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America’s Mega Millions lottery is no stranger to reaching insane heights, with rollovers in the past leading to some gigantic payouts, but the jackpot has reached never before seen heights for tonight’s draw.The jackpot on Tuesday was up to a staggering $667 million, marginally beating the previous record of $656 million set back in arch of 2012, however that’s due to change tonight.
Record breaking jackpot
Tonight’s Mega Millions draw is expected to have a jackpot of around $868 million, as the United States buys into lottery fever and more people are being tickets in the hope they can pick up this incredible amount of money.This will be a new record for Mega Millions by some distance, and the second highest in the history of any US lottery jackpot.
Tuesday’s draw
While nobody scooped the jackpot on Tuesday, nine people came close, picking up the secondary prize of a cool $1 million, one of those players also included the Megaplier, for an additional $4 million, while the huge rise in tickets bought due to the jackpot means that there were over 4.5 million players who picked up some form of win from their ticket.
What happens if you win?
There are two choices for winners of the Mega Millions jackpot, either annuity, or cash.The cash option is the simplest, paying out one lump sum, but one that would be considerably less than the advertised jackpot due to tax.The annuity option will pay out an initial sum, followed by 29 annual payments, increasing by 5% a time, spreading the winnings over a 30 year period.The annuity option may well be the way to go here, because even spread across 30 years, it will still be a huge amount of money on an annual basis!