$100 million Powerball win sparks ATO, Centrelink warning for every Aussie: 'Trap'
Australians are being warned about the potential implications of winning the lottery following last night's $100 million Powerball draw. It was the biggest Powerball jackpot of 2025, and one lucky person walked away as the sole jackpot winner.
However, there are a few stipulations worth considering as we get close to tax time and how a massive sum of cash like this can affect you. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) had some handy advice.
"You don't need to declare your winnings to us, and you won't pay tax on them," the tax office said.
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"But, any interest earned on the winnings will need to be included in your assessable income."
If you were the sole winner of the jackpot and had it sitting in a savings account with a 5 per cent interest rate, you would generate around $5 million in just one year.
Come tax time next year, you would have to pay tax on that immense amount of money.
First Financial's James Wrigley told Yahoo Finance you should seek out advice from professionals if you win big as they can guide you into divvying up the money wisely before you spend it all.Services Australia doesn't always count lottery wins in its income assessment.
This is because it assesses what you might earn on a regular basis and hitting the jackpot is stored under the "unlikely to happen again" and "hard to predict" categories.
It's also because the money wasn't from "a service or work provided".
But it depends on how you accept the payment.
Lottery winners can usually either get it as a lump sum payment, or they can choose to have it spread out in regular payment intervals over several years.
Services Australia will treat it as part of the income assessment if you pick the latter option because then it would be regular income, and that could drastically reduce how much Centrelink you receive.
That's what happened to South Australian resident Frank Kemmler, who was kicked off his disability support pension after winning a $60,000 lotto prize.
While he was stoked at the sudden influx of cash, he claimed he wasn't given an option between the lump sum or regular payments.
The Adelaide man had to foot the bill for GP appointments and medication that was previously paid for by his pension.
"I'm just trying to stop other people from falling into the same trap,' he told A Current Affair.
'These people that are buying these [lottery] tickets, there's no warning anywhere … to say that you're going to lose your pension.
Centrelink recipients have been urged to tell Services Australia as soon as possible about their new financial situation.
Even if you take a lump sum payment, your payments could still be affected.
Depending on how much you win, the government body will include your lottery earnings as part of your asset test.
If it's over a certain amount, combined with your other assets, your payments could be reduced or switched off.
The winning numbers in Powerball draw 1517 on Thursday, 12 12 were 28, 10, 3, 16, 31, 14 and 21. The all-important Powerball number was 6.
The person who won the entire $100 million jackpot purchased their ticket in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
There were also six division two winners, who scored $282,415.55 each.
In addition to them, there were 3,056,245 wins across divisions two to nine in the draw, and they have shared in more than $60.9 million of prize money.
That's an average win of $19 each.
Half of all Australian adults were expected to have bought a ticket for the megadraw.
More than 10 million people bought a ticket for the last $100 million draw in November last year.
If you didn't win, rest assured that scoring the grand prize has odds of one to 134 million.Sign in to access your portfolio
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