🎰 Lottery Odds
Your real odds of winning major lotteries
About this calculator
Lottery odds are worse than intuition suggests, and this calculator makes them concrete. Pick a game — Lotto 6/49, Lotto Max, Powerball — or enter custom pick/total numbers, and it computes your exact odds of the jackpot and smaller prizes using combinations.
The math is "n choose k": for 6/49 it is 49! ÷ (6! × 43!), giving jackpot odds of 1 in 13,983,816. Expected value is the prize pool times your win probability minus the ticket cost — negative for every major lottery, which is how the games stay profitable.
Tip: Play for entertainment with a fixed fun budget, never as a financial plan — and quick picks and chosen numbers have identical odds, despite what lucky-number lore claims.