Odds Of Winning Lottery Compared With Other Odds

Odds of Winning Lottery Low

Trying to figure out the odds of winning the lottery? Here are some things that are more likely to happen to you.

• Odds of getting struck by lightning in your lifetime: 1 in 3,000
• Odds of being injured by a toilet this year: 1 in 10,000
• Odds of getting killed by a shark: 1 in 3.7 million
• Odds of dying from an asteroid or comet: between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 250,000
• Odds of your car hitting a deer in Hawaii, the state where that is least likely to occur: 1 in 6,787
• Odds of dying from a bee sting: 1 in 6 million
• Odds of being murdered today in the United States: 1 in 19,000

And as for the lottery:

• Odds of winning something (even the dollar you spent to get the ticket) in the lottery: 1 in 15
• Odds of winning the second-place $1 million prize (matching the numbers on five balls but not the required megaball): 1 in 18.5 million.
• The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot of 12-18-13 hover around 1 in 259 million, thanks to an October 2013 increase in numbers available for the lottery. Before the increase, the odds of winning the jackpot were 1 in 176 million. To put that in perspective, the population of the United States is around 317 million people.