Buying a lottery ticket? Think again. Here’s the last time an Idahoan won the jackpot

Shaun Goodwin
·3 min read
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If you pick up a weekly Powerball or Mega Millions ticket or occasionally drop an extra couple of dollars on a ticket while at the gas station or grocery store, you might consider spending your money elsewhere. If you want to win, that is.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot is about 1 in 302 million, but if you’re in Idaho, you could well consider those chances closer to 0 in 302 million.

A new study from the online casino site CasinoArabi.io found that Idaho is the unluckiest state in the United States for jackpot winners.

Since August 2014 — when Wyoming became the 45th state where Powerball and Mega Millions tickets can be sold — Idaho has managed zero jackpot winners. The Gem State is one of 10 states where a jackpot-winning ticket is yet to be sold since 2014.

But Idahoans aren’t only unlucky at producing a state jackpot winner. If you buy tickets in the Gem State, there is also a 5.8% tax rate on lottery winnings, in addition to the 24% federal tax rate.

CasinoArabi.io calculated the unluckiest states by gathering the data on all jackpot winners since August 2014, factoring in the population of each state, and determining the rate of lottery winners per capita. The number of winners per capita was multiplied by 10 million to reveal the number of lottery winners per 10 million people for each state.

With a calculated population of 1,973,752, zero winners, and a 5.8% tax rate on winnings, Idaho was determined to be the unluckiest state in the nation.

It beat out Kentucky and Mississippi, which placed second and third, respectively. Both states have no winners but a lower tax rate for that day when someone finally buys a lucky ticket.

The luckiest states

Despite having a smaller population than Idaho, New Hampshire has cashed in three jackpot winners for a combined winning of $1.2 billion. With a population of 1.4 million, the Granite State calculates having 21 winners per 10 million people. Even better for New Hampshire residents is the fact that there is no state tax on lottery winnings.

Vermont and New Jersey rounded out the top three, tallying 15 and 12 winners per 10 million people, respectively.

“A truly staggering total of $38,916,800,000 has been won through Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots since 2014,” a CasinoArabi.io spokesperson stated in a news release. “To put that incredible amount into perspective, it is the equivalent of buying 130,924 Ferrari F8 Spiders or 256 Boeing 747s or giving each U.S. citizen $114.”

Past Idaho winners

Although Idahoans have been unlucky over the past decade, all hope isn’t lost.

The Gem State has one Mega Millions winner, when Holly Lahti, a resident of Rathdrum, split a $380 million jackpot with a couple from Washington in January 2011. She’s also the last person from Idaho to win either the Mega Millions or Powerball.

Since Powerball was released to 23 states in 1992 — Idaho was one of the original states included in 1992 — there have been five jackpot winners.

Idaho’s most famous Powerball winners are two Boise residents who purchased their tickets at the same Jacksons Food Stores located at Orchard and Interstate 84 a decade apart. Pam Hiatt won a jackpot worth $87.5 million in 1995, and then in 2005, Brad Duke cashed in on a $220 million jackpot.

Duke remains the most recent Idahoan to win the Powerball, and the Jacksons store he purchased his ticket from remains the only store in America to sell two jackpot-winning tickets, according to Idaho Lottery.