NEW YORK — Eight family members who bought the lucky ticket in last Saturday’s Powerball lottery drawing will share the $429.6 million grand prize, the New Jersey Lottery said Friday, ending seven days of suspense over the jackpot winners.
The jackpot was the ninth-highest U.S. lottery prize in history, lottery officials said. It was also the sixth-largest jackpot in the multistate lottery game’s history and the largest single jackpot winning ticket ever sold in New Jersey.
The prize will be paid in a lump sum of $284 million. It would be worth the full $429.6 million if the winners had opted for an annuity payout over 29 years, said lottery spokeswoman Judith Drucker.
The sole winning ticket in Saturday’s drawing was sold at a 7-Eleven convenience store with many regular customers in Trenton, the state’s capital, lottery officials said. A couple that owns the store received $30,000 for selling the ticket.
The eight winners purchased two $2 tickets for drawings held on Wednesday, May 4, and Saturday, May 7, and paid $1 extra on each ticket for the “Power Play” option that multiplies the winnings.
“We are very lucky in New Jersey,” Carole Hedinger, New Jersey Lottery executive director, told a news conference earlier this week. “We’ve sold four out of the top 11 Powerball jackpot tickets in the last couple of years going back to March 2013.”
In January, the grand prize of $1.6 billion for tickets sold in California, Florida and Tennessee set a record high for lottery prizes.
The winners chose their own numbers, the same on both days, rather than allowing them to be generated randomly, Hedinger said. The winning ticket was purchased on Tuesday, May 3, and matched the winning numbers drawn on Saturday, May 7: 25 66 44 5 26 and Powerball 9.
Powerball is played in 44 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Last Saturday’s Powerball followed 17 consecutive draws without a winner.
The odds of winning at Powerball have been calculated at one in 292 million.