The big EuroMillions prizes continue to arouse enormous curiosity among the Portuguese, especially when it comes to the records broken over the years. The theme of the biggest jackpots ever awarded in Portugal remains current, because it feeds the collective imagination about the possibility of changing lives in a single draw. In this article, we will tell you about the biggest Euromillions prize ever awarded in Portugal.
The biggest prize ever awarded in Portugal by Euromillions was won on June 25, 2024, in a contest that awarded around 213.9 million euros to a single bettor. The ticket was registered in Ramalde, Porto, and only had a simple bet worth 2.50 euros. This totalist has since become the biggest winner ever in the country, surpassing all previous records, according to the lottery website EuroMillions.
This jackpot, which corresponds to the gross value, is the officially announced amount, although in practice the winner receives less due to Portuguese tax legislation.
Taxes in Portugal
In Portugal, all state social game prizes exceeding 5,000 euros are subject to stamp duty at a rate of 20%. However, the amounts that are subject to these taxes are only the installments that exceed this amount, which means that this amount (5,000 euros) is exempt from taxes. For example, if a bettor wins a prize of 6,000 euros, only 1,000 euros will be subject to tax.
Applying this rate to the biggest jackpot ever, the net amount received by the totalist was around 171 million euros, making him the wealthiest euromillionaire ever in the country. It therefore paid around 42.8 million euros to the State.
Before this absolute record, the biggest Portuguese prize had been awarded in 2014, when a bettor from Castelo Branco won 190 million euros, a value that was then the maximum limit allowed by the game. In 2015, another relevant milestone was registered in Coimbra, with a prize of 163.5 million euros which became known as the “Eiras jackpot”, according to RTP.
Portugal: a ‘lucky’ country
Over the last two decades, Portugal has stood out among the participating countries, consistently appearing in the group with the most first prizes awarded. Despite this, to date, no Portuguese bettor has yet managed to reach the current maximum ceiling of 250 million euros, an amount that Euromillions started to allow in exceptionally accumulated draws.
Record remains
The record thus remains firmly associated with that report validated in Porto, whose gross value far exceeded previous standards and placed Portugal in the spotlight in the European gaming panorama.
In the general panorama, the trend has been pointing to increasingly higher jackpots, as a result of periodic updates to the Euromillions rules that allow for higher accumulations. However, none of these increases changed the fact that the largest prize ever awarded in Portugal remains, as indicated by , that of June 2024.
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