The Walmart Supercenter at 7680 Brandt Pike in Huber Heights sold the winning Powerball auto-pick ticket matching all five numbers plus the Powerball for last Wednesday’s drawing, the Ohio Lottery announced Thursday.
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The winning numbers were 2-26-33-55-57 and the red Powerball number was 22. The Powerplay was 2X.
The winner will have two options — take the $138 million jackpot in 30 installment payments over 29 years, or take the “cash option” prize of $65.8 million all at once. Either way, the winner will have to pay taxes on those amounts.
Before Wednesday’s winning ticket was sold, the last lucky Ohio ticket was sold July 19, 2023. Before that, the last Ohio Powerball winner ($124.9 million in 2014) was bought in Conneaut on the Pennsylvania border and Lake Erie shore — as far away from Dayton as you can be and still be in Ohio.
But that didn’t stop eager people from lining up to buy tickets and try their luck for Monday’s night’s grand prize, which was $29 million as of Monday afternoon. There were no jackpot winners in Saturday night’s drawing, when the numbers were 5, 32, 35, 39, 49 (21).
The largest Powerball jackpot ever was won in November 2022, when a single California player matched all the numbers for a $2.04 billion prize. He took the cash option, pocketing $997 million before taxes. The winning ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Center in Altadena, on the north side of Los Angeles, near Pasadena.
As a jackpot rises, so does the number of tickets purchased, says Josh Dziedzicki, territory manager of the Tipp City RoadDog store.
“There are a few different types of players we see; we get players who just get one or two tickets when the jackpot is high, then we’ll see people who have 10-year-old tickets and they’ll play those same numbers every time,” Dziedzicki told the Dayton Daily News last year.
According to the Ohio Lottery Commission, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot — which requires matching five numbers, plus a Powerball number — is one in 292 million. For comparison, the odds of getting struck by lightning are less than one in 1 million, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Ohio has had only slightly better luck in the Mega Millions lottery drawings in recent years, with two jackpot winners since November 2015. One of those was a $143 million ticket sold at Fat Daddy’s Road Dog in Moraine in May 2018. The winner chose the cash option, but claimed the jackpot via a passive trust to protect their identity.
Before that, a group of 15 Piqua city workers hit a $207 million Mega Millions jackpot just before Christmas in 2008.
If last week’s drawing was your lucky day, just know that the Ohio Lottery Commission will withhold 28% in income tax up-front (4% state and 24% federal), and you’re likely to owe millions more the following April, given the 37% federal tax bracket for the highest earners, plus the possibility of city income tax.
Lottery profits go to an education fund intended to benefit Ohio schools. State officials said the Ohio Lottery contributed $1.4 billion to the fund last fiscal year.
Staff Writer Aimee Hancock contributed to this story.
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