For the first time since last September, the Powerball drawing produced a winner.
The result of Wednesday’s drawing matched a ticket sold in Maryland, which is now worth a whopping $731.1 million.
That is the fourth-largest jackpot in Powerball history. It is also more than three times the largest prize ever won in a lottery in Maryland before.
Allegany County convenience store sells winning Powerball ticket
According to the Maryland Lottery, the winning ticket was sold at the Coney Market convenience store in Lanoconing in Allegany County.
The winning numbers were 40, 53, 60, 68, 69 — plus 22 for the Powerball and the Power Play multiplier 3X.
The winner now has a choice: take the $731.1 million in 30 payments over the next 29 years, or accept a single lump-sum payment of $546.8 million.
Those figures are pre-taxes. The federal withholding tax is 24%, while Maryland has its own 8.95% withholding tax on lottery winnings.
Typically, winners have six months (182 days) to claim their prizes, although a special coronavirus-related provision allows an extra 30 days after that, if needed.
The Coney Market gets to enjoy its patron’s success, too. The store earns a $100,000 bonus from the Maryland Lottery for having sold the winning ticket.
Other tickets just narrowly missed jackpot
Across the country, 13 other tickets had the five winning numbers minus the Powerball, enough to earn second-tier prizes.
Of those, 12 tickets earned $1 million prizes. The 13th added the Power Play option, thereby doubling the prize to $2 million. As it happened, that ticket was also purchased in Maryland, at an AC&T convenience store in Hagerstown.
Powerball prize crushes Maryland record, near all-time leaders
This marks only the third time someone in Maryland won the Powerball’s top prize. It was also the first winner since an anonymous player won a $128.8 million jackpot in the Powerball in December 2011.
The previous record for the largest lottery win in the state happened in March 2012, when a Maryland player won a one-third share of the Mega Millions for a prize worth $218.6 million.
As noted, the prize represented the fourth-largest Powerball jackpot since the multi-state lottery first launched in 1992. Here is the new top five:
- $1.586 billion (2016: California, Tennessee, Florida)
- $768.4 million (2019: Wisconsin)
- $758.7 million (2017: Massachusetts)
- $731.1 million (2021: Maryland)
- $687.8 million (2018: Iowa, New York)
The win also represented the fifth-largest prize in US lottery history, as a 2018 Mega Millions jackpot of $1.537 billion was won in South Carolina.
That said, the recent Powerball victory will soon rank sixth on the list.
That’s because the Mega Millions currently sits at an estimated $970 million for this Friday’s drawing. No one has won the Mega Millions since Sept. 15, 2019.
