EuroMillions vs the World's Biggest Lotteries

The Big Lottery Comparison Table

Every figure below is for the current version of each game — including Mega Millions' new 2025 format. Advertised US jackpots are 30-year annuity values; everywhere else pays a lump sum.

Quick Verdicts

The Payout Trap: Lump Sum vs Annuity

This is the single biggest difference between European and American lotteries — and the one most players miss. When EuroMillions advertises a €100 million jackpot, the winner receives €100 million, in one payment, within days. When Powerball or Mega Millions advertise a $1 billion jackpot, that figure is the total of 30 annual payments spread over 29 years. Choose the immediate cash option instead — as nearly all winners do — and you'll typically receive around half the advertised amount, before tax.

Then comes the tax. US lottery prizes are subject to federal tax of 24–37%, plus state taxes in most states. A $1 billion advertised Powerball jackpot can realistically become roughly $300 million in the winner's bank account. A €250 million EuroMillions win in the UK is £-for-€ exactly what it says — tax-free, in full.

Lottery Tax Around the World

Where you play (and where you live) decides how much of a win you keep. UK and Irish players pay no tax on EuroMillions or National Lottery winnings — the advertised prize is the real prize. In the United States, federal and state taxes take a substantial cut of every major prize. Italy taxes SuperEnalotto winnings above €500 at 20%. EuroJackpot's treatment varies by country: tax-free in Germany and Finland, taxed in several other participating nations. Even EuroMillions isn't tax-free everywhere — Spain, Portugal and Switzerland each apply taxes to big wins in their jurisdictions.

What the Odds Actually Mean

It's hard to feel the difference between 1 in 45 million and 1 in 622 million — both are enormous. But the gaps are real: your single UK Lotto line is roughly three times more likely to hit the jackpot than a EuroMillions line, six and a half times more likely than a Powerball line, and nearly fourteen times more likely than a SuperEnalotto line. The trade-off is jackpot size — the harder a lottery is to win, the larger its rollovers grow. That's the entire design: SuperEnalotto's brutal odds are exactly why it built Europe's record €371 million prize.

A fairer way to compare is the odds of winning anything. Since its 2026 switch to a two-round format, UK Lotto now leads on this measure at roughly 1 in 4.9 per line. EuroMillions follows at around 1 in 13, against 1 in 23 for Mega Millions, 1 in 24.9 for Powerball and 1 in 32 for EuroJackpot.

Beyond the Big Six: The Wider Lottery World

The six games above are the ones with the biggest jackpots. They are not the ones with the best odds. Step outside the headline draws and the numbers change completely — several national lotteries are more than ten times easier to win than EuroMillions, and one is twenty times easier.

The trade-off is exactly what you would expect. Smaller number matrices produce smaller prize pools, so these games pay millions rather than hundreds of millions. But if your objection to EuroMillions is that 1 in 139.8 million feels meaningless, these are the games worth knowing about.

Odds are derived from each game's current number matrix. Formats change from time to time — Australian Powerball moved from 6 from 40 to its current 7 from 35 in 2018, roughly doubling the difficulty — so figures published before a format change are frequently still in circulation and wrong.

What the smaller games are actually good for

Sweden's Lotto is the most winnable national jackpot on this list at 1 in 6.7 million — you are nearly twenty-one times more likely to hit it than a EuroMillions jackpot, and almost seven times more likely than the UK Lotto. Austria and Ireland sit close behind.

Australian Powerball is the outlier. It looks like a small-country game and is anything but: at 1 in 134.5 million it is three times harder than the UK Lotto and sits within touching distance of EuroMillions, because the 2018 format change added a seventh main number.

El Gordo de la Primitiva deserves a note for a reason unrelated to odds. It is drawn once a week, on Sundays, and is a genuinely different game from the Spanish Christmas lottery (El Gordo de Navidad) that people usually mean by "El Gordo" — a common and expensive confusion.

None of these are available as official tickets from the UK. All of them can be bet on through a UKGC-licensed lottery betting operator, which is the practical route if the odds above look more appealing than the jackpots below them.

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