Ticket sold in Arkansas wins $1.8 billion Powerball jackpot in Christmas Eve drawing – second-largest lottery jackpot in history

A Powerball player in Arkansas will receive an unforgettable holiday gift: a ticket sold there matched all six numbers to win a $1.817 million jackpot, the second-largest U.S. lottery prize, according to Powerball.

The winning numbers for Wednesday’s Christmas Eve drawing were: 4, 25, 31, 52 and 59 with Powerball 19.

The winner can choose between a lump sum cash payment of $834.9 million or an annualized prize paid over approximately 30 years of the total prize amount. Both options are before taxes.

The Christmas Eve jackpot was the game’s second billion-dollar-plus prize this year after 46 consecutive drawings without a winner.

A $1.787 million Powerball jackpot won in September by two tickets in Missouri and Texas was the third-largest prize in U.S. lottery history.

In this July 18, 2023, file photo, Powerball game tickets are shown at a convenience store in Los Angeles.

Mario Tama/Getty Images, FILE

The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in more than 292 million. according to Powerball.

Customers line up to buy lottery tickets on December 1, 2025 in Hawthorne, California.

Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Tim Chartier, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College, compared trying to win the Powerball jackpot to those odds of selecting a specific second over a nine-year span and then trying to guess that specific second. He told ABC News that buying more tickets increases a player’s chances of winning, but only marginally.

“If you buy 100 tickets, it’s true that you actually multiply your chances of winning by 100,” Chartier said, but he also noted that “buying 100 tickets is like having only 100 guesses to guess that second in a nine-year span, so it’s still not very likely.”