BRADENTON, Fla. — At some point on Tuesday evening, a customer at a Wawa convenience store on State Road 70 East took a Quick Pick lottery ticket and walked out. Whoever that person is, they are now holding a claim to $803 million.
Lottery officials confirmed Wednesday morning that the sole winning ticket in the July 28 Mega Millions drawing was sold at the Wawa at 14510 State Road 70 East in Bradenton, on Florida’s Gulf Coast north of Sarasota. The winning numbers, 34, 48, 49, 59 and 70, along with Mega Ball 12, matched all six digits on one ticket across the 45 participating states, Washington D.C., and the United States Virgin Islands. As of Wednesday afternoon, no one had stepped forward to claim it.
The jackpot, confirmed by Mega Millions at $803 million, ranks as the tenth largest in the game’s 30-year history. It is the third jackpot won this year on the multistate draw, and by a wide margin the largest of 2026: a $536 million prize went to an Illinois ticket in March, and a $60 million jackpot landed in Ohio on St. Patrick’s Day. Tuesday’s drawing ended a 38-game winless streak.
The winner faces a decision that must be made within 60 days of Tuesday’s drawing: accept a one-time cash payment of $344.2 million before taxes, or choose the full $803 million paid out in 30 graduated annual installments over 29 years, each one 5 percent larger than the last. The choice is irreversible once made, and neither option gives most people a useful reference point.
Florida’s tax structure creates one meaningful advantage for whichever Bradenton-area resident holds that ticket. The state imposes no individual income tax, unlike most of the others where Mega Millions is sold. On the cash option, the mandatory federal withholding of 24 percent reduces the immediate payout to roughly $261.6 million. The winner will owe additional federal taxes at the top marginal rate of 37 percent when they file, narrowing that figure further, but there is no state-level claim on the money. A winner in California or New York would forfeit an additional 13.3 or 10.9 percent to their respective state tax authorities on the same prize.
Claiming the prize requires a trip to Tallahassee regardless of which payout option the winner selects. The Florida Lottery’s central office handles all prizes exceeding $1 million, and the jackpot winner cannot simply present the ticket at the store where it was bought. The standard window to claim any prize is 180 days from the drawing date; the 60-day clock applies only to those choosing the cash option. As CBS News Miami reported, winners at this prize level are typically advised to retain an attorney and a financial advisor before appearing at lottery headquarters.
Florida Lottery Secretary Reginald Dixon said the win was “an exciting reminder that every ticket carries the possibility of a dream come true” and noted that lottery proceeds support educational funding statewide. Since Mega Millions expanded to Florida in 2013, the game has produced six jackpot wins for the state, generating more than $1 billion for education and awarding over $1 billion in prizes to roughly 87 million players. Florida’s single-state record remains the $1.602 billion jackpot claimed in August 2023.
Tuesday’s drawing produced 645,993 winning tickets across all prize levels. Two players who matched the five white-ball numbers but missed the Mega Ball collected multiplied second-tier prizes: a New York ticket with a 3X Megaplier won $3 million, while an Illinois ticket with a 5X Megaplier won $5 million. Fifteen third-tier tickets, matching four white balls plus the Mega Ball, took home prizes ranging from $20,000 to $50,000 depending on the Megaplier attached to the purchase.
The odds against any single ticket matching all six numbers are approximately 1 in 290 million. Tuesday’s jackpot-winning ticket was a Quick Pick, meaning the numbers were randomly generated by the terminal at the point of sale rather than chosen by the buyer. No strategy or system shortens those odds.
The win is part of a broader shift in what American lottery jackpots have come to look like. The accelerating pace of nine-figure lottery prizes in recent years reflects rule changes in both Mega Millions and Powerball that lengthened the odds and extended rollovers, pushing jackpots to levels that were once considered improbable. The $803 million prize sits just below the billion-dollar threshold that now defines the game’s most extraordinary drawings, but it far exceeds what would have been record-breaking territory a decade ago.
With the Mega Millions jackpot resetting at $50 million for Friday’s drawing, attention shifts to Powerball, which carries its own jackpot of $663 million into Wednesday night’s draw after a long string without a winner. Anyone who tracked Powerball’s prolonged jackpot drought last winter, when the prize climbed to $1.7 billion across 47 consecutive rollovers before producing a winner, knows the pattern: the longer a jackpot runs, the more compulsively people check their phones the morning after a drawing.
What lottery officials cannot answer is the simplest question of all: does the person who bought that Quick Pick at the Bradenton Wawa even know what they are holding?
