Is it true that you're likelier to be struck by lightning twice than to win the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot?

It is the line many jackpot stories reach for, and the arithmetic backs it up. Being struck by lightning twice really is more likely than winning Powerball or Mega Millions with a single ticket.

The arithmetic

The National Weather Service puts the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year at 1 in 1,222,000, and in an 80-year lifetime at 1 in 15,300, based on strike and casualty data from 2009 to 2018. Treat two strikes as independent events and you get 15,300² (15,300 x 15,300), which gives about 1 in 234,090,000.

Winning either jackpot with one ticket are roughly 25% less likely than two lifetime lightning strikes.

The keyword is "lifetime"

The lightning number covers 80 years of walking around outdoors. The lottery number covers one ticket, bought once, for one drawing.

Put both on the same footing and it kind of collapses. Someone buying a single Powerball ticket every week for 50 years has bought about 2,600 tickets, which works out at roughly 1 in 112,000 of taking a jackpot at some point in their life. Against two lifetime strikes at 1 in 234 million, that weekly player is about 2,000 times likelier to win the jackpot than to be hit twice.

Being struck once, at 1 in 15,300, stays ahead of them. It would take roughly 19,100 tickets over a lifetime to match that, which is about seven a week for 50 years.

Run the comparison the other way, over a single year, and it reverses completely. Two strikes in the same year is roughly 1 in 1.5 trillion, which makes a single Powerball ticket about 5,100 times more likely to win the jackpot than you are to be hit twice in the same twelve months.

Lightning does not work like a lottery draw

There is a deeper problem with squaring the number. Independence is the assumption that makes the math easy, and lightning badly violates it. People who are struck once are disproportionately people who spend their working lives outdoors, in the parts of the country where storms are frequent, doing the things that put them at risk. Their chance of a second strike is far higher than the general population's chance of a first.

Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park, was struck seven times by lighting between 1942 and 1977 and holds the record for it. Mainly because he had a job that put him on exposed ground in thunderstorms for 35 years.

Lottery balls aren't the same. Every ticket is drawn from the same fixed pool with the same odds every time, and nothing about last week's draw changes this week's. The lightning from this comparison is a population statistic about risk exposure. The lottery half is a fixed mathematical constant. Lining them up as though they're something similar to measure is what you would call sleight of hand.

What the comparison gets right anyway

Despite what I wrote, none of this makes the underlying point wrong. A 1 in 292 million shot is genuinely small and almost impossible, and human brains handle numbers that size badly. If the lightning line stops somebody spending money they can't afford to on a jackpot they will not win, it has done useful work even with its flawed arithmetic.

The more useful framing is what the ticket is actually worth. A typical $2 Powerball ticket returns roughly 50 cents in expected value across all its prize tiers, and the jackpot is a small part of that. Scratch-offs are the better-understood version of the same question, where a $1 ticket returns about 62 cents on the dollar and a $50 ticket about 80 cents, and where the ValueScore™ rankings let you see which specific games return more than others.

How Phil Nageotte calculated this. Lightning odds are the National Weather Service figures of 1 in 1,222,000 per year and 1 in 15,300 over an assumed 80-year lifetime, drawn from 2009 to 2018 casualty data. Two-strike odds square those figures, which assumes independence, as explained above. Jackpot odds are the published per-ticket figures we track for each game, 1 in 292,201,338 for Powerball and 1 in 290,472,336 for Mega Millions following its April 2025 format change. Multi-ticket odds treat each ticket as an independent draw, which is accurate across different drawings.

Sources

National Weather Service: How Dangerous is Lightning, odds of being struck