A lucky New Jersey resident will soon be a billion dollars richer, after correctly matching all six numbers in the Tuesday night Mega Millions drawing.
The winning ticket was sold at a ShopRite Liquor in Monmouth County - the store's owner will recieve a $30,000 bonus check for selling the winning ticket.
This marks the first Mega Millions jackpot win of 2024 and the fifth-largest drawing in the game's history. The white balls were 7, 11, 22, 29, and 38, while the gold mega ball was four.
"Congratulations to the New Jersey Lottery for selling a jackpot-winning ticket in Tuesday's $1.13 billion Mega Millions drawing," said Gretchen Corbin, lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium, in a press release.
"We celebrate our new jackpot winner, as well as all the prizes won and dollars raised for good causes during this exciting jackpot run."
The actual cash value of the winning ticket is an estimated $537.5 million but the final value of the prize is pending until the total number of ticket sales is confirmed on Wednesday.
While this marks the first jackpot win since December 8, there have been more than 29.9 million winning tickets sold in the intervening months.
Mega Millions tickets typically cost $2 and prizes range in value from $2 to $4 million. In addition to the jackpot win, there were 13 second-tier tickets - with a value of $1 million - that were sold on March 26. The odds of actually winning the jackpot are slim - at only 1 in 303 million per ticket.
This is the fifth Mega Millions jackpot to exceed $1 billion in value, while the first-ever billion-dollar ticket was told in South Carolina in 2018.
The next Mega Millions drawing will be this Friday. The jackpot will be reset to $20 million.
