Christmas Eve 2025 brought a wonderful gift to Arkansas. A single ticket sold in the state won the jackpot in the Powerball drawing held on Christmas Eve, a prize pool of $1.817 million which enters directly into history … American lotteries. It is the second largest prize ever awarded in the country and one of the largest won by a single ticket.
If the winner chooses for immediate paymentthe lottery reduces the amount to its current monetary value. In this case, the one-time payment is approximately $835 million before taxes. At the federal level, the tax on lottery winnings is around 37%, which significantly reduces the amount. After this retention, the winner would keep just over $525 million.
State taxes should be added to this figure, if applicable. Arkansas taxes lottery prizes, so the final cut would be larger. Adding the federal and state burden, the net amount you would receive the winner of the lump sum payment would move approximately between 480 and 500 million of dollars.
The alternative is to accept an annuity payment. In this case, the winner receives a relatively lower first payment, then annual payments which gradually increase. Each of these payments is taxed as ordinary income in the year in which it is received, so the tax impact is spread out over time. Ultimately, the total collected is closer to the announced figure, although it never fully reaches the pocket of the winner due to taxes.
The Arkansas boat only left behind of an absolute record: 2.040 million dollars won in 2022 with a single ticket sold in California, the largest lottery prize in US history and also the Powerball. This draw marked a before and an after for having crossed the two billion mark for the first time.
Under the price This Christmas Eve features the historic $1.602 million Mega Millions won in Florida in 2023, also with a single ticket, and the $1.586 million Powerball distributed in 2016 between three tickets sold in California, Florida and Tennessee, which for years was the largest jackpot ever. They are followed by other iconic prizes like the 1.537 million won Mega Millions in South Carolina in 2018 and the 1.348 million won Powerball in Maine in 2023.
The price of Arkansas is thus at the peak of a recent escalation big lottery jackpotsconcentrated almost entirely in the last decade. Complex changes in the rules of the game, which made it more difficult to land a winning combination, reduced the frequency of jackpots, but increased their size to numbers that Twenty years ago, they would have seemed improbable.
In addition to the big winner, Powerball has confirmed that other tickets won secondary awards the same evening, from medium amounts to smaller prices, a constant in these massive draws.
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