Paid for the rider you used to be

A cycling salary is set once, on the day the contract is signed, and then runs for three, four, sometimes seven years. The rider changes. The number does not.

17 September 2026 · 527 WorldTour riders · salary model v0.8 (16 Sep 2026) · figures frozen at publication

Two riders, one season. Remco Evenepoel has scored 3241 PCS points in 2026. Isaac del Toro has scored 3200 — second and third in the entire WorldTour behind Tadej Pogačar.

Evenepoel is reported to earn €6.6M a year. Del Toro is reported to earn €2M.

Neither figure is ours. Both come from published lists. The gap is not a modelling artefact and it is not an accusation against anybody — it is what happens when a sport prices a rider on the day he signs.

Why the number sticks

Football renegotiates. Basketball has a cap, maximum contracts and a calendar of extensions. Cycling has neither. A rider signs, and the figure holds until the contract ends. A team cannot cut a rider's pay after a bad year, and a rider cannot demand more after winning a Grand Tour — not until the deal expires.

That makes the signing date the most important fact about a cycling salary, which is why this site spends so much effort establishing it. For every rider we look for the announcement: the team's own release where it exists, the press where it does not. Then the model asks one narrow question — what was this rider worth, in this job, at this team, on the day he signed — and holds that answer for the life of the contract. The method page sets out how, and the validation page shows how wrong it gets.

Alongside it we compute a second number: what the same job at the same team would cost on this season's results. Call it market value. The ratio between the two is the subject of this piece.

Priced below what they are now worth

Every rider below has a signing date we could source. Riders whose date we still estimate are left out — if we cannot say when the price was set, we should not publish a claim about it.

Read the Basis column first. Reported means a named publication printed that salary. Model means we estimated it, and a single estimate carries a typical error around 24.6%. The market-value column is a model output for everybody, including the riders whose salary is reported.

The extremes belong to the young, and that is structural rather than scandalous. Paul Seixas signed his first WorldTour contract in September 2024, aged 18, straight out of the junior ranks. Two seasons later he has 2097 points — 6th in the WorldTour, ahead of every sprinter and every classics rider in the sport. A first professional contract is not priced for that, because nothing can be. Those deals are also the ones most likely to be rewritten early: Morgado, Romeo and Christen have all had theirs extended or replaced since signing.

The cases worth arguing about sit in the middle. Harold Tejada is 29, not a prospect, and out of contract in three months. Kévin Vauquelin moved to INEOS in October 2025 on a reported €800k — and is also, candidly, the rider this model handles worst, over-predicting him by the largest margin in our validation set. He is here because dropping an inconvenient case would be dishonest, not because we are confident about him.

The peloton splits both ways

An article about underpaid riders is only half the story, and the cheaper half. The mechanism that traps a breakout rider on an old price also keeps paying a rider whose results have gone.

All 527 priced WorldTour riders. Below 1.00× a rider is paid more than his current results would cost to buy; above it, less. Median 1.17×. 188 riders sit below 1.00×, 53 above 2.00×, 14 above 3.00×.

Tao Geoghegan Hart is the starkest case in the peloton. He signed a three-year deal with Lidl-Trek in August 2023, six months after winning the Giro and before the crash that cost him most of a season. His contract ends this December. Landa, Madouas and Geoghegan Hart are all out of contract at the end of 2026 — along with 165 other riders. Whatever the market thinks of them now, it is about to say so.

What this method can and cannot do

• 28 of these 527 salaries are reported. The rest are estimated, and we test by removing each reported figure and asking the model to reproduce it blind: median error 24.6%, 15 of 28 inside 25%. Useful for the shape of the peloton, too coarse for settling an argument about one rider.
• Market value is always an estimate. No team publishes what it would pay. The number answers a hypothetical and inherits every weakness of the salary model.
• The weakest assumption is timing. A contract announced mid-season is priced on the share of that season already raced, approximated by the month. Points do not arrive evenly — they cluster around the Grand Tours and Monuments — so a climber who signs in July is undercounted and a Vuelta rider oversold. 187 riders are priced this way, and each of their pages says so.
• A gap is not an injustice. A rider who signs early for security and then improves has made a trade, not been robbed. The question worth asking is not who is underpaid, but how much of a career the contract system leaves unpriced.

The correction is happening now

168 WorldTour contracts expire at the end of 2026 and the transfer market is open as you read this. Felix Gall, second at the Giro and third at the Vuelta this season, signed for Lidl-Trek on 15 September on a three-year deal — priced, at last, on the two seasons his old contract never saw.

That is the whole mechanism in one transfer. The market corrects. It just waits until the paper runs out.

Reported salaries: Gazzetta dello Sport Jan 2026 / Cyclingnews rich list Apr 2025 / Marca Oct 2023 / Cronica Vasca Mar 2024 / Eurosport-RMC Apr 2024 (Martinez) / NOS Dec 2025 (Kooij) / L'Equipe Oct 2025 (Vauquelin) / bici.PRO Sep 2025 (Ayuso). Where sources conflict we record both and use the more recent; every figure and its source is listed on the sources page. Contract dates: team announcements where they exist, cycling press otherwise, with the source shown on each rider page. Results: ProCyclingStats, 2026 season to 16 September 2026. Method: salary model v0.8 (16 Sep 2026) — full method, data and code. Know a figure we have wrong? The correction form is the most useful thing you can send us.