What are the hot and cold Powerball numbers right now?

Over the last 300 Powerball draws, ball 28 leads with 35 appearances, followed by 52 at 34 and 64 at 32. The coldest are 68 at 11 appearances, 22 at 14 and 10 at 15. Each number's fair share across that window is about 21.7 appearances, so the leaders sit roughly 60 percent above it and the laggards near half of it.

How many draws should a Powerball hot and cold list cover?

It depends on the question. Twenty-five draws is only 125 ball-slots across 69 numbers, so almost every number lands once or twice and the ranking swings hard from week to week. A few hundred draws gives each number a fair share of about 21.7 appearances and a steadier picture, and longer windows flatten the spread further. It is worth checking the window before reading any hot list.

Which Powerball number has gone longest without being drawn?

Ball 23 has the longest current gap, last drawn on March 9, 2026, which is seventy-one draws ago, ahead of ball 11 at sixty-one draws and ball 33 at fifty. That is a separate measurement from the cold list, which ranks by total count rather than by time since the last appearance.

Blog · September 1, 2026 · 4 min read

Powerball Hot and Cold Numbers - And Why the Window Matters

Powerball hot and cold numbers from the last 300 draws: 28 leads with 35 appearances, 68 trails with 11, and the window you pick reshapes both lists.

Across the last 300 Powerball draws, ball 28 has come up 35 times and ball 68 has come up 11. Those two sit at opposite ends of the same list, drawn from the same machine on the same Monday, Wednesday and Saturday schedule, and the distance between them is the whole reason hot and cold lists exist.

The catch is that both figures answer a question you chose without noticing: how many draws are we counting? Change the window and the leaderboard changes with it.

What hot is measured against

Powerball draws five white balls from 1 to 69, so 300 draws is 1,500 ball-slots shared across 69 numbers. That puts every number's fair share at roughly 21.7 appearances. A hot list is really the numbers that finished above that line, and a cold list the ones that finished below it.

Read that way, 28's 35 appearances is about 61 percent above its share, roughly three standard deviations clear of the middle, which is the wide end of what a 69-number field produces. Ball 68's 11 is not far off half the baseline. The interesting part is not that a gap exists, it is how fast that gap narrows or widens depending on how far back you count.

Move the window, move the list

Look at the latest 25 draws instead and the arithmetic shifts underneath you. Twenty-five draws is only 125 ball-slots across 69 numbers, so the fair share drops to under two appearances each. Most numbers land once or twice, a few land three or four times, and whichever ones happen to land four look spectacular on a chart while being a couple of appearances clear of average.

Stretch the window the other way, across all 1,969 Powerball draws on record, and the opposite happens: the bars flatten, the leaders shed their lead, and the spread between busiest and quietest shrinks as a share of the total. Short windows are volatile, long windows are smooth, and neither is the correct window. They answer different questions, so it is worth knowing which one a given hot list is answering.

Cold numbers and longest gaps are not the same list

Cold is a count: 68 at 11 appearances, then 22 at 14 and 10 at 15, the three lowest tallies of the last 300 draws. Longest gap is a calendar: ball 23 has not appeared since March 9, 2026, seventy-one draws back, with 11 at sixty-one draws and 33 at fifty behind it.

Those are different measurements and they name different numbers. A ball can post a low count and still have turned up last week, and a ball with a perfectly ordinary count can be sitting on the longest absence in the game, which is exactly what is happening here.

The red Powerball keeps its own list

The red ball is a separate pool, one number from 1 to 26, drawn once per draw. Over a 300-draw window that is 300 slots across 26 numbers, so the baseline sits near 11.5 rather than 21.7 and the whole chart is compressed. A red ball three appearances above its share reads far more dramatically than a white ball three above its own.

Both pools sit on the Powerball frequency page, with the recent-window leaderboard on the Powerball hot and cold page.

Pick your own window

The counts above describe one 300-draw slice, and it shifts three times a week. On Odds Engine you can read Powerball frequency and hot and cold from the published draw record, set how far back you want to look, and put every count next to the date it was drawn. The cross-game hot and cold page lines all eight games up side by side.

Want the week's numbers in your inbox? Subscribe to the newsletter. Prefer them on your phone? Odds Engine is a lottery number-analysis app on Google Play, so the Powerball board travels with you. Now the next hot list you see comes with a baseline attached.

Frequently asked questions

What are the hot and cold Powerball numbers right now?: Over the last 300 Powerball draws, ball 28 leads with 35 appearances, followed by 52 at 34 and 64 at 32. The coldest are 68 at 11 appearances, 22 at 14 and 10 at 15. Each number's fair share across that window is about 21.7 appearances, so the leaders sit roughly 60 percent above it and the laggards near half of it.
How many draws should a Powerball hot and cold list cover?: It depends on the question. Twenty-five draws is only 125 ball-slots across 69 numbers, so almost every number lands once or twice and the ranking swings hard from week to week. A few hundred draws gives each number a fair share of about 21.7 appearances and a steadier picture, and longer windows flatten the spread further. It is worth checking the window before reading any hot list.
Which Powerball number has gone longest without being drawn?: Ball 23 has the longest current gap, last drawn on March 9, 2026, which is seventy-one draws ago, ahead of ball 11 at sixty-one draws and ball 33 at fifty. That is a separate measurement from the cold list, which ranks by total count rather than by time since the last appearance.