How long Mega-Sena rolls over

Between draw 1, on 11 March 1996, and draw 3048, on 23 August 2026, Mega-Sena had 660 draws with at least one six-match ticket. In the other 2,388 the jackpot rolled over. I split the series into cycles: each cycle starts at the draw after a winner and ends at the next draw that has one. There are 660 cycles, and the question is how long each lasted.

Cycle length	Cycles	Share	Average total prize at the end
1 draw	102	15.5%	R$ 15.2 million
2 to 3 draws	192	29.1%	R$ 22.9 million
4 to 6 draws	204	30.9%	R$ 35.2 million
7 to 10 draws	126	19.1%	R$ 73.4 million
11 to 15 draws	35	5.3%	R$ 111.0 million
16 or more	1	0.2%	R$ 211.7 million

The average is 4.6 draws per cycle and the median 4. Prizes are in values of their time, not adjusted for inflation, so they mix 1996 with 2026; they show the scale, not a comparison between years.

The longest cycle

It started at draw 2221, on 4 January 2020, and ended at draw 2237, on 27 February: 16 draws in a row without a winner and the 17th with two, who took R$ 105.8 million each. That was 54 days. Ticket sales show what happened along the way. Draw 2221 took in R$ 24.1 million; draw 2237, R$ 203.0 million, more than eight times as much.

Right behind come two 15-draw cycles. One ended at draw 2150, on 11 May 2019, with a single ticket taking R$ 289.4 million, the largest individual Mega-Sena prize in a regular draw. The other ended at draw 2525, on 1 October 2022, with two tickets of R$ 158.9 million and R$ 478.8 million in sales for that draw.

The longer it rolls, the closer it gets

A single ticket's chance of matching all six numbers is 1 in 50,063,860 in any draw, rolled over or not. Even so, the chance that a draw has a winner changes a lot as the cycle goes on. Leaving out the New Year's Eve Mega da Virada, which follows other rules:

Position in the cycle	Draws with a winner
1st draw	14.9%
2nd and 3rd	18.7%
4th to 6th	22.9%
7th to 9th	28.1%
10th to 12th	37.9%
13th onwards	54.5%

There is no contradiction. What changes from one draw to the next is the number of tickets. A rolled-over jackpot draws more people in, and with more tickets in the draw it becomes more likely that one of them holds the drawn combination.

Four-match winners as a ticket counter

The prize data lets us measure this. A single ticket has a 1 in 2,332 chance of matching exactly four numbers, so a draw's count of four-match winners gives an estimate of how many single tickets it had. Looking only at draws from 2020 onwards, still without the Viradas:

Position in the cycle	Estimated single tickets	With a winner	Expected if picks were random
1st draw	6.9 million	8.3%	12.9%
2nd and 3rd	9.1 million	14.3%	16.6%
4th to 6th	11.7 million	17.8%	20.9%
7th to 9th	17.3 million	22.1%	29.3%
10th onwards	27.8 million	33.8%	42.6%

Volume quadruples between the first draw of a cycle and the ones past the tenth, and the chance of a winner follows. The last column shows something else: in every band, draws had a winner less often than they would if each person picked numbers at random. Many people mark the same combinations (dates, sequences, their usual numbers), and a pile of identical tickets covers fewer distinct combinations than the same pile of varied ones. It is the same effect that shows up in the winner counts of the Lotofácil da Independência and in the 52 winners of the 2018 Mega da Virada.

In days, the wait barely changed

Outside the Viradas, cycles that ended between 1996 and 2009 lasted 4.65 draws on average, or 16.2 days. Between 2010 and 2019, 4.0 draws and 10.0 days. From 2020 onwards, 5.74 draws and 13.4 days. Recent cycles have more draws, but the gap between one draw and the next shrank: on average it was 4.4 days between 1996 and 2009, 3.4 days between 2010 and 2019 and 2.9 days from 2020 onwards. That is why the wait in days stays between 10 and 16. The data does not say why cycles got longer in number of draws, and I will not guess.

What it means for players

A rolled-over draw is not a better opportunity for an individual ticket: each ticket's chance is still 1 in 50,063,860. The bigger prize comes with more people competing for it and, when it is won, a higher chance of being shared. The "record in numbers" table on the Mega-Sena page shows the longest rollover run and the records, updated with every draw.

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