The 2017 Price Hike: The Change That Rewrote Mega Millions' Rules

If you've been playing Mega Millions for a while, you probably remember when a ticket cost a dollar. That jump to two dollars wasn't a simple inflation-driven price adjustment: in October 2017, Mega Millions completely redesigned the game's underlying number formula, and that redesign is the real reason winning the jackpot became harder than ever before.

What was officially announced: more expensive, but with bigger prizes

The change took effect on October 28, 2017: the price per line went from $1 to $2, matching the price of a Powerball ticket. In exchange, the organization raised the guaranteed starting jackpot from $15 million to $40 million, and increased several of the lower-tier prizes — for example, the fifth-tier prize went from $50 to $200. The message communicated publicly was simple: fewer tickets for the same total spend, but bigger starting prizes from the very first draw.

The change that actually matters: a different number formula

What's almost never explained in detail is that the price increase came bundled with a change to the game's own number structure — far more significant than the price itself. Before 2017, players picked 5 numbers from a drum of 75 white balls and 1 number from a drum of 15 gold balls (the Mega Ball). From that date on, the white-ball drum was reduced to 70 balls, but the gold-ball drum was expanded from 15 to 25 balls.

The net result of that trade-off is counterintuitive: shrinking the big drum should make matching the 5 main numbers easier, but expanding the small drum so much made matching the Mega Ball much harder. The odds of winning the jackpot went from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million, getting noticeably worse even though the main drum got smaller.

A real trade-off: better odds on the second prize

Not everything about the change worked against players. Mega Millions adjusted the system specifically so that the second prize (matching the 5 main numbers without the Mega Ball) became slightly more attainable than before, as a way to offset the higher ticket price with somewhat more reachable mid-tier prizes. It's a nuance that's rarely mentioned when this change comes up: not every set of odds got worse to the same degree.

The experiment that went largely unnoticed: "Just the Jackpot"

Alongside the price and formula change, a betting option was introduced that very few players remember today: for $3, a player could buy two lines that only competed for the jackpot, with no shot at any lower-tier prize. This option, called "Just the Jackpot," launched in a limited rollout only in Texas, Georgia, South Dakota, Ohio, Nebraska, and Massachusetts, as a trial before deciding whether to expand it to the rest of the states that play the game.

Why the organization took the risk of raising the price

The official reason behind the entire redesign was to generate bigger jackpots more often, betting on an idea already proven by Powerball: that a more eye-catching jackpot drives more total sales, even while charging twice as much per line. Eight years later, in 2025, Mega Millions repeated exactly the same logic by raising the price again, this time to $5, explicitly citing this 2017 change as direct precedent for the strategy.

In summary

The 2017 price increase wasn't just about paying a dollar more: it changed the size of the game's two drums, worsened the jackpot odds from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million, slightly improved the second-prize odds, and served as a trial run for a pricing strategy Mega Millions would repeat almost a decade later. A change that looked simple on the surface but, in practice, completely redesigned the game's math.