How Many People Win the Lottery a Year?

Lots of people! Seriously – that’s the real answer.

But you probably want me to get a bit more specific with this. 🙂

The thing is it really depends on what you mean by ‘win’. And if your idea of ‘the lottery’ is any lottery anywhere in the world OR a specific game.

So let’s break it down a bit.

How Many People Win the Lottery Each Year

Normally when we refer to winning we’re really talking about the jackpot.

But of course there are a whole bunch of smaller prizes to be won too. Right down to free tickets and prizes of $1 and $2. Is that winning? Technically, yes (but obviously, m’eh!).

If we look at Mega Millions for example. They typically pay out over 500,000 prizes every single draw. Again, that’s actual ‘wins’, not dollars. Every draw. Twice a week.

About half of these wins are for just $2, the cost of a ticket. And 99.99% of these 500,000+ prizes are for $500 or less.

Mega Millions is incredibly hard to win the jackpot. The odds are amongst the toughest of any lottery game. But each draw usually 1 player manages to hit the 2nd tier prize by matching the 5 main balls. That pays out a $1 Million prize. And most of us would consider that to be ‘winning the lottery’.

So even though the Mega Millions jackpot itself is only won a few times a year, there are about 100 winners every year of $1 Million.

That’s just one game.

Just in the USA.

There are 91 countries in the world that have a lottery.

All of those countries have at least one game that pays out a major prize. Some have more than one. Some, like the USA, Canada and Australia, have different lottery companies for different states and regions. And multiple games per state.

So if you multiply all that out, you can quickly reach a figure of 1,000-2,000 people winning a major prize on the lottery a year.

And we haven’t even mentioned scratchers yet.

You can easily double or triple that figure if we include major prize winners on scratch off tickets. Every year.

So next time a friend says to you “why play the lottery, nobody ever wins” – feel free to correct them. 🙂

How Often Does Someone Win the Lottery?

This is a similar question. But again, it depends exactly what we mean.

Somebody, somewhere wins the lottery every single day.

Because somewhere in the world there is a lottery being drawn today. Every day.

This tends to apply more to the ‘Pick 3’ type games though where some of those run 7 days a week and even get drawn 3 times a day. But the prizes are very small and probably not what most people would really consider ‘winning’.

But consider our example above of Mega Millions. It’s a super tough game, but so many people play it that somebody tends to win the second tier $1 Million prize every draw. Which is ‘pretty often’ if you consider that to be winning it. Otherwise it’s only a few times a year.

So How Rare Is Winning a Lottery?

Winning a lottery is not rare at all, because somebody somewhere wins it every week.

But what you probably care about more is how rare is it to win a lottery yourself? And the answer to that depends on the choices you make and how you play. Your chances of winning are much better if you use good lottery strategies.

What Determines How Often Someone Wins?

Two things determine how often a lottery is won.

Firstly, the type of game and therefore the odds of that game. As we’ve already covered – somebody will win a game like Pick 3 every draw. But the prizes are tiny so we don’t really care that much (and that’s why you should avoid playing Pick 3).

Secondly, the number of people playing. The more people playing, the more combinations get picked. And the more combinations that are picked, the more likely that one of those combinations will be drawn (this is how are lottery numbers picked).

How Many People Have Won the Lottery?

It’s fascinating to think about how many lottery winners there have been in the world.

The lottery hasn’t really been around that long (see lottery games explained). The first one in the US started in 1934 – the UK didn’t get one until 1994!

But when we factor in all the games that are around now, plus all the scratch off tickets, this easily makes around 5,000 winners per year.

So a reasonable estimate of the total number of people who have won the lottery could easily be 200,000+.

And that’s a lot of sports cars. 😉