Powerball Jackpot Reaches $1 Billion Ahead of Tonight’s Drawing in Montana

That's billion with a B, and it's got me daydreaming this morning.

The Powerball jackpot has climbed to an estimated $1 billion ahead of tonight's drawing, and no matter where you buy your ticket in Montana, from a gas station in Billings to a convenience store out on the Hi-Line, you're playing for the same shot at that number. Lottery officials say the jackpot has grown into the eighth-largest in the game's history, and it's already the biggest Powerball prize anyone in the country has seen this year.

Powerball Jackpot Growth: Why the Prize Keeps Climbing

No one matched all five numbers plus the Powerball in Monday night's drawing, so the pot rolled over again. That's how these things snowball. Every time a drawing comes up empty, the jackpot swells, ticket sales spike, and suddenly everybody from your coworkers to your grandma is talking about what they'd do with a billion dollars.

Powerball Last Winner: Jackpot Has Grown Since May

If you're wondering how long this jackpot has been building, the last person to actually win it was back on May 2, when tickets sold in Florida and Texas split a $20 million prize. Every drawing since then has come up short, which is exactly how a $20 million jackpot turns into a billion-dollar one over the course of a few months.

For context, this isn't even close to the biggest Powerball prize ever handed out. That record still belongs to a single ticket sold in California back in November 2022, worth a staggering $2.04 billion. But tonight's drawing is the largest Montana players have had a shot at all year.

Powerball Cash Value: What Tonight's Winner Would Take Home

Here's the part that always surprises people. That billion-dollar number is what you'd get if you took the prize as an annuity, spread out in payments over years. Almost everybody takes the lump sum instead, and for tonight's drawing, that cash option comes out to roughly $433.1 million.

Either way, that's more money than most of us will ever see in one place, and it's exactly the kind of number that gets a person's imagination running wild on a Wednesday morning.

Powerball Daydream: What I'd Buy With a $1 Billion Jackpot

I've already spent part of my morning daydreaming about this one. If I won tonight, I wouldn't be buying a mansion or a yacht. I'd find a wooded plot of land somewhere with a view of a lake, and I'd build a handful of high-end tree houses on it. Not the plywood kind from your backyard as a kid, but the real thing, with windows and porches and good bones, tucked up in the trees where you can hear the wind move through them.

It would be a retreat for my siblings, my nieces and nephews, somewhere our whole scattered family could actually gather instead of just texting about it. I can picture the kids arguing over which tree house is theirs for the weekend, and all of us sitting out on a dock as the sun goes down over the water. A girl can dream.

Powerball Drawing Time Tonight: How to Watch in Montana

The drawing happens tonight, Wednesday, Aug. 12, at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, which puts it at 8:59 p.m. our time here in Montana. You can watch it live through the Powerball website if you don't want to wait for the numbers to hit the news.

Tickets run $2 a play, and you can tack on an extra dollar for Power Play, which gives you a shot at multiplying any non-jackpot prize you win. Powerball is sold in 45 states plus D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom, so Montana players are very much in the game tonight.

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The odds of matching all six numbers and taking home the jackpot sit at about 1 in 292 million. Long odds, sure, but somebody's going to beat them eventually, and tonight it might as well be one of us.