The New Jersey Lottery says a ticket sold at a Wegmans in Montvale won Wednesday's $847 million Powerball jackpot. Winners can stay anonymous, but state agencies can still collect certain debts from their winnings, and prizes over $10,000 are taxable. The lottery's profits go to public pensions.

The New Jersey Lottery says the winning ticket for Wednesday's $847 million Powerball jackpot was sold at a Wegmans in Montvale, in Bergen County. From here, state law largely decides what happens to the money.

Powerball calls the prize the ninth-largest jackpot in the game's history. The $847 million figure is the annuity, paid over 29 years in 30 payments that grow as they go. A winner who takes cash instead gets $363.1 million. Both figures are before taxes, Powerball said.

The winner decides whether to take the annuity or cash, and they also choose whether to stay anonymous. State law created the anonymity option and sets its limits. It also sets the tax that comes out of the prize.

Prizes over $10,000 have counted as taxable income in New Jersey since 2009. The lottery's own profits, the money from ticket sales that it keeps after paying prizes and costs, go to three public pension funds under a 2017 law.

Winners can keep their names private, but not from the state

A 2020 law let the state Lottery Commission adopt a rule allowing winners to stay anonymous indefinitely. The law keeps the identity of a winner who takes that option out of the records that the public can request under the state's Open Public Records Act.

Until then, a records request could turn up any winner's name, hometown and county, according to a Senate committee's February 2019 statement on the bill. The lottery's rules at the time also let it use a winner's name, photo, prize amount and address, though never with a street or house number.

The Senate passed the bill, S2267, 39-0 on Jan. 9, 2020. The Assembly followed 75-0 on Jan. 13, the Legislature's records show. Then-Gov. Phil Murphy signed it Jan. 21, 2020.

An anonymous winner still has to show identification, which the lottery uses to process the claim and to report the prize to the Internal Revenue Service, according to its guidance.

The 2020 law also says anonymity does not stop authorized state agencies from sharing information to collect certain debts from lottery winnings. Those include overdue child support, defaulted or delinquent student loans, certain sums owed to state agencies and certain overpayments of public assistance.

A 2009 law started the prize tax, and a Senate bill would end it

New Jersey left lottery winnings out of its income tax until 2009. Since then, any prize over $10,000 counts as taxable income, according to the state Division of Taxation. The prize tax was one piece of a broader June 2009 income tax law, passed, its title says, "in response to the severe economic downturn."

The lottery withholds state income tax from taxable prizes, meaning it takes the money out before paying the winner: 5 percent on prizes over $10,000 up to $500,000, and 8 percent on anything bigger, according to its claim page. For federal income tax, the lottery withholds 24 percent of any prize over $5,000, as federal law requires.

A jackpot counts as income like any other, and the state's top income tax rate, 10.75 percent, applies to taxable income of $1 million and up, according to the Division of Taxation's rate schedules. That is higher than the 8 percent the lottery takes out, so the amount withheld can fall short of what a winner owes the state. The division says a winner in such a position must pay the rest during the year, through what it calls estimated payments, or face interest and penalties.

Sen. Carmen F. Amato Jr. (R, 9th District) and Sen. Latham Tiver (R, 8th) are sponsoring S1615, which would take "all New Jersey Lottery winnings" out of the state income tax and end withholding on prizes over $10,000.

The senators introduced the bill on Jan. 13. It remains in the Senate Economic Growth Committee with no later action as of Nov. 6, the Legislature's records show. Public records showed no Assembly version of the bill as of publication. The same two senators filed a version in February 2025 that ended without action when that legislative session closed.

The lottery's profits go to public pensions for 30 years

Under a 1969 amendment that voters approved the year before the lottery began, New Jersey's constitution allows state lotteries only if all of their net proceeds go to "State institutions and State aid for education." The 2017 Lottery Enterprise Contribution Act says handing the lottery to the pension funds meets both tests, since the funds' members include teachers, school employees and people who work at state institutions.

The 2017 law, in effect since July 4 of that year, signed the lottery over to three public pension funds for 30 years, though the state's lottery division still controls operations. The law set the lottery's starting value at $13.535 billion, based on an independent appraisal, and directs the lottery division to make as much money as it can for the funds.

Most of the lottery's contribution, 77.78 percent, goes to the Teachers' Pension and Annuity Fund. The Public Employees' Retirement System gets 21.02 percent and the Police and Firemen's Retirement System 1.20 percent. Each system counts its share of the lottery's value as an asset toward its "funded ratio," the measure of what it holds against the benefits it owes.

In the 2026 budget year, which ended June 30, the lottery sent the pension funds $1.01 billion, according to its year-end results. That figure is unaudited, and lottery officials said they expected the final tally to come in higher.

Total ticket sales rose 4.6 percent in the 2026 budget year, to $3.49 billion. Powerball sales alone jumped 89.4 percent, to $315.9 million, and the lottery credited two Powerball jackpots of more than $1 billion with helping drive the increase. With no Mega Millions jackpot of $1 billion or more that year, lottery officials said, that game's sales fell to $146.9 million, down 22.4 percent.

State law also sets a minimum share of ticket money that must go into the pension funds' investment account. A 2025 law lowered that floor to 27 percent, from 30 percent, starting with the 2026 budget year. This lower floor stays only if sales hold up compared to 2025. If average yearly ticket sales and revenue over the three budget years after 2025 fall short of that year's numbers, the law says, the floor returns to 30 percent.

James A. Carey, the lottery's director, testified about the change at a Senate committee hearing June 19, 2025, according to a cost estimate from the Office of Legislative Services. The director told the committee that Northstar NJ Lottery, the company that handles the lottery's sales and marketing, expected the pensions to come out ahead. By its projection, the lottery's pension contribution would grow despite the smaller share, by as much as $15 million a year in the law's first two budget years, on added ticket sales of $50 million to $100 million a year.

The Office of Legislative Services, which wrote the estimate, called the law's overall fiscal effect "indeterminate." It could not say whether the change would leave the pensions with more lottery money or less. If the lottery sent the pension funds less, the office wrote, the state would have to make up the gap with its own money. If the lottery sent more, the state could put in less.

Winners have a year to claim, and payment takes weeks

For games with drawings, such as Powerball, a winner has one year from the drawing to cash the ticket, the lottery's FAQ says. After that, the ticket expires and the lottery cannot pay it.

Jackpot winners can ask for an appointment to file their claim in person with staff at the lottery's claim center in Trenton, the claim page says. Many top-prize winners hand-deliver their tickets, though they do not have to, according to the FAQ. Handing over a ticket in person brings no money that day. As the FAQ puts it, the lottery "does not have the legal authority to cut checks on behalf of the State of New Jersey." Processing now takes four to six weeks, according to the claim page.

The Montvale Wegmans gets a $30,000 bonus from the lottery for selling the ticket, officials announced Nov. 5. The store's manager said Wegmans would donate it to a New Jersey food bank.

Two big New Jersey jackpots from 2024 show how claims have played out under the anonymity law.

A Powerball ticket bought at Preet Food Mart in Lindenwold, in Camden County, won $222.6 million in the June 10, 2024, drawing. On July 11, 2024, James A. Carey, the lottery's executive director, announced that the ticket's holder had come forward and taken the $104.7 million cash option, according to Powerball.

A Mega Millions ticket from a Neptune Township ShopRite in Monmouth County won $1.13 billion in March 2024. On Dec. 23, 2024, lottery officials announced that the ticket's holder had turned it in and begun the claim. That winner took the lump sum, which a published estimate put at about $537 million before taxes, and chose to stay anonymous.

The prize of the Montvale lottery ticket trails only Neptune's. Carey called it "the second-largest jackpot ever won in New Jersey" on Thursday. By that point the winner still had not come forward, and he offered advice for the ticket holder.

"I would call a lawyer. I would call a tax accountant, and I would call a financial adviser," Carey said. "This is an extraordinary amount of money, and you're going to need help from professionals that deal with things like this all the time.”

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