QUINCY, Ill. – The numbers went up: 4, 26, 66, 67, and 69, with a red Powerball of 9. Someone bought a ticket at a Hy-Vee gas station on North 36th Street in Quincy and matched all six, local station CBS12 reported. The Powerball jackpot, which had accumulated through 44 consecutive drawings without a grand prize winner, ended Wednesday night at $1.040 billion.
Quincy has roughly 40,000 residents and sits on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, close to the Missouri border. Whoever holds the winning ticket woke up Thursday morning as the eighth-largest Powerball jackpot winner in the game’s history, purchased at a gas station at the edge of the Midwest that most of the country could not find on a map.
That $1.040 billion is the advertised figure. The winner’s first meaningful decision is how much of it they intend to collect. Powerball offers two paths: an annuity paying the full billion across 30 annual payments over 29 years, each 5 percent larger than the previous, or a cash option delivering $450.5 million before taxes. Winners must elect the cash option within 60 days of the drawing date or receive the annuity by default.
The cash option is what most winners choose. Federal law requires Powerball to withhold 24 percent of any lottery payment above $5,000 at the moment of collection: approximately $108 million on a $450.5 million payout. What remains, roughly $342 million, then sits on the winner’s 2026 federal income tax return. A lump sum of that scale lands entirely in the top marginal federal bracket of 37 percent. After reconciling withholding against the full tax liability, the federal tax on the cash option runs to approximately $167 million. The after-federal number is roughly $284 million.
Illinois levies a flat 4.95 percent income tax on all earnings, including lottery prizes. On a $450.5 million lump sum, that amounts to roughly $22 million more. The winner’s take-home after both federal and state deductions is approximately $262 million. Real money, though the gap between the headline and the deposit is a conversation the winner will have immediately with any competent financial adviser.
Illinois is one of several states that allows winners to claim prizes through a trust or limited liability company, which shields the winner’s name from the public record. The Illinois Lottery still requires identity verification against the signed ticket, but the face associated with the winning combination can remain private under current state law. The winner has up to one year from the drawing to step forward. There is no competitive advantage to moving quickly, and substantial advantage to moving carefully.
The run that produced Wednesday’s jackpot began accumulating after the previous grand prize was claimed. As The Eastern Herald reported ahead of Wednesday’s draw, the Powerball jackpot had been projected at $1 billion with a cash option of $433.1 million; sales volume on the final night pushed both figures higher. The jackpot crossed the 748 million mark in early August and kept growing as drawing after drawing passed without a winner.
The eighth-largest ranking places Wednesday’s prize behind only a handful of jackpots since Powerball’s 2015 rule revision made the grand prize harder to win but larger when it lands. The largest in the game’s history was $2.04 billion, won by a California ticket in November 2022. Wednesday’s $1.040 billion is the largest Powerball jackpot of 2026 and surpasses the Mega Millions jackpot of $803 million won at a Wawa convenience store in Bradenton, Florida, on July 28. Two jackpots above $800 million within a single summer is a concentration that has no recent parallel in American lottery history.
Wednesday’s drawing produced secondary prizes across the country. A Massachusetts ticket matched all five white balls with the Power Play active, earning $2 million. Tickets in Arizona, California, Florida, and North Carolina each matched five white balls without the multiplier for $1 million apiece. Seventy tickets nationally matched four white balls and the Powerball for $50,000 each; 16 of those had Power Play active and collected $100,000. The ticket in Quincy is the only one that matched all six.
Financial advisers who specialize in sudden wealth describe the hours immediately after a win as among the most consequential and most dangerous of the entire experience. Their recommendations are consistent: sign the back of the ticket immediately to establish ownership, tell no one until counsel has been retained, and approach lottery officials only after an attorney and a financial planner are in place. The year-long claim window removes any urgency. Every decision that follows, from trust structure to whether to take lump sum or annuity to what level of anonymity Illinois law permits, rewards deliberate planning over speed.
Whether the holder of the Quincy ticket knows what they are holding is not something the lottery’s results page can answer. Whether they discovered the match Wednesday night when the Powerball website updated, found out Thursday morning checking a gas station app, or have not looked at all; that information sits somewhere in western Illinois, at a Hy-Vee on North 36th Street, already gone from the scene.
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