After no winners of Friday’s Mega Millions jackpot, top prize grows to $1.55 billion

The Mega Millions jackpot climbed to a record $1.55 billion after no one claimed the jackpot Friday as the national lottery entered its 31st weekly drawing without a big winner.

Friday’s winning numbers were 11, 30, 45, 52, 56 and a golden “Mega” number of 20.

At stake in the latest drawing was one of the largest jackpots in Mega Millions history. No ticket across the country had matched all six numbers drawn Friday night, lottery officials said. The next drawing is Tuesday.

The winner would have taken home about $659.5 million in cash. The last jackpot was won in New York on April 18.

“There’s always an air of excitement around the country when Mega Millions jackpots soar,” Gretchen Corbin, the lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium, said in a news release.

The total number of winning tickets increases with the jackpot, with Tuesday’s drawing producing 4,904,910 winners in the nation across varying prize tiers, according to Mega Millions.

Seven tickets matched five of the numbers drawn Tuesday, winning the lottery’s second-tier prize. One ticket sold in Texas is worth $4 million. Two tickets, worth about $1 million, were sold in California.

The odds of a California ticket winning it all in Friday night’s jackpot is 1 in 302,575,350. The chances of matching five of the numbers drawn is better at 1 in 12,607,306. Overall odds of winning any prize are 1 in 24, according to California Lottery.

“Whenever we see jackpots this high, it gets exciting for our players, of course, and also California’s public schools,” Carolyn Becker, a California Lottery spokesperson, said in an email statement. “For every Mega Millions ticket sold in California, 80 cents goes right to education. That’s why the California Lottery exists.”

The national lottery game has awarded only four jackpots of more than $1 billion since it began in 1996. The winning years were 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The largest prize in the game’s history, won in South Carolina in 2018, totaled $1.537 billion. The largest jackpot won in California was worth $648 million in 2013.

Times staff writer Jeremy Childs contributed to this report.