Odds of 50 random events happening to you

The U.S. Weather Service places a person's odds of being struck by lightning in a given year at 1 in 1,222,000 people, based on population. That probability climbs significantly when looking at the odds of being struck by lightning in a lifetime—1 in 15,300—averaging that lifetime to be 80 years.

The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina featured about 2,900 athletes across 116 medal events, with 740 medals handed out in total across individual and team events. That works out to roughly one medal for every four athletes (though some stars took home several, so the share of athletes who reached the podium is a bit lower). When expanding to include the general populace, the odds dwindle substantially—an everyday person with eyes on the gold has a 1 in 662,000 chance of reaching an Olympic podium.

Take a deep breath and board that plane with confidence. Commercial aviation remains extraordinarily safe, and the long-term trend is unmistakably in your favor. In 2025, there were 38.7 million flights worldwide and only eight fatal accidents, or roughly one for every 4.8 million flights. Over the last five years, the rate has averaged one fatal accident for every 5.6 million flights, compared to one for every 3.5 million flights a decade earlier.

Total onboard fatalities in 2025 came to 394, up from 244 in 2024. Two crashes accounted for more than 77% of those deaths: Air India Flight 171 in June and PSA Airlines Flight 5342, which collided with an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., in January. Your overall odds of dying in a commercial plane crash, based on population and average flying rates, remain around 1 in 11 million.

You're setting up a nursery and buying a crib, but should you build it for two? In 2024, there were 30.1 twin births for every 1,000 births in the U.S. (about 1 in 33), according to the CDC, an 11% drop from 2014. Identical twins are rarer, occurring in roughly 1 in every 250 natural pregnancies. The odds of having twins increase for older mothers and those receiving fertility treatments. Though there is a gene that makes women more likely to have fraternal twins, men who inherit it are no more likely to have twins in the family, and it doesn't increase the chance of having identical twins.

Tornadoes killed 67 people in the U.S. in 2025, according to the National Weather Service. With a population of roughly 340 million, that puts the odds of dying in a tornado at about 1 in 5 million in a given year. Those odds go up if you're in a mobile home, live in frequent paths of these storms, or take undue risks when a tornado is nearby.

If you're hoping to win the lottery, you're either very lucky or bad at math. Your odds of winning the lottery depend on which game you're playing and, for some games, how many other people are playing. Generally speaking, your odds of winning a prize in Powerball are 1 in 24.87. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million. Your chances are about the same for winning the Mega Millions jackpot, which improved slightly to 1 in 290.5 million after the game's April 2025 overhaul. Overall odds of winning any Mega Millions prize are 1 in 23.

More than 350,000 cardiac arrests happen outside of hospitals in the U.S. each year, and only about 9% of patients treated by EMS survive to hospital discharge. But the American Heart Association says immediate CPR can double or triple a person's chance of survival, and only about 40% of victims receive CPR from a bystander. Nearly 3 in 4 of these emergencies (73%) occur in people's homes, making it helpful for all family members, even children with the requisite physical strength, to learn how to administer CPR.

Meteorites may be at the heart of many science fiction and disaster films, but when it comes down to real science, Earth is a big planet covered by large, uninhabited areas. Considering the empty versus occupied planetary surface area, you have pretty low-if-wide-ranging odds—between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 250,000, according to one estimate—of being killed by a meteorite impact.

That said, a 2016 death in India was blamed on a meteorite impact (NASA said it was "unlikely something from space"), and the famous 9-pound "Hodges meteorite" in 1954 made direct contact with Ann Hodges' thigh as she napped on her living room couch.

This genetic plant quirk brings the luck of the Irish to just 1 in every 10,000 clovers, says Dr. John Frett, professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Delaware.

That doesn't mean you won't find one, though: The Guinness World Record for the most four-leaf clovers collected in a single hour goes to Gabriella Gerhardt of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, who, on Sept. 21, 2019, gathered 451.

Paying taxes is stressful enough without worrying about getting audited. For individual returns filed for tax year 2021 (the most recent year with near-final figures), the audit rate was about 0.3%, or roughly 1 in 330, according to the agency's 2025 Data Book.

That number masks big swings by income: taxpayers earning between $200,000 and $500,000 faced audit rates of about 0.2%, while those with income above $10 million were audited at a rate of around 6.6%. The IRS has also made a public commitment not to increase audit rates for individuals earning under $400,000, instead directing new enforcement resources toward high-income filers, large corporations, and complex partnerships — a policy outlined in the Treasury Directive following the Inflation Reduction Act. Enforcement capacity has shrunk since then, however: the IRS workforce fell from about 99,600 to roughly 81,000 employees between September 2024 and September 2025.

It's a good time to be a bowler, as more advanced equipment has helped people significantly improve at the sport. The American Bowling Congress recorded the number of perfect games rising from 905 in 1968 to 34,470 in 1998. Even with the changes, the odds of a professional player bowling a perfect game are about 460 to 1, while those for a casual player stand at 11,500 to 1.

Technological advances have more than doubled human life expectancy worldwide in the last century—and in 2024, an estimated 101,000 centenarians were living in the United States. Women have much higher odds of reaching this feat than men, as women make up more than 80% of centenarians.

But don't go planning your 100th birthday party quite yet—your odds fluctuate by a host of factors, not the least of which being that those who are youngest now have a significantly higher chance of living to 100 than the rest of us. The centenarian population is projected to more than quadruple to about 422,000 by 2054.

Though it won't guarantee college admission, it certainly doesn't hurt to get a perfect score on the SAT. But few manage such a feat: Only 504 of the 1,698,521 students who took the SAT in 2015—0.03%—got every point.

Things didn't get any easier after the test was redesigned in 2016, or after it went fully digital in 2024. Test administrators no longer release precise numbers, but suffice it to say that in the class of 2025, just 7% of the roughly 2 million test-takers scored between 1400 and 1600, with 1600 representing a perfect score.

Car theft had been declining for decades, then surged during the pandemic years, but has recently dropped sharply. There were around 850,708 car thefts in 2024, representing a 17% decrease from 2023—the largest annual decrease in 40 years. That marked a return to pre-pandemic levels after thefts peaked at over 1 million in 2022 and 2023. The slide continued in 2025, when thefts fell another 23% to 659,880, the lowest level in decades.

While approval ratings jump up and down, there's usually better than a 90% chance a congressional representative running for reelection will be successful. Though the figure dipped to about 85% in 2010, it has rarely gone below 90% since 1974. The reelection rate to Congress in 2024 was 97% nationally, matching the 2022 rate.

Listeria, salmonella, E. coli are just a few organisms capable of causing food poisoning. One in 6 Americans will experience food poisoning in a year, according to FoodSafety.gov. Of the 48 million who become ill, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. Foods that are eaten raw and difficult to clean are especially risky.

Harvard has become a near-impossible admission for most applicants. It drew 55,104 applications for the Class of 2030, a 15% jump that pushed its estimated acceptance rate down to about 3.7%, according to The Harvard Crimson. That's down from a Class of 2029 acceptance rate of 4.2%, the year after the school reinstated mandatory SAT/ACT testing and its applicant pool shrank from 54,008 to 47,893.

The overall rate has stayed below 5% for nine consecutive years. Early applicants continue to fare better, with estimated acceptance rates roughly double the regular decision rate — though Harvard no longer publicly releases early-round figures separately.

Be careful when you address an envelope or a parcel. Of the 88 million lost items the U.S. Postal Service's Mail Recovery Center received in 2014, it was only able to return 2.5 million. That's less than 3%.

While it's impossible to know how many items actually get lost in the mail, averages stand between 3% and 4.7%. Some postal centers host online auctions to sell off unclaimed items.

Many people sign up for bone marrow registries, but because you need an actual match with a patient to donate, not everyone ends up donating bone marrow. The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP, formerly known as Be The Match) reports the likelihood of becoming a donor at the time of joining a registry is just 1 in 430. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Health Resources and Services Administration says only 30% of people who need a bone marrow transplant have a relative who matches them.

Films like "Jaws" and "Sharknado" have primed people to fear shark attacks, but in reality, it's very unlikely to happen. The odds of being killed by a shark are commonly estimated at about 1 in 3.7 million. In 2025, the Florida Museum's International Shark Attack File confirmed 65 unprovoked shark bites worldwide, nine of them fatal. Just one of the 25 unprovoked bites in the U.S. was deadly.

Surfers are most likely to encounter sharks since the best places for catching a wave are also where sharks like to gather.

The Social Security Administration gathers and analyzes name data each year, offering tremendous insight into past and present periods. Emma and Jacob rank as the top two most popular baby names of the 21st century, according to SSA data from 2000 to 2019, released in September 2020. Utilizing the Baby Name Uniqueness Analyzer, we found the odds of being named Emma (for girls) or Jacob (for boys) in 2021 stood at 1 in 115 girls and 1 in 222 boys, respectively. By 2025, Emma ranked No. 3 among girls' names with 12,754 babies, while Jacob had slipped to No. 43 for boys, with 6,152.

Half of all adults older than 75 have disabling hearing loss, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders reports. It's not just senior citizens, either: 14% of adults ages 20 to 69 have trouble hearing the frequencies of human voices. Two to three of every 1,000 American children are born with documented hearing loss.

If you always dreamed of being an astronaut when you grew up, the odds haven't gotten any easier. In 2024, NASA received more than 8,000 applications for its latest astronaut class — and selected just 10 candidates. That's an acceptance rate of about 0.125%, making the odds far more daunting than getting into Harvard.

The 2025 class — the agency's 24th — will spend two years in training before becoming eligible for missions to the International Space Station, the Moon, and eventually Mars.

Your odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash stand statistically higher than most causes of death, at 1 in 101. In 2025, an estimated 36,640 people died in traffic crashes, a decrease of about 6.7% from 39,254 in 2024. That brings roadway deaths back to pre-pandemic levels, and the 2025 fatality rate of 1.10 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled is the second-lowest on record.

College completion rates vary by school, gender, geography, and a host of other factors. Women are more likely to finish their degrees than men; and at highly selective institutions, more students are likely to finish on time. On average, data show that as many as 6 in 10 students who enroll at two-year community colleges and for-profit, four-year schools will not graduate within six years. Nationally, 61.1% of students who started college in fall 2019 earned a degree or certificate within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, with full-time students finishing at nearly twice the rate of part-time students (67.1% vs. 34.1%).

Those of us with insurance buy it with the hope of never having to use it. But when it comes to long-term care insurance, few people invest in the service despite 58% of women and 47% of men 65 and older will need long-term care in their lifetimes. Just 2.3% of Americans actually have insurance to cover that long-term care, with a 50% chance that a 60-year-old who buys a policy will use it sometime before death.

While a text-focused culture like the U.S. may appear to take literacy for granted, estimates suggest 43 million adults in the U.S., or about 1 in 5, have low literacy skills. Newer data suggests the problem is growing: In 2023, 28% of working-age U.S. adults scored at the lowest literacy level (Level 1 or below) on an international skills assessment, up from 19% in 2017. Groups like the American Library Association offer free adult literacy classes for those looking for resources.

The odds you can use both hands equally for any task are low: Readers Digest reports that only 1 in every 100 people is ambidextrous. Some people may learn to use their nondominant hand out of convenience or necessity, but that's not the same thing.

Better hurricane-prediction systems have helped reduce the number of fatalities from storms—most of the nation's deadliest hurricane seasons happened more than 50 years ago. A 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas, killed around 8,000 people. The death toll from 2017's hurricanes in Puerto Rico was updated to 2,975 nearly a year after the storms made landfall. Generally speaking, your odds of dying in a hurricane are 1 in 62,288.

The odds of cracking open an egg with a double yolk are about 1 in 1,000, and often come from younger hens. If you crack an egg every day, you're only likely to get a double yolk once every three years. Because the universe can be truly random, you could also end up with an entire carton of double-yolk eggs—like one British man did in 2016.

There were an estimated 344,600 residential building fires in the U.S. in 2023, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. The odds of your home burning down in a fire are around 1 in 3,000; residential fires killed 2,890 Americans in 2023.

Being injured or killed by unstable furniture falling over is rare: A 2024 Consumer Product Safety Commission report counted 217 deaths from TVs, furniture, and appliances tipping over between January 2013 and July 2023, and 155 of them were children. Most tip-over accidents involve bookshelves, dressers, TVs, and TV stands. Throughout your lifetime, the odds of you being so much as knocked over by falling furniture is 1 in 5,508.

Though plenty of kids dream of becoming pro athletes, there's simply not enough room on the proverbial court for the record 8.27 million high school athletes competing across the country. Only about 550,000 (roughly 7%) end up on a National Collegiate Athletic Association team in college. From there, the number who move on to pro teams or the Olympics is even smaller: 1% of NCAA men's basketball players and 0.8% of women's basketball players were drafted into major U.S. pro leagues in 2024.

Winning the lottery isn't in the cards for most people, but that doesn't mean your odds of becoming wealthy are insurmountable. Each of us has between a 6.4% and 22.3% chance of becoming a millionaire, depending on many factors including education level, wealth, race, and age. More education improves chances all around, but race plays the most significant factor, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found.

Bees might seem like harmless, fuzzy pollinators, but alongside wasps and hornets, they are responsible for nearly 60 deaths a year and hundreds of thousands of emergency room visits. Your lifetime odds of dying from one of these stinging insects are 1 in 42,626, according to the National Safety Council.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, became an international story in 2015 after news broke that city officials had known and done nothing about lead pipes contaminating the city's water, poisoning thousands of children. But they're not the only ones suffering the developmental effects of lead poisoning: As many as 500,000 American children younger than 6 have elevated amounts of lead in their systems.

The Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage was seen as a watershed moment in the movement for equality for LGBTQ+ Americans. In the years since, more people openly identify as LGBTQ+: about 9% of American adults in 2025, according to Gallup surveys, essentially unchanged from 9.3% in 2024. That's more than double the 3.5% Gallup recorded when it first measured LGBTQ+ identification in 2012, and nearly 1 in 4 Gen Z adults now identify as LGBTQ+.

It seems like you should have a 1 in 365—or 366 on a leap year—chance of dying on any particular day of the year. An economist at the University of Chicago discovered this isn't the case. You're 6.7% more likely to die on your birthday, a rate that increases for young people or when birthdays fall on weekends.

Being born with extra fingers and toes results from a medical condition known as polydactyly, which affects 1 in every 500 to 1,000 births in the United States. But don't worry if it happens to you or your child, as most cases are easily fixed with surgery. People usually end up with one extra finger or toe, but the world record is held by a child born in 2010 in India with 14 fingers and 20 toes.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens, but mass shootings account for a relatively small fraction of gun deaths. The average American has a 1 in 11,125 chance of dying in a mass shooting over the course of their life.

Shiny Pokemon are no different than normal Pokemon, except they have a different color scheme and are incredibly rare. They appeared in the video game franchise with Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver, where players had a 1 in 8,192 chance of finding one. The Pokemon game for Nintendo Switch eases those odds to 1 in 341 after players catch a certain number of a specific species, or 1 in 4,096 without the combo.

No birth control is 100% effective, but some are more successful at preventing pregnancy than others. Latex condoms fail 13% of the time, prescription birth control pills fail 7% of the time, and implants like intrauterine devices (IUDs) fail 0.1-0.8% of the time. The right choice depends on the person in question and should always be discussed with your doctor.

Catching a foul ball during a professional baseball game is any fan's dream. The odds of it happening aren't too terrible, depending on obvious factors like where you're sitting and the pitcher-batter matchup. All in all, there's around a 1 in 835 chance of snagging a ball while rooting for your team. The odds of catching two in a row are closer to 1 in 1 billion.

The best hand in poker, a royal flush consists of a 10, jack, queen, king, and ace of the same suit in your hand. There's only a 0.00015% chance of being dealt this and only four possibilities—one of each suit—out of 2.6 million possible poker hands in a normal five-card game.

People born on Feb. 29, the extra day added to the calendar every four years to keep calendars matching up with the rotation of the sun, are the subject of fascination and constant jokes about how they only have a birthday every four years. The chances of any person being born on that day are 1 in 1,461, the number of days in four years plus one.

Getting your wisdom teeth removed has become an adolescent rite of passage, with about 10 million of them removed every year. Despite debates over the necessity of having surgery before the teeth cause problems, around 85% of people who have wisdom teeth—some people are born without them—still get them removed.

There may be about a 45% chance of there being alien life, according to one study released in 2020 that estimated the odds of other-planetary life and intelligence. The findings were based on a series of inferences adding up to what's called Bayesian analysis.

You may also like: States with the most UFO sightings

Due dates are an inexact science, usually calculated based on a rule devised in the 19th century. Only around 4% of babies are born on their due dates, while 80% are born sometime in the two weeks before or after. Babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy are considered premature and can suffer from physical disability or developmental delays. An estimated 13.4 million babies were born prematurely in 2020, or more than 1 in 10 worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

For nearly a decade, Warren Buffett ran a bracket challenge for Berkshire Hathaway employees, offering $1 million to anyone who could survive a gauntlet of first-round predictions. No one won — until 2025, when Buffett relaxed the rules enough that an employee from subsidiary FlightSafety International finally claimed the prize, correctly picking 31 of 32 first-round games.

The original threshold had been a perfect bracket, odds of which the NCAA estimates at 1 in 9.2 quintillion — a number that makes the lottery look like a sure thing. Buffett has since stepped down as Berkshire CEO, but the contest is expected to continue.

This would be the probability that started it all, but what are the chances of any one human existing at all? While they're not infinitely small, the odds are not stacked in your favor. Your parents had to meet, you had to be conceived from a specific sperm and egg, you had to be born, and your ancestors had to do the same thing for generations before you or your parents were born.

After all that, you had around a 1 in 10 to the power of 2,685,000 chance, but if you're reading this, you beat those tough odds, so congratulations are in order.