Mega Millions Jackpot Jumps To $353 Million, 5th Biggest In Game History

The Mega Millions jackpot for Friday, March 14, jumped to a staggering $353 million, the 5th-largest jackpot in the 22-year history of the nationwide lottery game. The winning numbers that came up Tuesday night in Atlanta, Georgia, produced no perfect matches with any of the 60,734,638 tickets sold for that drawing — the 19th straight without a jackpot winner.

The last time anyone won the Mega Millions jackpot was January 3, when a retired state government employee in Tennessee took home a $61 million grand prize.

The nearly 61 million tickets sold for Tuesday’s game were the most sold for any Mega Millions drawing since December 17, when Mega Millions ended up giving away its second-largest jackpot ever of $648 million. More than 330 million tickets were sold for that drawing.

The total tickets sold for Tuesday’s drawing marked only the fifth time since the start of November — the earliest date for which stats are available — that lottery players bought more than 60 million tickets for either of the multi-state lottery games, Mega Millions or Powerball. Three of those instances occurred in the run-up to the December 17 Mega Millions drawing.

Though it didn’t produce a jackpot winner, Tuesday night’s drawing did make two more millionaires, with one ticket each in Texas and Washington state matching the first five numbers but not the Mega Ball number.

All told, 4,118,247 tickets were good for some level of prize Tuesday night. See if yours was one of them. Check your numbers against the winners:

9 — 14 — 56 — 57 — 69 Mega Ball 10

While two tickets were good for a million bucks, another 77 matched four numbers plus the Mega Ball, which was good for the $5,000 third prize — except in California where under the state’s pari-mutuel system, non-jackpot prizes vary from drawing to drawing.

Tuesday night’s “4+1” prize was worth $4,859 to the 13 people who won it in the Golden State.

Friday night’s $353 million jackpot would be the 12th-largest in United States lottery history, if someone wins it — and it could still increase with a surge in ticket buyers. It would need to top a $363 million jackpot given away on May 9, 2000, in The Big Game, the predecessor to Mega Millions, to move into 11th place.