How the salary estimates are made

No team publishes what it pays its riders. This site estimates it from three public things — team budgets, results, and the handful of salaries that get reported — with one method applied to everyone, published in full so it can be argued with. Model v0.9 (22 Sep 2026).

The short version

1. A salary is set when the contract is signed, not each January. So every rider is priced on the season the deal was announced and on his results up to that point — not on this year's form. Roglič is paid on 2023, Seixas on 2024, Adam Yates on 2025. Announcement dates come from 643 press reports, listed on each rider page; where no report exists we infer the year from his run at the team and his contract end. Some reports give a duration (“a two-year deal”) and no end year: such a report is used when a signing was announced at most one season before the rider’s current run at the team began, or an extension was announced during it, and the contract end is no more than five seasons after the report. Otherwise the year is inferred, as above.
2. Every job has a pay band. A team is a pyramid, and each step of it has a going rate — from the leader the whole team rides for down to the tempo domestique. Our bands come from what agents and journalists have published about the market (Daniel Benson's 2025 breakdown, Cyclingnews' 2025–26 reporting, UCI aggregates) and are scaled by the team's budget: the same job pays less at a €20M team than at a €60M one, and the gap is wide for leaders and narrow for domestiques, because a domestique's job costs roughly the same everywhere.
3. Results place him inside the band. Where a rider sits between the floor and ceiling of his band comes from his points, wins and podiums in the two seasons up to signing, plus his age. A run of wins pushes him to the top of the band; a promising junior is placed in the upper half of the neo-pro band.
4. Reported salaries are fixed. 28 riders have a base salary published by the press. Those numbers are used as they are, never estimated, and every figure we have found — including the ones that contradict each other — is shown with its link on the rider's page.
5. The team's books are a check, not the formula. If a team's bands add up to more than 15% away from its estimated wage bill (budget × the rider-wage share), the unreported riders are scaled back to that edge and the rider page says so. Teams that pay below their band — Ineos is the clearest case — show up as exactly that.

The pay bands

Bands are for a mid-sized WorldTeam (about €45M) and are multiplied by (budget ÷ 45)0.6, capped at 0.65–1.15. That multiplier applies in full to leaders, at 0.6 power to key domestiques and at 0.35 power to the rest of the squad.

Every rider also has a floor — what a roster place actually costs — scaled by team budget: €50k under 23 (the UCI neo-pro minimum is €35,721 employed / €58,582 self-employed), €80k on a second contract, €120k for an experienced domestique, €160k for an established pro with 1,500+ career points. On UAE that last floor is €213k, on Uno-X €123k.

Market value — a second, different number

Each rider page also carries a market value for 2026: the same machinery run on today's results and today's place in the team, ignoring what he actually signed. It answers a different question — not "what is he paid" but "what would this job cost now". The gap between the two is the interesting part: Paul Seixas is on a neo-pro deal signed at 17 and worth many times it; a leader in decline is the reverse. Neither number includes bonuses, image rights or personal sponsors.

What earlier versions did

Versions up to v0.4 split each team's wage pool in proportion to a points-based value score. That priced a Grand Tour domestique who never scores near the minimum and, worse, repriced everyone every January as if contracts were renegotiated annually. The tier system (v0.6) and these pay bands (v0.7) replace it. The season-by-season estimates for 2021–2025 still use the older machinery.

Calibration against what the UCI publishes

What the estimate is and isn't

• It is a base salary for the 2026 season in euros, gross. It excludes bonuses (a Grand Tour stage is typically €20–100k, a Monument €50–500k), prize money, image rights and personal sponsors. For a star, total income can be 30–50% above base.
• How wrong is a single figure? We measured it: dropping each reported salary and letting the model guess it gives a median error of 25.0% on the 28 riders we can test, with 4 misses over 50% and no systematic bias. Details, rider by rider, on the validation page. The range on each rider page is the pay band for his job at his team, not a flat error bar; that test only covers the top of the peloton, so for a mid-table rider the honest answer is that we cannot measure the error yet. The method is much better at the shape of a team's wage bill than at any individual inside it.
• Salaries are set when the contract is signed, not each January. A rider is paid for what he had done before he signed and for what the team expected next — and that figure runs until the contract ends. This model prices everyone on this season's points plus a career average, so it misses two groups in opposite directions: riders on a contract signed in stronger years (Roglič, Adam Yates: the model is far too low) and riders in their first contract who have since outgrown it (del Toro: the model is roughly right about the pay and says nothing about what he is now worth). Version 0.5 will price riders at the moment of signing and by role — leader, sprinter, super-domestique, breakaway rider, neo-pro — rather than by points. It is in progress.
• Team budgets are themselves journalistic estimates with ranges (see Sources). A team whose budget is off by 20% has every unreported salary off by 20%.
• Domestiques. PCS points reward the rider who crosses the line; a domestique who controls a breakaway for 120 km or leads out a sprint scores nothing and is priced by his floor alone. There is no public signal that measures that work, and we don't pretend there is. Expect the model to under-price valued helpers and over-price point-scorers on small teams — corrections for riders like that are the ones we most want. That's also why the "weakest value" ranking needs reading, not just sorting.
• Employed vs self-employed status (43% / 57% of the peloton), tax residence (Monaco, Andorra) and the different cost of a neo-pro versus an established domestique are only partially captured.

Cycling agents

Agency attributions come from the agencies' own published rosters (FirstCycling's agency pages compile most of them), from agency websites, and from press reports naming a rider's agent. Each attribution carries a confidence (high = agency's own roster; medium = press report; low = single indirect source) and a source, shown on the rider page. 168 riders are unknown: not found on any published roster. "Family" and "self-represented" are real answers.

Contracts

Contract end years come from ProCyclingStats as of 22 September 2026, corrected with official team announcements where we found them (the source is linked on the rider page). "No 2027 contract announced" means PCS lists the current deal ending in 2026 and we found no announced extension. It does not mean the rider is leaving, and it does not mean nothing has been agreed: a move can be widely reported for weeks before the team makes it official.

Prize money — generated, not kept

Each rider page shows the prize money attributed to him by ProCyclingStats for the 2026 season, summed across all WorldTour and ProSeries races to 12 September 2026 (races without published prize lists, and lower-category races, are not counted, so the true figure is slightly higher). PCS assigns prizes by result — the stage winner "earns" the stage prize, the GC winner the GC prize.

That is not how the money is paid out. In professional cycling prize money is pooled and divided among the team's riders, and at most teams also with the staff — mechanics, soigneurs, drivers — according to each team's own key; there is no UCI rule. So "€809k" on Pogačar's page is what he brought in, not what he received. We label it prize money generated everywhere for that reason.

Estimated share received. To show what a rider actually pockets we model the distribution: for every race, the team's total prize money (PCS) is split equally among the riders the team started in that race (PCS start list), after 15% set aside for the staff on the race. Three simplifications: (1) equal split — most teams do this, some weight it; (2) a flat 15% staff share — real keys run from about 10% to 20%, or a fixed "share" per staff member; (3) no leader waivers — when a leader gives his share to the helpers (Pogačar and Vingegaard have done this after Tour wins), the helpers' figure is higher than shown and the leader's is zero. Deductions (riders' association levy, income tax in the race country) are not modelled. Treat single-rider figures as ±30%; the pattern — helpers of a winning leader earn tens of thousands, everyone else a few thousand — is robust.

Why show it at all? Because of the ratio. The whole men's WorldTour generated about €8M in prizes this season against roughly €310.1M in salaries — under 3%. The median rider's share is 0.8% of his salary; 475 of 527 riders are below 5%. Even the most dominant rider in the world brings his team about a tenth of his own salary in prizes. In this sport you don't get rich by winning; you get rich by the contract that winning earns you. At the bottom of the pyramid the same arithmetic turns harsh: a Continental-team manager's summary is that "you essentially pay to race — win and you might get €800, and after tax, UCI fees and sharing you keep €100."

ProTeams — the second division (model v0.1)

The 422 riders on the 16 UCI ProTeams get the same machinery with four changes. Budgets are thinner-sourced — Tudor, Cofidis, Q36.5 and TotalEnergies have press estimates; for most Spanish and Italian teams our figure is an estimate from roster size and sponsor scale, marked T3 on the Sources page. Wage share uses the same budget-dependent curve, which bottoms out at 36% below €14M; for the smallest teams the floors alone exceed that, and the pool is then set at the floors + 5% — i.e. the UCI minimum wage is what determines a €3M team's wage bill. Floors start from the UCI ProTeam minimum (€35,392 employed; €58,043 self-employed): €30k under 23, €36k on a second contract, €50k experienced, €70k established, scaled by budget between ×0.6 and ×1.6 and never below the minimum. The tier-wide half of the blend is run across the 16 ProTeams, not against WorldTeams — a Tudor leader is compared with other ProTeam leaders. Riders under 23 are capped at €1M. Two reported salaries anchor the tier: Pidcock (€4M) and Alaphilippe (€2M). Team Novo Nordisk is a special case: a mission-funded team whose budget is not spent on buying results, so its pool is floors + 25% rather than budget × share.

Output: €50.3M of estimated wages across ~€137M of budgets; median €54k, mean €121k; 102 riders over €100k, 188 under €50k, 123 at their floor. Expect wider errors than in the WorldTour — ±50% on a single rider — because both the budgets and the reported salaries are scarcer. Agency attributions are not yet collected for ProTeams.

Continental teams are not covered. At that level most riders are unpaid or on expenses, there is no minimum wage, and no roster source we would publish from; a rider directory without money figures is planned as part of the road-to-pro material. What is known about pay at that level, and about the step from it to a WorldTeam, is set out in From Continental team to WorldTour: how riders turn pro.

Salaries by season, 2021–2025 (season model v0.1)

The same machinery is run on each WorldTour season since 2021 with that season's rosters (ProCyclingStats), team budgets and reported salaries. Three things are weaker than for 2026. Budgets are press lists (SpazioCiclismo/Gazzetta 2022, tour-magazin 2023, ranges for 2024–25) rescaled so the league total matches the UCI's published aggregate (€379M in 2021, €473M in 2023, €499M in 2024, €570M in 2025; 2022 interpolated); the rider-wage share curve is re-centred on that season's average budget so the league-wide share stays at the UCI's 45%. Reported salaries come from L'Équipe (2021), Calcio e Finanza (2022–23, largely a recycled list), Gazzetta (2024) and Cyclingnews (2025). Floors are the 2026 floors scaled by that year's average team budget. Career points are the rider's PCS points up to and including that season. Treat a single rider-season at ±50%; the shape of the league — wage bill, median, how many riders above €1M — is more reliable than any one figure. Riders who have since left the WorldTour get their own page; ProTeam seasons before 2026 are not modelled.

How wrong is it? The leave-one-out test

For each of the 28 reported salaries we remove that one figure, re-run the whole model as if we didn't know it, and compare the guess with the reported number. Median absolute error 25.0%; 14 of 28 within ±25%, 21 within ±40%, 4 more than 50% off. The median bias is -8.3% — the model is no longer systematically low on stars, which it was up to v0.4. The remaining big misses are teams paying well under or over the going rate for a job. Full table, rider by rider, on the validation page.

Rising: how we measure young riders' results

For U23 riders we do not give a score. We count facts, and every result links to its source on ProCyclingStats.

Strength of results. For every stage or one-day race where a rider finishes in the top 20, we look at who else finished in the top 20. Opponent strength is the opponent's place in the UCI World Ranking at the end of the previous season. For 2026 results that is the ranking of 30 December 2025. We use three bands: top 50, top 200 and top 500. A rider has finished ahead of an opponent when the opponent crossed the line behind him and still inside the top 20. We count each opponent once per season.

U23 races. At U23 races most riders have no UCI ranking yet, so we add two measures. Big U23 races: wins, podiums and top-10 finishes (stages, one-day races and overall classifications) at the Tour de l'Avenir, Giro Next Gen, U23 World Championships, Ronde de l'Isard, Peace Race, Liège-Bastogne-Liège U23, Paris-Roubaix U23, Giro della Valle d'Aosta, Flanders Tomorrow Tour, GP Palio del Recioto, Giro del Belvedere, Trofeo Piva, GP della Liberazione, GP Capodarco and Kattekoers. Proven riders: an opponent counts as proven if, before that race, he had already finished in the top 10 of a WorldTour or ProSeries stage or one-day race that season.

Teams and contracts. A rider's team and level are his official registration for the season, as listed on ProCyclingStats. Young riders often race for their WorldTeam or ProTeam while registered with its development team; we show the registration, not the jersey of the day. Trainees (stagiaires) are marked. "Signed for 2027" means the 2027 team is already registered on ProCyclingStats.

Terrain comes from the stage profile type published by ProCyclingStats: flat, hilly, mountain or time trial. It describes the course, not how the race was won.

What this does not show:

• We only see the top 20 of each stage. A ranked rider who finished 45th is not counted either way.
• A rider who was a junior last season has no UCI ranking yet, so he counts as unranked until the next season.
• Mountain and sprint points and combativity awards are shown as what they are. We do not claim to know who was in the breakaway.
• Riders on WorldTeams and ProTeams often race for a leader. Their results can understate their level.

We do not publish anything about riders under 18.

Reproduce it

The model is one Python script and one CSV. Both are in the data download. Run it, change an assumption, tell us where we're wrong: corrections are credited in the changelog.

Every rider's figure is also available as a card to embed on another site, with the same Reported / Model / Press estimate label it carries here.