Wellington Couple Win $7 Million – First Powerball Millionaires Of 2025

It’s back to work for most of us this week after the Christmas and New Year break, but one Wellington couple’s commute yesterday morning was a little bit different to the rest of us.

The couple, who wish to remain anonymous, had seen in the news that someone in Wellington had won $7 million, but never thought it would be them.

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

It wasn’t until a couple of hours later when they were driving to work that they found out they were in fact the lucky people – Lotto NZ’s first multi-millionaires of 2025.

“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,” said the woman.

But she had an inkling there was a bit more to it.

“I thought the best thing to do was to log into the app and check, so I did and there it was, there were a lot of zeroes!”

The woman gasped and turned to her husband, who was driving, and said ‘it’s us! We’ve won $7 million.’

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

The pair safely pulled over to double check what they were seeing.

After a bit of discussion about whether they were still going to work, they decided to keep their day as normal as possible.

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

“In the afternoon I heard Grant Kereama on the radio talking about the $7 million Powerball win and it felt so strange knowing it was me he was talking about,” she said.

Later that evening the couple got home and celebrated their win over a bottle of champagne while discussing their future.

“We’re going to take some time to process the win, but we do have some ideas about what we’d like to do.

“First we’re going to set ourselves up for the future, then help our family, and later down the track we’d like to do some trips and we’re already adding some amazing places to our travel bucket list,” said the woman.

Notes:

• The winning $7 million Powerball First Division ticket was sold on MyLotto for the draw on Wednesday 8 January.
• The $7 million Powerball prize is made up of $6 million from Powerball First Division and $1 million from Lotto First Division.
• The winner would like to remain anonymous and does not wish to provide any further comment at this stage.
• This is the first Powerball First Division winner of 2025.
• In 2024 there were 23 Powerball winners across the motu.

Powerball wins in 2025

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