Information taken right from the Mega Millions website reveals that it takes $1 to play a game. The calculations put aside for each of these possible prizes, here are the monetary amounts of the prizes with their associated chances of winning:
| Prize | Chance ^ (-1) |
| Jackpot | 175,711,536 |
| $250,000 | 3,904,701 |
| $10,000 | 689,065 |
| $150 | 15,313 |
| $150 | 13,781 |
| $7 | 306 |
| $10 | 844 |
| $3 | 141 |
| $2 | 75 |
The ultimate jackpot prize value varies consistently, but at present is estimated at $65 million. To get the expected payoff, simply multiply each earning by its likelihood, and sum the products. This can be easily done in Excel.
When the jackpot is $65 million, the expected payoff is only 55.18 cents. In fact, it takes slightly less than $144 million for the expected payoff to just reach $1. The jackpot recently reached record high of $656 million. With that, the expected payoff was slightly over $3.91. However, tax was not considered in any of these situation. Furthermore, as in the case of the recent record high, the winning amounts are split if more than one winner arises. In all, the small probability of winning seems to dwarf the large amounts of potential winning.
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