling that created it, and it happened in one week in July 2026.

A 20% increase in people added to the pool doesn't mean a 20% increase in ticket sales. Nobody outside Allwyn knows how many Powerball lines British players are buying per head, the game is new to them, and the UK population figure includes people who are under 18 and can't buy lottery tickets. The population comparison sets an upper bound on what the UK could add, and the cash-basis growth of about 13% in this cycle sits comfortably under it. Whether it climbs toward the bound or fades as the novelty does is what the next few cycles will show.

What is not the UK

The advertised jackpot is not the actual cash in the pool. It is what that cash would pay out as a 30-year annuity, and the conversion moves with US Treasury rates. When rates rise, the same cash advertises as a bigger number. The cash option was about 45.5% of the advertised jackpot in March and April of this year. It is 43.1% of that now. That change alone makes a given cash pool advertise about 5% higher than it would have in the spring.

What can be said is that the jackpot is growing faster than it did in any non-holiday cycle of the past 20 months, that the extra is concentrated on Saturdays, and that about three-quarters of it is not explained by treasury rates. The Powerball page carries the current figure.

How we calculated this. Advertised jackpots and winners are from our drawing database for all Powerball drawings from January 1, 2025 through September 5, 2026, with the September 7 estimate from the game's current listing. A cycle begins at the first $20 million drawing after a jackpot win; the ten complete prior cycles reset on January 20, March 31, April 28, June 2, September 8, and December 27, 2025, and January 24, March 4, April 8, and May 4, 2026. A short May 2 reset that was won on its first drawing is excluded. Step sizes count only drawings where the starting jackpot was between $80 million and $180 million. Cash-to-annuity ratios are from our hourly jackpot snapshots, which begin in March 2026, so the cash-basis comparison uses the 2026 cycles only. UK ticket sales are not published and are not used. Population figures are the Office for National Statistics mid-2024 estimate for the UK and the Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates for July 1, 2025; the Powerball-state total is the US figure less Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah, and excludes Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Sources

Office for National Statistics: Population estimates for the UK, mid-2024

US Census Bureau: State Population Totals, Vintage 2025