Fastest 50s in Cricket: World Cups, ODIs, Tests & T20Is

AB de Villiers reached fifty in 16 balls against West Indies in 2015 — still the fastest half-century anyone has scored in ODI cricket. Yuvraj Singh got there in 12 balls against England at the 2007 World Twenty20, a T20I record that has stood for almost two decades. In Test cricket, where boundaries come harder, Misbah-ul-Haq’s 21-ball fifty against Australia in 2014 remains the fastest on record. Each format punishes speed differently, and the leaderboards below show exactly how the record-holders got there.

Fastest 50s in Cricket — Quick Reference

Fastest 50 in ODI Cricket

De Villiers’s 16-ball fifty came in the same Johannesburg innings as his 31-ball hundred — three fours and five sixes, including 21 runs off one Andre Russell over. Matthew Forde matched the 16-ball mark ten years later against Ireland, keeping the record alive into 2025 rather than letting it stand untouched. For the full innings and where it ranks among the format’s other blistering knocks, see the fastest century in ODI cricket.

Fastest 50 in T20I Cricket

Yuvraj’s record is inseparable from the six sixes he hit off Stuart Broad in a single over at the 2007 World Twenty20 — his fastest fifty arrived mid-carnage, not as a slow build to one big shot. It has survived nearly 20 years of aggressive T20 batting, even as Colin Munro (2016) and, in early 2026, both Abhishek Sharma and Shivam Dube closed the gap to 14 and 15 balls. Outside Test-playing nations, Nepal’s Dipendra Singh Airee reached fifty in 9 balls at the 2023 Asian Games — faster, but not counted on the main T20I leaderboard. For more six-hitting benchmarks, see most sixes in T20I cricket.

Fastest 50 in Test Cricket

Misbah-ul-Haq’s 21-ball fifty against Australia in Abu Dhabi came off the back of criticism over his cautious batting — he reached it in 24 minutes, marked it with a celebratory push-up, and went on to a century in 56 balls, the joint-fastest in Test history at the time. Test fifties this fast are almost always built on sixes rather than fours, since the field is spread and singles alone cannot get a batter there quickly enough. Ben Stokes’s 24-ball fifty against West Indies in 2024 is the most recent entry to crack the top five, a reminder the record book still moves even in the format’s slowest format for scoring. For the century-length version of this list, see fastest century in cricket and most centuries in cricket.

What the Fastest-Fifty Record Actually Measures

Balls faced, not minutes, is the standard the ICC and ESPNcricinfo use to rank these innings, because it strips out over-rate and stoppage time and lets a 2026 T20I fifty be compared fairly against a 2005 Test one. What makes the record hard to break is that it requires near-flawless timing across an entire spell of overs, not just one big shot: a batter has to clear the rope repeatedly, against bowlers actively trying to slow them down, without getting out. That is why the T20I, ODI, and Test lists barely overlap — the format dictates the ceiling, and only a handful of players in each era have combined the power and the risk tolerance to reach it.

Active Chase: Where These Records Stand in 2026

None of the headline records fell in 2026, but the gaps kept closing. Abhishek Sharma and Shivam Dube both produced sub-16-ball T20I fifties for India in January 2026 alone, and Matthew Forde’s 16-ball ODI fifty in 2025 showed the format’s record is no longer a de Villiers monopoly. Yuvraj Singh’s 12-ball T20I mark and Misbah-ul-Haq’s 21-ball Test mark remain the two records that have gone the longest without a genuine challenge — both now approaching, or past, the decade-plus mark since their nearest rival got within two balls. Track the cricket hub for the next time one of these falls.