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The floor is law. The rest is a survey.
In six years the minimum wage in women's WorldTour cycling went from €15,000 to €38,000. It binds fourteen teams. Below them, one division has a minimum of €22,000, the next has none at all, and the organisation that measured what those riders actually earn has told its members it may have to close.
18 September 2026 · figures frozen at publication · every figure below was read from the document it came from, and where we could not open the document we say so
This site estimates what men's WorldTour riders are paid. People keep asking for the women's equivalent, and the honest answer is that it cannot be built the same way — not yet, and possibly not ever on the same terms. This piece is why. It is also, as far as we can establish, the first time the published record on women's cycling pay has been assembled in one place.
The floor that rose
Article 2.13.177 of the UCI road regulations is short and unambiguous: “The riders of the UCI Women's WorldTeams are entitled to a fixed minimum salary.” The amounts sit in a table inside the regulation, split between riders in their first professional years and everyone else, with the self-employed figure set at exactly 164% of the employed one — most riders in this sport are contractors, so the right-hand column is the one that usually applies.
| Season | Employed | Self-employed | Neo-pro, employed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | €15,000 | €24,600 | — | first season of the category |
| 2021 | €20,000 | €32,800 | — | |
| 2022 | €27,500 | €45,100 | — | |
| 2023 | €32,102 | €52,647 | €26,849 | parity with the men's ProTeam minimum |
| 2024 | €35,000 | €57,400 | €29,270 | |
| 2025 | €38,000 | €62,320 | €31,768 | |
| 2026 | €38,000 | €62,320 | €31,768 | frozen at 2025 levels |
2020–2022 from the UCI's own press release; 2023–2025 read from the regulation's table; 2026 frozen at 2025 levels. The regulation's early rows carry a year label that is off by one against the press release, so we use the press release for those three seasons.
The 2023 row is the one the UCI wanted noticed. The regulation says it plainly: “From the 2023 season onwards, the minimum salary will correspond to the minimum salary defined for the UCI ProTeams.” The women's floor was legislated up to meet the men's second division, and in 2023 it did.
What nobody seems to have written down is that parity did not hold — and that it broke in the women's favour. From 2024 the UCI kept the women's amounts on its own fixed ladder, €35,000 then €38,000, while the men's ProTeam minimum moved on the CPA–AIGCP joint agreement's index to €35,392. The Women's WorldTeam minimum has sat above the men's ProTeam minimum since 2024, by roughly €2,600 in 2025 and 2026. That is our own comparison of two published tables rather than a claim either body makes, and we would welcome a correction if we have read it wrong.
Note also what the floor is not. The men's WorldTeam minimum for 2026 is €44,150 employed and €72,404 self-employed. The women's top division is pegged to the men's second division, and always has been.
Who the floor actually binds
Fourteen teams. That is the whole reach of the regulation above.
Below it sits the UCI Women's ProTeam category, created for 2025 — around 7 teams and 90 riders — with a minimum of €20,000 in 2025, €22,000 in 2026 and €24,000 scheduled for 2027.
Below that, nothing. The registration guidance for UCI Women's Continental Teams states it as a note, in five words: “Wages are not required for UCI Women's Continental Teams.” A contract must spell out “wages and/or repayment of expenses” — the and/or is doing the work. The only financial obligation on the team is a bank guarantee of €20,000 or 15% of combined salaries, whichever is higher, which exists to cover wages that go unpaid rather than to require that any be promised.
The only complete picture ever published
Women's cycling has been surveyed once a year since 2017 by The Cyclists' Alliance, a riders' union founded in 2017 precisely because the existing one did not represent women. Eight editions exist. Exactly one of them published a full income distribution — 2022, 124 respondents. This is it, and as far as we can find it is the only complete picture of what women in this sport earn that has ever been made public.
| Annual income | Share of riders |
|---|---|
| no salary at all | 23% |
| under €5,000 | 11% |
| €5,000–10,000 | 10% |
| €10,000–15,000 | 4% |
| €15,000–20,000 | 2% |
| €20,000–30,000 | 13% |
| €30,000–40,000 | 3% |
| €40,000–50,000 | 9% |
| €50,000–60,000 | 4% |
| €60,000–100,000 | 13% |
| over €100,000 | 6% |
The Cyclists' Alliance 2022 Annual Rider Survey, n=124, self-reported, anonymous option. Bands as printed; they sum to 98% rather than 100% because each is rounded. The survey covers the whole peloton, not the top division — in 2023, when the composition was published, 41% of respondents rode for a WorldTour team and 53% for a Continental one.
Read the top row first. In 2022, 23% of respondents had no salary at all — not a low salary, none. Another 21% were under €10,000. Against that, 13% were between €60,000 and €100,000 and 6% above €100,000. Two populations, one peloton, and almost nobody between €30,000 and €40,000 where the WorldTour minimum then sat.
The same survey found 50% of riders on one-year contracts and only 10% on deals of three years or more. On the men's side, where this site can measure it directly, a multi-year deal is the norm and the length of it is the single biggest determinant of what a rider is paid — because the price is set on signing day and then holds. A peloton on annual contracts is a peloton repriced every autumn.
The headline improved. The gap widened.
Between 2023 and 2024 the share of riders reporting no salary fell from 25% to 15%. That looks like the story, and it is not.
| 2023 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|
| Respondents | 140 | 100 |
| No salary — whole sample | 25% | 15% |
| No salary — outside the WorldTour | 41% | 27% |
| Under €10,000 — whole sample | — | 15% |
| Under €10,000 — outside the WorldTour | — | 55% |
| €20,000 or less — whole sample | — | 35% |
| €20,000 or less — outside the WorldTour | — | 64% |
The Cyclists' Alliance annual rider surveys, 2023 and 2024, both read from the published decks.
The 2024 sample was 45% WorldTour riders. When a survey of the whole peloton draws more of its answers from the best-paid division, its average improves without anything changing for anyone. The division-split rows are the honest series, and they say something else: in 2024, 55% of riders outside the WorldTour earned under €10,000, against 15% of the sample as a whole.
The 2025 edition, with 202 riders from 43 teams, reports both halves of this at once: 84% of Continental riders earn under €20,000 a year, while over 75% of WorldTour and ProTeam riders now hold multi-year contracts. Security at the top, subsistence below it, and the two moving apart.
The money above them
The UCI presented divisional budget figures at its WorldTour seminar in December 2025. They set the ceiling on everything above.
| Women | Men | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Combined WorldTeam budgets, 2026 | €80m | €620–630m | 12.8% |
| Average team budget | €5.7m | €33m | 17.3% |
| Median team budget | €5.7m | €28m | 20.4% |
| Average ProTeam budget | €1.9m | €9.4m | 20.2% |
UCI figures presented at the WorldTour seminar, December 2025, published by Cycling Weekly on 10 June 2026. The women's total rose from €70m in 2025. The same article writes “15 Women's World Teams” while €80m at an average of €5.7m implies fourteen, and the 2026 licence list has fourteen — we report the money and leave the count alone.
One figure from the same disclosure is worth holding onto: of the 1,182 professional riders it counts, men and women together, WorldTeam and ProTeam, only 60-70 earn more than €1m.
One team, and only one, has a budget on the record
Divisional totals are published. Team budgets are not — with a single exception. On 2 August 2026 Stéphane Pallez, chief executive of FDJ United, told Sport Business Club: “Le budget de l'équipe féminine, c'est 7 millions d'euros. Celui d'une équipe dans le Tour masculin se situe entre 20 à 60 millions.” The women's team's budget is €7 million; a men's Tour team is between €20m and €60m.
Team manager Stephen Delcourt has given the trajectory behind it in his own words: “Notre budget est passé de 500 k€ en 2017 à 1 m€ en 2020 et 5 m€ en 2024.” From half a million to seven million in nine years, in the one team that talks about money.
And then the warning that applies to every number on this page. Three days after Pallez said €7m, Cyclingnews reported the same team, the same season, as “understood to have a budget of around €5 million”. Both can be honest: there is no agreed definition of what a cycling team's budget includes — sponsor services in kind, equipment, shared staff with a men's programme. When the one team that publishes a figure can be reported two ways in the same week, a per-team estimate for the other thirteen is not a measurement.
For those thirteen there is almost nothing. Erwin Janssen of SD Worx-Protime gave a rank rather than a number in April 2026: “Eerst zaten wij in de top-2 qua budget, nu zijn we de nummer vier met een behoorlijk gat naar de eerste twee.” Movistar runs its women's squad through a separate registered company, Abarca Women Sports, whose filed accounts for 2019 show a turnover of €1.2m and personnel costs of €734,500 — the only figures in this sport that come from an audited filing rather than an interview, and seven years old. Uno-X's cycling company files openly in Norway, but one company carries the men's team, the women's team and the development squad together, so it bounds the women's budget without measuring it.
Why this site has no women's salary database
The model behind the rest of this site works because there is something to check it against. Twenty-eight men's WorldTour salaries have been printed by named publications; we remove each one, ask the model to reproduce it blind, and publish the error — median 24.6%. Without those anchors the model would be an opinion with decimal places.
On the women's side they barely exist. 11 women have ever had a specific salary figure printed. 10 of them come from a single article, and 6 of those 10 share one sentence in it — six riders “all thought to earn close to €500,000”. That is one claim about six people, not six observations. Every figure is hedged: thought to be, understood to, estimated. Not one is a confirmed disclosure, and we could not find a single woman who has stated her own salary on the record, active or retired.
One case is different in kind, and it is worth naming. Paula Blasi signed for UAE Team ADQ for 2025 on a reported €40,000 — roughly the WorldTour minimum. Her contract carried a €100,000 release clause, reported by four outlets in May 2026 and then exercised in June when Movistar paid it. A release clause that someone actually paid is a contract term, not an estimate, and it is the single hardest number in women's cycling. Her Movistar deal from 2027 is reported at just under a million.
Eleven hedged estimates from one writer could be fitted. They could not be validated: removing one and reproducing it would measure how well we predict that writer, not what anyone earns. A model built that way would print a number for every rider and look exactly as authoritative as this site's men's pages while being worth nothing.
So the rules we will hold ourselves to, written down here so they can be held against us:
- No per-rider salary figures below WorldTour level. Continental has no mandated minimum and 84% of its riders earn under €20,000. An estimate attached to a name down there is not a market observation, it is a public statement about one woman's household income, and we are not going to make it on this evidence.
- Ranges, not point estimates, wherever we publish at rider level at all. A single number implies a precision this data cannot support.
- Team and division level first. The €80m total and the €5.7m average are real, official and binding: any team-level estimate has to sum to them. That is a tighter constraint than anything available on the men's side, and it is where the honest work is.
- Distribution over individuals. The question worth answering here is not what Demi Vollering earns. It is what the median woman in this sport earns, and whether the floor the UCI legislated reaches her.
The counting may stop
There is no 2026 survey. The launch window in May passed and the publication window in August and September has now passed too. In earlier years both were reliable.
On 4 March 2026 The Cyclists' Alliance published a notice headed Urgent Funding Crisis: “Without immediate financial support, The Cyclists' Alliance will be forced to cease operations.” On 16 September, two days before this piece, it advertised for an Advocacy and Communication Lead whose listed duties include “leading and evolving TCA's annual Rider Survey.” So the survey is meant to continue. Right now nobody is running it.
Everything above about the bottom of this sport — the 23% with no salary, the 55% under €10,000 outside the WorldTour, the 84% of Continental riders under €20,000 — comes from that one voluntary survey, with between 100 and 202 respondents, no published response rate, and no stated share of the peloton. It is thin evidence. It is also the only evidence there is, and it is the part of the sport the regulations do not reach. If it stops, the floor stays law and the rest stops being counted at all.
Sources, and what we could not read. UCI minimum salaries: UCI Cycling Regulations Part 2, article 2.13.177 (2023–2026 figures) and the UCI press release of July 2021 (2020–2022 figures). Women's Continental: UCI team registration guidance as published by USA Cycling. Budgets: UCI WorldTour seminar figures, December 2025, via Cycling Weekly, 10 June 2026. Survey data: The Cyclists' Alliance annual rider surveys — the 2022, 2023 and 2024 decks read directly, the 2025 figures taken from TCA's own published release. The 2025, 2021 and 2020 survey PDFs are disallowed to automated readers by the site's robots file, and we did not go around it. That is why no income-band percentages for 2025 appear above, although several outlets have published them from the deck: we do not restate a figure we could not open. Men's minimum salaries are set by the CPA–AIGCP joint agreement rather than by the UCI, which is why the two ladders drift. Know a figure we have wrong, or have the 2025 deck? The correction form is the most useful thing you can send us.