Saturday's draw came up empty across the board
The winning combination on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026 was 14, 40, 52, 55 and 57, with a red Powerball of 24 and a Power Play multiplier of 3x, according to Powerball's official draw results. Players in all 45 participating states, plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, came up short of matching all six numbers, sending the top prize into another rollover.
The next tier down went unclaimed too. No ticket matched all five white balls without the Powerball, a combination worth $1 million, and nobody landed the $2 million prize reserved for a Match 5 ticket that also carried the Power Play add-on.
How the jackpot climbed to $389 million
Lottery officials had pegged Saturday's jackpot at roughly $360 million ahead of the draw, with an estimated cash value of $149.8 million before taxes. Final ticket sales pushed that figure slightly higher by the time the balls were drawn. With no winner, the prize rolled forward again and grew to an estimated $389 million for Monday night, with a cash option of about $161.9 million, based on figures reported by MyNewsLA's coverage of the drawing.
Why the jackpot is so hard to hit
Matching all five white balls plus the red Powerball comes down to odds of 1 in 292.2 million, a figure set by the Multi-State Lottery Association and confirmed on Powerball's own site. Those odds are the reason jackpots routinely swell into the hundreds of millions of dollars before anyone claims them, sometimes stretching across weeks or months between grand-prize winners.
The last time someone actually won
Powerball's most recent jackpot winner surfaced on Aug. 12, when a ticket sold at a Hy-Vee Fast & Fresh in Quincy, Illinois matched all six numbers for a $1.04 billion prize, according to the Illinois Lottery's announcement. That drawing ended a run of 44 consecutive draws without a jackpot winner and ranks as the eighth-largest prize in the game's history. The winner chose to stay anonymous, as Illinois law allows, and came forward about a month later to formally claim the money.
It wasn't the only big win of the year. Back in January, a ticket sold in North Carolina claimed a $209.3 million jackpot, part of the same run of drawings that eventually built toward August's billion-dollar payout, according to Powerball's recap of the jackpot run.
How to play, and when the next drawing happens
Powerball is offered in 45 states along with Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each $2 ticket requires picking five numbers between 1 and 69 for the white balls and one number between 1 and 26 for the red Powerball. Adding the Power Play option, which multiplies certain non-jackpot prizes, costs an extra dollar per play. Monday's drawing, with the jackpot at $389 million, takes place at 10:59 p.m. Eastern time; drawings are held three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
What a winner would need to know
Powerball tickets can be purchased by anyone who meets the legal age requirement in the state or territory where the ticket is sold, regardless of citizenship or residency. A prize, however, has to be claimed in the same jurisdiction where the winning ticket was bought, and the claim window typically runs anywhere from 90 days to a full year depending on that jurisdiction's rules.
For now, the wait continues. If Monday's numbers again go unmatched, the $389 million prize will keep climbing into the following drawing, extending a cycle that, as this year's Illinois win showed, can end suddenly or drag on for weeks.
