Updated November 12, 2026.
Hot, cold, and overdue are labels for the past. A hot number, on this site, is one that has appeared more often than the other numbers in the same pool. A cold number has appeared less often. An overdue number is one with a long current gap: many drawings have happened since it was last drawn. Lottery sellers and tip sheets use those words as if they were forecasts. They are not. A drawing does not remember the archive.
This page uses LotteryMigo’s copy of the NY Open Data files and the current rules of each game. The counts below are rebuilt whenever the archive is rebuilt. They will not match a screenshot from last month, and they should not.
A count from this archive
Through November 11, 2026, the current Powerball matrix in this archive has 1,432 drawings. white ball 21 has the most appearances, at 128. white ball 13 has the fewest, at 80. The even-split count for a white ball over those drawings is 103.8. The longest current gap is 54 drawings, held by white ball 43, last drawn July 8, 2026. Those are facts about this file. On the next drawing every white ball still has a 5-in-69 chance.
The pages for white ball 21, white ball 13, and white ball 43 list the drawings behind the totals, including the lines those balls actually landed in.
The even-split figure is the count a number would have if the drawings were spread perfectly evenly. For a Powerball white ball it is the number of current-matrix drawings times 5, divided by 69. Real counts wander around that line. After more than a thousand drawings they are still not identical, and they do not need to be. Closing a gap is not a debt the machine owes anyone.
What the words mean on LotteryMigo
Frequency is the number of drawings in which a ball appeared. It is not the number of times it could have appeared inside one drawing. Five white balls in one drawing count as one appearance each.
The current gap is how many drawings have been held since the drawing that included the ball. If the ball is in the latest drawing, the gap is zero. If it missed the last drawing only, the gap is one. The gap is measured inside one matrix. A Powerball gap uses drawings from October 7, 2015 forward, the first drawing in this file that uses white balls 1 through 69 and a Powerball 1 through 26. A Mega Millions white-ball gap uses drawings from October 31, 2017 forward. A current Mega Ball gap uses drawings from April 8, 2025 forward, when the gold ball moved to 1 through 24.
The longest gap on a number page is the longest run of missed drawings in that same set. It might be a stretch between two appearances, a slow start at the beginning of the matrix, or the gap that is still open. The page says which one it is and gives the dates.
“Overdue” is the word to retire. A ball is late only if a schedule exists. The published odds are a schedule of combinations, not a timetable for ball 23. After a gap of 30 drawings, the chance that Powerball white ball 23 is among the next five white balls is still 5 in 69.
Why the past feels persuasive
Short runs are noisy, so people remember them. A number that shows up three times in a month is easy to see. A number that is quiet for a month is easy to see too. Both things happen often when you watch 69 balls, five at a time, three nights a week. The odds page walks through the combination count. The relevant piece here is smaller: each draw is independent, and the field does not shrink just because a number was drawn last week.
There is a second confusion between “equal chance” and “equal history.” Equal chance means each remaining ball in the machine has the same chance on the next draw. Equal history would mean every ball has been drawn the same number of times. Fair drawings produce the first of those and almost never the second. A leaderboard is what you get from a fair game, not evidence that the game has stopped being fair.
Clusters have the same explanation. If 17 has often been drawn next to 42, that pair can lead the companion list on the number pages without meaning 42 is attached to 17. Five white balls produce ten pairs every drawing. Across a thousand drawings some pairs will lead and some will lag. The companion list is a record of those pairs.
Older matrices make all-time charts lie
The home page frequency chart reads the full loaded file. That file is the right place to look up an old drawing. It is the wrong denominator for “is this number hot under today’s rules.”
Powerball’s current white balls 60 through 69 do not exist in the rows before October 7, 2015. In this archive their first possible drawing is that date. An all-time chart that starts in 2010 gives balls 1 through 59 several extra years. They will tend to lead an all-time list even when the current-matrix list is flat. The number pages show the current-matrix count beside the full-file count so that extra history is visible.
Mega Millions is messier. The NY file starts in 2002 and includes white balls up to 75 and Mega Balls up to 52, because older formats used those fields. From October 31, 2017 through April 4, 2025 the game was 5 from 70 and a Mega Ball from 1 through 25. On April 8, 2025 the Mega Ball field became 1 through 24 and the ticket price became $5 with a built-in multiplier. White ball 70’s current-matrix count starts in October 2017. Mega Ball 25’s appearances stop at the April 4, 2025 drawing. The Mega Ball 25 page is marked historical for that reason. Treating 25 as “overdue” in the current game would be a category error: it is not in the machine.
The Mega Ball sample since April 2025 is short. A hot or cold label on Mega Balls 1 through 24 will swing as new Tuesday and Friday drawings arrive. That swing is a small sample, not a signal.
What a frequency page can still answer
The useful questions are historical. When did this number last appear? Which drawing had it beside the numbers on a ticket you already bought? Has white ball 64, which could not be drawn in 2014, caught up inside the current matrix? Those questions have answers in the draw list. The results pages list recent drawings with a link on every number, and each number page lists the recent lines that included it.
The questions that do not have answers here are the predictive ones. The archive cannot say which white ball is more likely on Saturday. The prize charts already say: each legal combination is one ticket in a field of 292,201,338 for Powerball, or 290,472,336 for the current Mega Millions game.
LotteryMigo’s number generator and the practice drum on the home page are toys for building a legal line. They draw from the current field. They do not consult the hot list, and consulting the hot list would not have helped them.
Sources
- Powerball prize chart — current matrix odds, which assume every combination is equally likely.
- Mega Millions how to play — current 5/70 plus 1/24 matrix.
- NY Open Data Powerball and Mega Millions — the drawings these counts come from.
The method, including the matrix dates and the gap definition, is written out on the about page.