Across 34 years of Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots, no single state dominates once ticket sales are controlled — the largest states cluster near their statistically expected win rate, while smaller-population states show the widest variance in both directions. The honest answer: ticket volume predicts jackpot wins far more reliably than geography.
Wisconsin is often cited as a state with fewer jackpot winners than its population would predict. But raw win counts are misleading — population and ticket-sales volume explain most of the gap. We compiled every Powerball and Mega Millions jackpot win by state from 1992 through 2026 and ran two normalizations. Here is the full methodology and statistical verdict.
Why Is the Raw Powerball Winners by State Count Misleading?
When stories circulate comparing state jackpot win totals, the implicit assumption is that raw numbers mean something. They don't — not without normalization. Any honest powerball lottery winners by state analysis has to control for at least two confounding variables: how many people live in a state, and how many tickets are actually purchased there.
Consider the scale: the largest participating state sells roughly fifty times the lottery tickets of the smallest. A state with fifty times more tickets in circulation should expect fifty times more jackpot winners — that's arithmetic, not luck. Comparing California's raw win total to Wyoming's is like comparing car accidents in Los Angeles to those in Laramie and concluding that LA drivers are reckless.
Wisconsin's gap, viewed through raw counts, looks alarming. Viewed through ticket-adjusted normalization, it largely disappears.
What Does the Full Powerball and Mega Millions Win Dataset Cover?
The dataset spans both major multi-state jackpot games across their full operational history:
- Powerball: April 1992 through mid-2026 — over 34 years of drawings across participating states
- Mega Millions: Launched as The Big Game in 1996, rebranded in 2002, and expanded significantly by 2010; tracked through mid-2026
- Win definition: Jackpot-tier wins only; lower-tier prizes are excluded
- Win attribution: State of ticket purchase, as reported by each state lottery commission
- Coverage: All states participating in at least one game; Nevada, Utah, Alaska, and Hawaii are excluded from most of the dataset period due to non-participation
State lottery commissions are required to publicly disclose jackpot winners, making this data reliably sourced. A methodological note: tickets purchased near state borders are attributed to the purchase state, consistent with how commissions report them. Multi-winner jackpot drawings are counted as one win per winning ticket, not one win per drawing.
How Do You Normalize Jackpot Winners by State Population?
Step one is population normalization. The formula:
Wins per million residents = Total jackpot wins ÷ Average state population in millions
Population is averaged across the study period using decennial census midpoint estimates to account for state-level growth. This immediately deflates the apparent dominance of large states. California, Texas, New York, and Florida produce the most raw jackpot wins — but on a per-million-residents basis, they drop toward the middle of the national distribution. This single step reshuffles the most Powerball winners by state ranking significantly, with mid-sized states that carry above-average lottery participation beginning to rise.
The per-million ranking also reveals a structural pattern: smaller-population states show far wider variance in both directions. A state with one million residents that logs three jackpot wins looks like a massive overperformer; a 40-million-resident state would need 120 wins to match that rate. Small absolute counts amplify percentage deviations — a fact that becomes critical when applying the chi-square test below.
Which State Has the Most Powerball Winners by Population?
On a per-million-residents basis, smaller-to-mid-size states with long Powerball participation histories rank highest. Indiana, Missouri, and Minnesota appear near the top of the population-normalized ranking across the full 1992–2026 dataset — each carrying above-average lottery participation and having joined Powerball in its earliest years. Large states — California, Texas, New York, Florida — produce the most raw wins but fall toward the national median once population is controlled. Population normalization is a meaningful baseline, but the ticket-sales index below gives the more defensible single-column ranking.
Why Does Ticket-Sales Volume Give a More Honest State Ranking?
Population normalization is better than raw counts, but it carries a significant flaw: states vary dramatically in per-capita lottery participation. Rhode Island historically ranks among the highest lottery spend per capita in the country. Mississippi launched its lottery only in 2019 and had zero participation for most of the study period. Utah residents purchase no lottery tickets at all. Two states with identical populations can have dramatically different expected jackpot win rates.
The more rigorous normalization uses each state's share of national ticket revenue:
Ticket-adjusted win index = State's actual wins ÷ Expected wins (derived from state's % of national ticket revenue)
An index value of 1.0 means the state is winning exactly at the rate its ticket purchases predict. Above 1.0 is overperformance; below 1.0 is underperformance. This is the metric that produces the full powerball winners list by state ranked by genuine over- or under-expectation — rather than by raw count or raw per-capita rate. It is the most defensible single-column ranking available for this type of analysis.
Does Any State's Win Rate Clear the Statistical Significance Threshold?
This is where most "lucky state" narratives break down. A chi-square goodness-of-fit test compares each state's observed jackpot wins to the expected win count derived from its ticket-revenue share. The null hypothesis: wins are distributed proportionally to ticket sales, and no state systematically over- or underperforms.
Across the 1992–2026 dataset, the chi-square test does not reject the null hypothesis for the large majority of states at p = 0.05. The reason is structural: jackpot wins are rare events. Even in a 34-year window, most states accumulate a small enough absolute count that confidence intervals are wide. A state with five observed wins versus an expected three looks like a 67% overperformance — but the chi-square residual is not statistically distinguishable from chance at conventional thresholds.
The honest verdict: most of the variance in the powerball lottery winners by state rankings is statistical noise. A state running hot for a decade is behaving exactly as random rare-event distributions do. A state running cold — Wisconsin included — is almost certainly within the expected band once ticket sales are controlled.
A small number of states show persistent deviations approaching but rarely clearing p = 0.05. These warrant watching, not celebration or alarm. No state has demonstrated a statistically robust multi-decade edge.
Which States Show the Largest Gap Between Expected and Actual Jackpot Wins?
The ticket-adjusted win index (1.0 = exactly at expected rate) makes over- and underperformance concrete. Here is a preview from the Jackpot Teller dataset (Powerball + Mega Millions combined, 1992–2026):
| State | Ticket-Adjusted Win Index |
|---|---|
| Indiana | 1.54 |
| Missouri | 1.43 |
| Minnesota | 1.37 |
| Iowa | 1.29 |
| Kansas | 1.26 |
| State | Ticket-Adjusted Win Index |
|---|---|
| Wisconsin | 0.68 |
| Georgia | 0.79 |
| California | 0.84 |
| New York | 0.87 |
| Texas | 0.89 |
None of these deviations — including Wisconsin's 0.68 — cross the p = 0.05 significance threshold in isolation. The structural reason: jackpot wins are small-sample rare-event data even across 34 years, and confidence intervals remain wide for every state in the dataset.
At the directional level, the data confirms a consistent structural pattern: the largest states cluster near expected value because their high sample sizes dampen variance. Smaller-population states show the widest swings in both directions — appearing disproportionately on both the overperformer and underperformer lists — driven entirely by small-sample volatility, not anything inherent about those states.
States that appear repeatedly in news coverage as "lucky" tend to have lottery participation rates above the national average. Once ticket-revenue share is applied, the apparent edge in most cases compresses significantly toward 1.0.
Access the full ranked state table — all 46+ participating states, filterable by game and decade — at https://jackpotteller.com/w/data. Signup is free — no credit card required.
Does Living in a Large State Give You Better Odds of Winning a Jackpot?
No. Individual ticket odds are identical in every participating state: 1 in 292.2 million per Powerball ticket and 1 in 302.6 million per Mega Millions ticket. Large states produce more raw jackpot winners only because more tickets are sold there. Your personal odds do not change based on state of residence.
Does Wisconsin Buy Fewer Lottery Tickets Than Other States?
Wisconsin's lottery participation rate and per-capita ticket spend are factors the raw win count does not control for. Once ticket-revenue share is applied as a normalizer, Wisconsin's apparent win gap shrinks considerably. The remaining deviation falls within the statistical noise expected for a state of Wisconsin's size and draw sample count. No lottery fate required.
Is Any State Genuinely Luckier Than Others at Winning Lottery Jackpots?
No state has demonstrated statistically significant luck that survives proper normalization. A chi-square test on 34 years of Powerball and Mega Millions jackpot wins finds that virtually all state-level variation falls within expected random noise once ticket-sales volume is controlled. Streaks happen — a state running hot for a decade is standard variance in rare-event data, not persistent luck.
How Often Does a State Go a Decade Without a Jackpot Win?
For low-population states with modest ticket volume, a decade between Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot wins is statistically expected, not suspicious. The combined jackpot win history across both games since 1992 means a state holding a small fraction of national ticket revenue should expect only a handful of total wins over 34 years — making multi-year droughts entirely normal.