Powerball is jumping the pond.
The lottery game that has made millionaires in the United States will expand this summer to include players in England, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom.
An agreement was announced Tuesday between the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the lottery game, and Allwyn UK, which operates the U.K.'s National Lottery. The deal still must be approved by a U.K. gambling commission.
It will mark the first time
a lottery outside the United States will contribute to the Powerball jackpot.
“We're constantly looking for ways to make sure that we're keeping Powerball culturally and commercially relevant,” said Matt Strawn, who heads Powerball and is chief executive of the Iowa Lottery. “And this really is the next natural progression in doing just that.”
The same jackpot amount will be available to players on both sides of the Atlantic with U.S. payouts in dollars and those in the U.K. in pounds.
For players in the U.S., nothing changes, including the $2 cost of a Powerball ticket and the long odds of winning the jackpot of 1 in 292.2 million, Strawn said. But with U.K. players buying tickets, a larger player pool will grow jackpots more quickly.
“Players consistently tell us in survey after survey that faster growing Powerball jackpots is what they'd like to see,” Strawn said. “Not surprisingly, the higher the jackpots grow the more people play the game in a particular drawing. The more people play, the higher sales grow. The higher sales grow, the higher the jackpots get, the more people play."
For U.K. players, Powerball will offer a chance at much larger jackpots than are now available at lotteries in the country and Europe.
The largest Powerball payout was just over $2 billion from a ticket bought in 2022 in California. EuroMillions, a lottery offered across nine European countries and also operated in the U.K. by Allwyn, paid the biggest prize to a U.K. player of £195 million ($265 million) in 2022.
“Our ambition is to bring more games, more innovation and more excitement to The UK National Lottery — and it doesn’t get more exciting than Powerball, with its transformative jackpots and life-changing contribution to good causes,” Allwyn UK Chief Executive Andria Vidler said in a statement.
Although jackpots will be the same in each country, estimated jackpot amounts will be different due to currency conversion rates and because the U.S. advertises prize amounts pretax, unlike in the U.K.
U.K. Powerball jackpots also will be paid over 30 years whereas in the U.S. jackpot winners have a choice between taking their winnings spread over years through an annuity or in cash — nearly all winners opt for cash.
All players will vie for the same jackpot prize, but smaller prizes will be different in the two countries.
Powerball is played in 45 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In the game, players choose numbers displayed on five white balls numbered 1 to 69 and one number from 1 to 26 on the red Powerball numbered. Drawings will continue to be held Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
More than 31 million people play at least one National Lottery game each year across the U.K.
The new agreement won't change how Mega Millions, the other large U.S. lottery game, operates.
