Fourth-biggest Hoosier Lotto $42.5M jackpot hit in Tell City
A single ticket sold in Perry County wins the $42.5 million Hoosier Lotto jackpot on Wednesday, March 12. The winning ticket was purchased at On the Fly #822, a four-pump gas station at 1448 12th Street, at the junction of S.R. 37 and S.R. 66 in Tell City . . . not exactly a place that people would pass through like they might on a major highway interchange or a heavily traveled urban route.
The 2023 per capita personal annual income in Perry County was $46,830, and the county’s GDP is only about $1 billion (we recall a former county economic development director joking to The Legislative Conference a generation ago that about the only thing his community could offer economic development prospects was “human test subjects”), so assuming the winner was a local, that’s a big deal for the locale.
The lotto jackpot had grown to the third largest in the nation – behind only Powerball and Mega Millions (and had actually briefly been second nationally) – and became the top state jackpot game on several occasions (including at the time of the winning draw day) through the course of 132 drawings. As we’ve been chronicling here, a long time had passed since the last Hoosier Lotto jackpot had been won on December 6, 2023.
Not only had all of calendar year 2024 passed without a Hoosier Lotto jackpot having been hit, this is a record for back-to-back jackpots for the Hoosier Lottery, because that December 2023 jackpot had been worth $44.0 million.
Lottery officials tell us that not only were only three other lotto jackpots larger than the March 12 largesse, but this jackpot marks only the fifth time in game history in which a winning jackpot has topped $40 million. The Indiana jackpots greater than $40 million:
(1) $54.5 million – won November 7, 2007
(2) $44.0 million – won December 6, 2023
(3) $43.8 million – won August 10, 2019
(4) $42.5 million – won March 12, 2025
(5) $42.0 million – won June 6, 1999
The top $54.5 million jackpot about 17½ years ago accumulated much more quickly thanks to the former jackpot metric. Given the (hard-to-discern) rate of refresh pattern of increments added to the jackpot during the run that had just ended, we were probably about four months or so away from establishing a new lotto jackpot record.
In case you’re curious about the numbers . . . 27,022,342 Hoosier Lotto tickets were sold during this jackpot run. The total dollar amount of tickets purchased (including the add-on options) reached $54,044,684.
There were five additions of at least $1 million to the jackpot during the build-up to the jackpot (the total was increased twice weekly), all of which came more than 10 months into the run. The largest of those was a $1.2 million bump for the drawing on January 11.