NZ’s first 2025 Lotto millionaires are Wellington couple

A Wellington couple were driving to work as normal when they found out they were 2025's first big Lotto winners.

• A Wellington couple are 2025’s first Lotto millionaires, bagging a $7m Powerball.
• They found out they had won while driving to work.
• Their win follows on from a big year of winners in 2024, including a family that won $44m.

New Zealand’s first Lotto millionaires for 2025 were driving to work when they found out they had bagged the $7 million prize.

The Wellington couple, who wish to remain anonymous, had earlier heard someone from the capital had won the major prize but never thought it could be them.

“I just thought to myself, ‘Wow, what lucky people,’” said the woman.

But then a couple of hours later, while driving to work, they found out they were 2025’s first big winners.

“I saw an email from MyLotto Customer Support saying we’d won a prize. My husband thought it was spam and didn’t believe it,” the woman said.

Logging in to her Lotto account to check the results, she couldn’t believe how many “zeroes” she saw.

“He said he still didn’t believe it. It shocked the heck out of us.”

After pulling up to take it all in, they had a chat about how to proceed with the rest of their day and to ask whether they should keep on driving to work.

“I did go to work, but I was certainly a bit preoccupied, and I couldn’t stop shaking for a good few hours,” the woman said.

In the afternoon, she said she heard the radio hosts talking about the $7m win.

“It felt so strange knowing it was me he was talking about,” she said.

In the evening, the couple made it home to celebrate with a bottle of Champagne.

She said they’re going to take time to work out what they’d like to do but they do already have some ideas.

“First we’re going to set ourselves up for the future, then help our family,” she said.

“Later down the track we’d like to do some trips and we’re already adding some amazing places to our travel bucket list.”

The early Powerball win in 2025 follows on from a series of big wins in 2024.

In August last year, a single Auckland ticket bought by a family won Powerball’s $44 million jackpot — equalling the biggest single-winner in Lotto history in New Zealand.

Their total prize for the ticket bought on MyLotto was $44,066,667, and it included a one-fifteenth share of the Division One prize.

The son of the parents who bought the winning ticket said his family went out to a restaurant to celebrate the win and could hear other diners talking about the Powerball draw.

“It was surreal, we could hear people in the restaurant talking about the $44m prize, and I can remember saying in a hushed voice, ‘If only they knew’,” he said at the time.

His parents also said that — as well as not having a heart attack — their “best piece of advice” to any future winner is to remember to eat and sleep in the first two weeks.

“It’s the little things like that that are easy to forget in the early days after a big win.”

Their win followed on from a record $50 million Powerball jackpot in June that was split between seven people — each claiming $7.1 million.

While two of those winners had claimed their share of the first prize by the next day, it took seven weeks for the final winner to come forward and collect their portion of the winnings.

Other big winners from last year included a $30.16m Wellington winner in April, a $17.25m Canterbury winner in January and a $12.3m Otago winner in March.