When Is the Next Powerball Drawing? Jackpot Hits $975 Million

The next Powerball drawing is Wednesday 12 August 2026 at 10:59 pm ET, and the estimated jackpot is $975 million. Take the cash instead of the annuity and it is $422.3 million.

Nobody has won it since 2 May. Wednesday will be the 44th consecutive drawing of this run, which is why the number has got so large.

When is the next Powerball drawing?

Wednesday 12 August, 10:59 pm ET — and then Saturday, and then Monday.

Powerball draws three nights a week, every week, from a studio in Florida. The drawing is streamed live on Powerball.com.

The UK column is not a typo. Powerball went on sale in the UK three weeks ago and the drawings happen in the middle of the British night — there is a section on that below .

Sales close before the drawing, and the cut-off is set by each lottery rather than nationally, so the safe rule is to buy well before the evening of the drawing rather than in the last hour.

How big is the Powerball jackpot right now?

An estimated $975 million as an annuity, $422.3 million as cash.

Both of those are estimates. Powerball sets the advertised figure from expected ticket sales and revises it upward as the money actually comes in, which it has done at every stage of this run — the drawing announced on 9 August as “$905 million” was advertised at $929 million by the time it was drawn on the 10th.

The climb has not been even. From the 4 May reset to the 20 July drawing, each new drawing added an average of $15.9 million to the jackpot. Over the nine drawings since 22 July, the average has been $42.7 million. Two things changed at once: the jackpot got big enough to sell itself, and the UK started buying tickets. Powerball said in July that adding UK players was “expected to accelerate jackpot growth”; it is also true that Powerball jackpots always accelerate at this size, and one run cannot separate the two.

When was the Powerball jackpot last won?

On Saturday 2 May 2026, by two tickets sold in Florida and Texas.

They split a $20 million jackpot — the minimum, the reset amount after a previous win. Each winner chose between $10 million paid as an annuity and $4.5 million in cash.

That is the whole reason this run is so long. The jackpot was won twice in four days at the start of May, dropped to the floor, and has climbed from there ever since without being hit.

Five jackpots have been won in 2026, all of them in the first four months. The most recent drawing, on Monday 10 August, produced no jackpot winner but did produce three million-dollar ones: tickets in California and Maryland matched the five white balls for $1 million each, and a ticket in Tennessee had added Power Play for $1 and collected $2 million.

Is $975 million a record?

No. It would be the eighth-largest Powerball jackpot, and the largest of 2026 so far.

It has been climbing that table quickly. On 4 August, at $786 million, Powerball announced it as the ninth-largest in the game’s history; by today it has passed the $842.4 million won in Michigan on New Year’s Day 2024 and sits eighth.

The record is the $2.04 billion won on a single ticket in California in November 2022. Seven jackpots have passed a billion dollars, the most recent on Christmas Eve last year in Arkansas. Powerball’s own announcement says that if this one keeps rolling it will become “the game’s next billion-dollar prize” — their words, and conditional on nobody winning first.

Annuity or cash — what would you actually get?

Neither number is $975 million in your hand.

The advertised jackpot is the annuity: 30 graduated payments over 29 years, starting smaller and rising each year. Take it as a lump sum instead and you get the cash value, which is currently 43% of the headline. Both figures are before tax, in both countries.

The third bar is the one worth sitting with. There are 292,201,338 possible lines, and at $2 each, buying every one of them costs $584,402,676 — about $162 million more than the cash you would collect for winning. Syndicates have tried to corner lotteries this way before; at this jackpot, on the cash option, the arithmetic does not work even before you account for tax, for the logistics of printing 292 million tickets in a few days, or for the possibility that someone else picks the same numbers and halves your prize.

What are the odds of winning Powerball?

1 in 292,201,338 for the jackpot, 1 in 24.87 for any prize at all.

A ticket is $2. Power Play adds $1 and multiplies every prize below the jackpot; Double Play adds $1 and enters your numbers into a separate drawing worth up to $10 million, which is where the $500,000 winners in Colorado and New Jersey came from on Monday.

One detail that matters at this jackpot: the 10X Power Play multiplier is only in play when the advertised jackpot is $150 million or less. At $975 million the best you can draw is 5X, and Monday’s multiplier was 3X. If you are buying Power Play now, you are buying a smaller ceiling than the marketing implies.

Those odds do not improve because the jackpot is bigger. The only thing a large jackpot changes is how many other people are playing, which raises the chance that a winning line is a shared one.

Can you play Powerball in the UK?

Yes, since 21 July 2026 — at £4 a line, which is double the US price.

Powerball is now sold in 45 US states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom, where The National Lottery’s operator Allwyn put it on sale across 43,500 shops. It is the first time a lottery outside the United States has paid into the Powerball jackpot, and it brings the number of lotteries pooling funds to 49.

For a UK player the practical differences are larger than the price:

You cannot buy a UK ticket on the day of the draw. Because the drawing happens at about 4am UK time, National Lottery terminals sell Monday, Wednesday and Saturday tickets for draws that land in the early hours of Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. For Wednesday’s American drawing, that means buying by 11:55pm on Wednesday 12 August for a result at 03:59 on Thursday 13 August.

The five-hour gap holds until late October, and then briefly does not: the UK puts its clocks back on 25 October and the US does not until 1 November, so for one week the drawing lands at 02:59 rather than 03:59.

The sterling figure is the other thing to read carefully. The National Lottery advertises Wednesday’s prize as £503 million, and its own small print says the jackpot “is estimated and is paid over 30 years” and “will vary based on exchange rates after claim validation”. A UK winner does not get a cash option, and the number they eventually receive is not the number on the poster. Nine UK drawings have been held so far, from £308,063,478 on 23 July to £485,428,762 on 11 August.

Players must be 18 or over and physically in the UK or the Isle of Man. If the fun stops, GamCare is on 0808 8020 133, free and open 24 hours.

What this does not tell you

Whether it rolls again, what it will be worth on Saturday, or what any of this is worth to you.

We have not printed a projected jackpot for the next drawing, and no one can give you one honestly: the advertised figure depends on ticket sales that have not happened yet, and whether there is a next drawing at this size depends on Wednesday.

It does not tell you what a winner keeps. Both the annuity and the cash figure are before tax, and what tax applies depends on where the ticket was bought and where the winner lives — the National Lottery’s own wording is that a UK Powerball prize “may be subject to applicable taxes in certain scenarios”, which is the sort of sentence worth taking to an accountant rather than an article.

And it is not advice to buy a ticket. The odds in the table above are fixed, published by the game, and unaffected by how large the prize gets. The only number in this piece that changes in your favour is the one on the poster.

Sources

Checked on 11 August 2026, the day before the drawing.

Powerball’s pages are rendered in the browser and return a JS shell to a plain command-line request, so each one was fetched with full browser headers and the crucial pages were also opened by eye. The wrong-path control test passes on that domain: an invented URL returns a clean “Page Not Found”, while every source above returns its article.