Winning the lottery has become harder in recent years, causing jackpots to grow bigger and bigger - and that’s by design. For both games, the odds of winning any prize stand at about 1 in 24. Of course, both Mega Millions and Powerball offer a handful of tiers below the top jackpots - with the lowest prizes starting at $2 and $4, respectfully. It’s about 4 times as likely that you die in a car accident on the trip to buy your ticket than you are to win,” he said. “Imagine you have to drive half a mile to buy your lottery ticket, so you have a 1 mile round-trip. “A slightly darker example,” Kovach added, is comparing the odds of winning the lottery to getting into a fatal car accident on the way to a store. Even if you bought a lottery ticket for every drawing over 80 years - two times a week for Mega Millions and three times a week for Powerball - you would still be far less likely to win than to be struck by lightning one time in your life, Syracuse University mathematics professor Steven Diaz said.
A common comparison is the odds of getting struck by lightning once in your lifetime, which stand at about one in 15,300.
