How much do pro cyclists earn?

The median men's WorldTour rider earns €301k a year before tax in 2026. The average is higher, €591k, because 79 riders are paid more than €1M. In the second division, the ProTeams, the median is €54k. The minimum on a WorldTeam is €44,150 a year for an employed rider and €72,404 for a self-employed one.

What is the minimum salary in pro cycling?

The men's minimums are set in the joint agreement between the riders' union (CPA) and the teams' association (AIGCP), the women's by the UCI itself; all of them are written into the UCI regulations. For 2026 they were frozen at their 2025 level; only the Women's ProTeam minimum went up.

A self-employed rider is paid more because he pays his own social security and insurance; in the UCI's 2024 figures, 57% of WorldTour riders were self-employed. Continental teams, the third division, are regulated by their national federations rather than the UCI, so what they have to pay depends on the country.

The minimum is a floor, not a typical salary. Our model puts no WorldTour rider on it: its lowest estimate is €73k, because it assumes a place on a WorldTeam roster costs more than the UCI minimum. In the ProTeams the floor is real: 137 of 422 riders are estimated at the UCI minimum or at the model's floor.

How are salaries spread?

Half of WorldTour riders earn less than €301k. A quarter earn less than €196k, a quarter more than €669k, and one in ten more than €1.3M.

How much does a domestique earn?

Pay follows the job a rider was hired for. The model places every WorldTour rider in a pay band for his role in the team when his contract was signed, scaled by the team's budget. The medians by band:

An experienced domestique — the rider who fetches bottles, rides at the front and shelters his leader from the wind — earns a median of €282k. A key climber or super-domestique, the last helper in the mountains, about €762k. The 7 tier-one leaders have a median of €4M.

How much does a neo-pro earn?

A rider on his first WorldTour contract earns a median of €164k in our estimates; half of them are between €126k and €201k. The UCI minimum for a neo-pro on a WorldTeam is €35,721 employed or €58,582 self-employed. For the most sought-after talents, Cyclingnews put a first contract at €150–500k.

First contracts are rarely reported, so these are the estimates on this page that rest on the least evidence.

At what age do riders earn the most?

Salaries rise through a rider's twenties. The median WorldTour salary goes from €167k at 18–22 to €440k at 30–33, the best-paid age group.

Median salary by age group; the number of riders in brackets.

Who are the highest-paid cyclists?

The best-paid rider in the world is Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), with a base salary of €8.2M a year, as reported in the press. 9 of the 10 highest salaries are reported in the press; the rest are estimates.

All rankings →

Which teams pay the most?

The biggest wage bill in the WorldTour is UAE Team Emirates-XRG's: an estimated €34.0M a year for its riders, ahead of Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe (€32.9M) and Visma | Lease a Bike (€31.6M). The smallest is Picnic PostNL's, €6.9M. Together the 18 WorldTeams pay their riders about €311M a year; the UCI's own figure for 2024 was €226.5M.

Every team's budget and wage bill →

How much do ProTeam riders earn?

The 16 ProTeams are a different economy: a median of €54k, an average of €119k, and 194 of 422 riders under €50k. Only 4 earn more than €1M; the best paid is Tom Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5), €4M.

Only WorldTeams and ProTeams can start a Grand Tour, so every rider at the Tour de France, the Giro and the Vuelta has a page on this site.

All 16 ProTeams →

Do riders keep their prize money?

No. Prize money is paid to the team, pooled and shared with team-mates and staff. So far in 2026, WorldTour riders have generated €8M in prize money against about €311M of salaries: 2.6%. Our estimate of what the median rider actually receives from the pot this season is €6,715. Tadej Pogačar generated the most, €809k, against a salary of €8.2M.

Prize money ranking →

What is not in the salary?

• Bonuses for results, which are rarely published. For Tadej Pogačar, La Gazzetta dello Sport put the total with bonuses at €10–12M a year, against a base of about €8M.
• Prize money, which is shared (see above).
• Personal sponsors, appearance fees and image rights. They matter for a few stars and are almost never published.
• The agent's commission, usually 5–7.5% of the salary, is paid out of it.
• Tax. Every figure on this site is gross; what a rider keeps depends on the country where he is resident for tax.

How much do women pro cyclists earn?

The Women's WorldTeam minimum for 2026 is €38,000 a year for an employed rider and €62,320 for a self-employed one. In the Women's ProTeams it is €22,000; on Continental teams there is none. This site does not estimate individual women's salaries. What is on the record — the minimums, the riders' union surveys, the few published figures — is in our analysis: what women's professional cycling actually pays.

Where do these numbers come from?

30 salaries on this site are reported in the press and used as fixed points. Every other figure is an estimate from our published model: each team's budget sets its wage pool, and each rider is priced on the job he was hired for and his results in the two seasons before he signed. Tested against the reported salaries, the model's median error is 24.2%, so read any single estimate as a range rather than an exact figure.

For comparison, the UCI's own figures for 2024, as reported by Cyclingnews: a median of €216k for employed riders and €350k for self-employed ones, averages of €384k and €654k, and about 70 riders over €1M.

Every figure on this page is computed from the same data as the rider pages, each time the site is rebuilt.

Methodology · Validation · Sources · Download the data · Correct this data

Sources: CPA, Joint agreement · Velora, Minimum salary freeze set for 2026 · Cyclingnews, Millionaires and minimum wage · Cyclingnews, Low wages, high expenses and questionable conditions · Cyclingnews, Cycling's rich list · Escape Collective, Who are the most powerful agents in pro cycling? · La Gazzetta dello Sport, salary list, January 2026