$10 Million Must Be Won: Jackpot Shared Two Ways in Final 10-Ball Draw 2620

Mia here. Saturday night was the last time New Zealand will ever see the 10-ball Powerball game drawn, and it finished the way these nights usually do — not with one phone call that changes a life, but with the money sliding down a division and splitting itself in two.

Draw 2620 produced no Powerball Division 1 winner. The $10 million jackpot rolled down to Powerball Division 2, where two tickets each picked up $5,027,676.

The numbers

Where the $10 million went

The Division 2 prize pool came to $10,055,352 — a little above the advertised $10 million, because the jackpot was joined by Division 2's own share of the prize fund before being split two ways. That is the roll-down doing exactly what it is designed to do: the money leaves the building on the night, no matter who catches it.

Two players walking away with just over $5 million each has a near-twin in the record books. In August 2020, ten strangers split a $50 million Must Be Won into $5.02 million slices. Same destination, very different crowd.

Lotto and Strike

Across all three games, 585,829 winning tickets were paid out on the night — 404,475 in Lotto, 35,126 in Powerball and 146,228 in Strike. The lowest divisions of Lotto and Strike (345,663 and 140,652 winners respectively) are recorded in the results feed without a cash dividend, so I have left them out of the prize table rather than guess at a figure.

The 14th Must Be Won, and it was shared again

A roll-down is simple enough: if Division 1 is not won, the whole jackpot moves to the next Powerball division that has winners and is divided evenly among them. I have written up the full mechanism and every previous draw in Must Be Won: how the forced payout works.

What keeps standing out in my data is how rarely one person takes the lot. Before Saturday, seven of the twelve completed Must Be Won draws had been shared and only five had gone to a single ticket holder. Draw 2620 makes it eight shared out of thirteen.

The reason is not mysterious. Jackpots this size pull in people who do not normally play, and volume is what creates collisions — both in Division 2 and in the crowded lower divisions. Saturday's two Division 2 winners were drawn from the biggest Lotto sales week of the year so far, on a night that had been flagged as a guaranteed payout for days.

The end of the 10-ball game

Whatever else draw 2620 was, it was the curtain call for a format that has run since 2007. From Sunday 13 September the Powerball pool grows from 10 balls to 14, a new Division 8 is added at the bottom, the starting jackpot rises from $4 million to $5 million and the cap lifts from $50 million to $60 million. I covered the full detail in Powerball is changing on 13 September 2026.

The practical effect for anyone who plays: Division 1 gets harder. Under the game that finished on Saturday, the odds of a single line taking Powerball Division 1 were 1 in 38,383,800. Under the new game they are roughly 1 in 53.7 million. The trade-off is a bigger starting jackpot and a higher ceiling.

The first draw under the new rules is Wednesday 16 September, starting at $5 million. Tickets for the new format could not be bought until 13 September, so Saturday was the last advance-purchase draw of the old game.

One thing worth knowing

Both Division 2 winners have twelve months to claim. Lotto NZ asks winners to sign the back of the ticket and get in touch straight away — in store, through MyLotto, or by phone.

Full numbers, dividends and the division-by-division breakdown for this draw are on the 12 September 2026 draw page.

As always: the odds of Powerball Division 1 were 1 in 38,383,800 per line under the old game, and are about 1 in 53.7 million per line from here on. Every line is an independent event. Nothing about Saturday's numbers makes Wednesday's numbers any more or less likely.

Play for the fun of it and never spend more than you are comfortable losing. If your play ever stops feeling like fun, free and confidential help is available at gamblinghelpline.co.nz or on 0800 654 655.