The 2026 Tour de France start line earns €149.5M a year, 46% more than any other race

The riders who started the 2026 Tour de France earn €149.5M a year in salaries between them. That is €46.9M, or 46%, more than the start line of Milano-Sanremo, the next race on our list. No other race comes close to putting this much payroll on one road.

The gap to every other race

The Tour had 184 starters. We have a 2026 salary for 175 of them; the other 9 are not counted. After Sanremo come La Vuelta at €97.9M, Il Lombardia at €97.5M and the Giro d'Italia at €94.5M. The Giro had the same 184 starters as the Tour, but its priced riders earn €55M less.

The Tour is where teams send their best-paid riders. Pogačar, Evenepoel and Vingegaard, the three highest salaries in our data, started the same race only once in 2026: the Tour.

Who makes up the €149.5M

The five best-paid starters all have Reported salaries:

• Tadej Pogačar, UAE Team Emirates-XRG: €8.2M (Reported)
• Remco Evenepoel, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe: €6.6M (Reported)
• Jonas Vingegaard, Visma-Lease a Bike: €5.0M (Reported)
• Mathieu van der Poel, Alpecin-Premier Tech: €4.0M (Reported)
• Jasper Philipsen, Alpecin-Premier Tech: €3.2M (Reported)

The ten best-paid starters earn €40.7M, or 27.2% of the total. The typical rider earns far less: the median starter is on €500k.

Most of the total is an estimate. 20 starters have Reported salaries worth €60.2M, and 5 have Press estimates worth €4.55M. Together that is 43.3% of the total. The other 150 riders carry Model salaries, worth €84.8M.

43.4% of the WorldTour wage bill

The 537 riders of the 18 WorldTeams earn €313.1M in 2026. The 139 WorldTeam riders on the Tour start line earn €135.9M of it, or 43.4%. The other 36 priced starters ride for ProTeams.

So the Tour does not quite put half the WorldTour wage bill on the start line. It puts a little over two fifths of it there, spread across about a quarter of the riders.

The prize fund is 1.5% of the payroll

The Tour offered €2,302,800 in prize money and bonuses in 2026 (Domestique, 30 June 2026). That is 1.5% of what its starters earn in salaries in a year. Prize money is generated, not kept: riders usually share it with teammates and staff, and the share a rider receives is a Model estimate. For more, see the most expensive startlists ranking.

How we got this number

We matched each 2026 Tour starter on the uci.org results to our rider data and added up their 2026 salaries (Reported, Press estimate or Model). Riders without a salary in our data are left out. Each salary is a full-year figure, not pay for the race. Method: /cycling/methodology/.

Sources

• Domestique, 30 June 2026, Tour de France 2026 prize money: domestiquecycling.com

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