While no one from New Jersey is the latest big Powerball jackpot winner, that doesn't mean the much-anticipated weekend drawing was a total bust for the Garden State.
The near-record, $1.787 billion Powerball jackpot that amassed over the last several months will be shared by winning ticketholders from Missouri and Texas following Saturday's drawing in Florida.
In New Jersey, a ticket sold in Camden County scored a $1 million Powerball prize over the weekend, according to New Jersey Lottery officials.
And in just the last week, two other Powerball prizes, each totaling $1 million, were also won from tickets sold in Hunterdon and Ocean counties, the state Lottery officials said.
Winners and winners
Meanwhile, as that near-record Powerball jackpot was building up since May, ticket retailers in New Jersey earned commissions totaling more than $4 million, thanks to the Powerball contest, the officials said, citing data as of last week.
"Powerball creates lots of winners beyond the jackpot," said James Carey, director of the New Jersey Lottery, in a recent news release.
New Jersey is among the many states where it's legal to sell and purchase tickets for the major multistate lotteries, Powerball and Mega Millions.
In recent years, state Lottery officials have suggested the buildup of major jackpots by the multistate games has helped drive gross sales at a time when lotteries are now competing for consumer attention with things like online gambling and mobile sports betting.
New Jersey's largest lottery win was a $1.13 billion Mega Millions jackpot sold to a ticketholder in Neptune, Monmouth County, in March 2024, Lottery officials said.
For example, overall state Lottery sales reached $3.6 billion during the 2024 fiscal year, a year that saw five jackpots across the two multistate games exceed the attention-grabbing, $1 billion threshold.
However, sales declined to $3.3 billion during the 2025 fiscal year, which ended June 30, as the multistate games saw only one jackpot top $1 billion.
Winning numbers
The largest-ever Powerball jackpot, which topped $2 billion, was won by a California ticketholder in November 2022. This latest Powerball jackpot became the second largest in that contest's history, besting a $1.765 billion sum won by another California ticketholder in October 2023.
Meanwhile, the largest-ever Mega Millions jackpot, totaling $1.6 billion, was also won in 2023, by a ticketholder in Florida.
New Jersey's largest lottery win was a $1.13 billion Mega Millions jackpot sold to a ticketholder in Neptune, Monmouth County, in March 2024, state Lottery officials said. The same year, a player in Camden County won a $220 million Powerball jackpot.
Pension contributions
New Jersey began dedicating a significant portion of the Lottery system's annual revenues to the state's public-worker pension fund under a policy change enacted in 2017 by then-Gov. Chris Christie.
And in some years during those more than two decades, the state made no pension contribution at all, helping to generate a massive unfunded pension liability that remains a key fiscal challenge for New Jersey policymakers today.
However, in the state's latest annual budget, which Gov. Phil Murphy and lawmakers approved in late June, more than $7 billion in funding is earmarked for the pension system, counting the revenue to be contributed monthly by the Lottery.
Moreover, the pension funding included in the state's 2026 fiscal year budget equals the "full" amount required by state actuaries, marking the fifth straight year of full pension funding recorded during Murphy's tenure.
During the 2025 fiscal year, the monthly Lottery contributions to the pension fund totaled a combined $989.5 million, according to the latest unaudited revenue figures.
But that total is expected to rise above $1 billion once interest income is tallied during end-of-the-year accounting, officials said.