What a jackpot actually is

The questions below are the ones readers really ask (they come from what gets typed into a search box, not from what a marketing department would like answered), and this first group is the one that makes all the others make sense. Almost every misunderstanding about these games grows out of a single missing idea: the prize is not inside the game you are looking at.

What is a progressive jackpot?

It is a prize grown out of a slice taken from every stake placed on every game attached to the same "pool" (the shared fund that holds the money), across every casino carrying that pool, until somebody "triggers" it (the event that opens the jackpot round, which differs from one network to the next). The game on the screen is a theme and a set of reels; the money sits in the "network" behind it, which is why the identical pot turns up under twenty-nine separate titles and why a win in one country empties the fund for a player in another.

What is the difference between a fixed and a progressive jackpot?

A "fixed" jackpot is a named prize paid as a multiple of the stake out of the game's own mathematics: it takes nothing from a shared pool, it never grows, it does not reset, and it does not depend on anybody else playing anywhere at all. It is the one jackpot in a casino you can work out for yourself (the paytable has the multiple, and the multiple is the whole of it).

A "progressive" takes between 0.99 and 7.60 points of return away from the base game as its "contribution" to the pool (the figure depends on the network, and the range is wider than almost anybody writes), and that money leaves the game whether the jackpot round ever appears or not.

What is a seed, and does a jackpot reset after somebody wins it?

The "seed" is the amount a level restarts from once it has been paid, and yes, every progressive level resets to its seed when it falls, which is why a pot that looks small has very often just been won by somebody. Seeds are not conversions of one another: the top level of Mega Moolah starts at a million in sterling, a million in Canadian dollars and a million in euros, which are three separate nominal thresholds (we say so on every page that gives a seed) rather than one figure translated three times.

What is a must-drop jackpot?

It is a pool with a deadline written into its rules, so that it has to be paid before a stated time or above a stated ceiling instead of only when a combination appears. Red Tiger built the model (one pot falling every hour, another before midday each day) and half the trade has copied it since, and Jackpot Madness, launched in August 2026, is the first Games Global network carrying "must drop" levels of its own.

The numbers nobody publishes

This group holds the four questions we answer differently from almost every other site (we refuse three of the four outright), and the difference is not a matter of opinion: the figures being asked for either exist in a published source or they do not, and three of these four do not.

What are the odds of winning a progressive jackpot?

Nobody publishes them. NetEnt, Games Global, Playtech and Relax Gaming all publish the return to player and the "hit frequency" (how often the game pays anything at all), which says nothing whatever about the top level: the two are different quantities describing different events, and our pages keep them apart. Every percentage circulating for a top jackpot is either unattributed or incompatible with the recorded sequence of wins, so what you will find here, wherever a level has a history worth counting, is the measured "interval" instead.

How often does a top jackpot really fall?

That depends on the level, and the spread is enormous. The lowest level of the Playtech "Age of the Gods" pool has averaged a win every two hours and thirty-eight minutes; the top level of Mega Moolah has averaged about nine and a half weeks; the tops of WowPot! and Joker Millions have both averaged around thirty-four; Hall of Gods has taken thirty-nine weeks; and one small Playtech pool (Thai Temple) has paid once in eleven years.

Do jackpot slots have a lower return to player?

Some do, dramatically, and some do not at all. One Mega Moolah title returns 86.93 per cent in total and only 81.63 on the "base game" (the game a player who does not win the Mega is actually playing), while Divine Fortune returns 96.59 with a progressive attached. The question worth asking about a "jackpot slot" is not whether it has a pot, but how much return the supplier has moved into that pot, and we give both figures wherever the supplier has published them.

Is a jackpot that has not paid for years about to drop?

No, and the belief that a pot can be "due" has a name and a long history behind it. The chance of the next spin does not shift because the last win was a long time ago, and a counter standing above the average of everything a game has ever paid is a fact about the past rather than a signal about the future, however much a "drought" of three years looks like one. One Games Global title (King Cashalot) carries a pot above $2.2 million that has not moved since 2017, which is a very long run of disappointed readers of "live" counters!

Playing one

The practical group, and the one where the answer most often turns out to depend on whether the game was written in 1999 or last year. The networks built in the past decade are fair about "qualification" (whether your stake counts at all) in a way the first generation never was.

Do I have to bet the maximum to win the jackpot?

On the modern networks, no. Jackpot King asks for no minimum stake and no side bet, so any real-money spin on an eligible game counts. Relax Gaming states plainly that on Dream Drop every stake carries the same chance of starting the round. The games of the nineties are the opposite: Treasure Nile needs £4.50 a spin and a particular combination on the ninth line, Fruit Fiesta needs a stake on all fifteen lines, and below those "qualifying stakes" the jackpot is not unlikely but unavailable, while the contribution comes out of the stake all the same.

Can a progressive jackpot be won in demo or free play?

No. A demo runs on play money, nothing is contributed to the pool from it, and there is consequently nothing for the network to pay anybody when the "win" appears on screen. A "demo" is still the cheapest way to learn what a game does before staking anything on it, which is a different and much better reason to open one.

Does the same jackpot pay the same at every casino?

For a "global" pool, yes: the money is one fund, and which house the winning spin came from makes no difference to it. For a "local" pool (one held per casino rather than per network) it matters a great deal, and the NetEnt games are the case to watch, because two of the three Mega Fortune levels are local (the "Mega" is the only one shared), so the figure a player sees genuinely depends on where that player is standing.

Why is there no live jackpot total on this site?

Because a total is true for minutes, cannot be checked afterwards by anybody (ourselves included), and comes from services stating neither their source nor how often they refresh. The seed, the average of everything the game has paid and the gap since the last win are all of them still true next year, whenever you come back to check, and we would rather give you three figures you can verify than one nobody can.

The records, and why the rankings are wrong

Four of the five largest jackpots ever paid have no entry in any book of "records", and the one that does is not the biggest of them. That sentence accounts for most of what goes wrong on the pages that rank these things.

What is the largest online jackpot ever paid?

€38,461,200.95, on Wheel of Wishes, on 20 December 2023 (the figure is given to the cent in the supplier's own announcement). Games Global put out the amount and the date and never said which casino it happened at (the usual practice rather than an exception), and nothing has beaten it in the three years since, although two of the networks have grown considerably in that time.

Which jackpot holds the Guinness World Record?

A smaller and older one: €17,879,645, won by Jon Heywood at Betway on 6 October 2015. A "world record" of that sort goes to whoever applies for it (and pays the fee, and supplies the evidence), and nobody applied for the four larger wins that came afterwards, so the register holds an application rather than a maximum, which is why you will see the smaller figure described as a "world record" on sites that also report the larger one correctly.

Can the record amounts be compared with one another?

Not as plain numbers, and this is where almost every ranking in the trade falls over. The largest wins are in three currencies and span several years, which is two problems rather than one. Twenty million Canadian dollars of January 2019 was worth a good deal less at the time than thirteen and a half million euros, so sorting the figures by size alone puts them in the wrong order altogether. Every amount on this site keeps the currency it was paid in, with its date beside it.

This site

Three questions arrive often enough to belong here as well as on the pages treating them at length (about us, and how we review), and our answers to all three are short.

Do you test the games and the casinos?

No. Nobody has played these games on our behalf, no account was opened for the purpose, and no probability was measured here. What we read instead were the authorities' registers, the suppliers' own game rules and terms, the licence conditions of operators obliged to describe a pool correctly, and the public "trackers" (the services logging each level and the day it last fell). Each of them carries the day of our reading beside it.

How is the list of casinos ordered?

By the regulator whose register we were able to read for each house, and by nothing else whatever. A commission does not move a card, there are no stars here because a borrowed "score" is not a verdict of ours, and no card carries a bonus figure, partly for a regulatory reason (Ontario and Alberta) and partly because on a jackpot site the proposition is the pool.

Where do I report a mistake?

At contact, with the source attached if there is one. We change a figure on the page itself rather than quietly in an archive, and a number that turns out to rest on a comparison site gets labelled (in the line that carries it) as resting on one. It is the least glamorous part of the method, and it is the part that makes the rest of it true!