Highest-Paid Female Tennis Players: Pay Explained

The highest-paid female tennis player and the highest prize-money earner are usually two different people. On Forbes’ 2024 list of the highest-paid female athletes, Coco Gauff ranked first at $30.4 million, yet only $9.4 million of that came from the court. Aryna Sabalenka, who won more on court that year, ranked lower overall because she earns less from endorsements. Keeping those two numbers separate is the whole point of understanding tennis pay.

Prize money and endorsements are not the same number

Forbes and Sportico report a single total that folds two very different income streams together, and the split reveals more than the ranking does.

Player	Total (2024)	Prize money	Endorsements
Coco Gauff	$30.4m	$9.4m	$21m
Iga Swiatek	$21.4m	$8.4m	$13m
Aryna Sabalenka	$17.7m	$9.7m	$8m

Figures per Tennis.com’s summary of the Forbes 2024 list, published December 2024. Read the middle column and the ranking inverts: Sabalenka earned the most on court that year at $9.7 million, but Gauff’s $21 million in endorsements, more than double Sabalenka’s, put her first overall. Nine of the top 15 highest-paid female athletes of 2024 were tennis players, a dominance no other women’s sport comes close to.

The lesson is simple to state and easy to forget. Prize money is paid for winning. Endorsement money is paid for marketability. A player can lead one column and trail the other, so any list that quotes a single figure is really quoting a sum you should break apart. For how that marketability is valued across all sport, our guide to the most marketable athletes covers the endorsement side in detail.

How the Grand Slams reached equal pay

Tennis is the rare sport where the four biggest events pay women and men the same, and it took 34 years to get there.

The 1973 US Open was first, after Billie Jean King threatened that the women would not play unless prize money was equal, per ESPN’s account of how the gap closed. The Australian Open followed in 2001, the French Open in 2006, and Wimbledon last in 2007. Since 2007 all four majors have awarded identical prize money to the women’s and men’s singles champions.

That matters because the Grand Slams are run by their own federations, not by the tours, so their equal-pay decisions were made event by event rather than tour-wide. It is also why the achievement, real as it is, covers only four tournaments a year.

Where tennis pay is still not equal

Below the majors, the tours diverge, and this is the part celebratory coverage tends to skip.

At the many combined events where the ATP and WTA share a venue, each tour has historically set its own prize pool, and the men’s has generally been larger. The WTA’s response is a published timeline: equal prize money at combined WTA 1000 and 500 events by 2027, and at the remaining single-week 1000 and 500 events by 2033, per the WTA’s own pathway announcement. The dates are the admission that parity does not yet exist outside the slams.

So the honest summary is that Grand Slam pay has been equal since 2007, and tour-level pay is on a stated path to equality that runs to 2033. “Tennis pays women equally” is true of the majors and aspirational everywhere else.

The career prize-money leaders

Single-season lists move every year; the career list is the more durable measure of who earned most from winning. As of July 2026, the WTA’s all-time prize money leaderboard reads:

Rank	Player	Career prize money
1	Serena Williams	~$94.9m
2	Aryna Sabalenka	~$50.3m
3	Iga Swiatek	~$45.9m
4	Venus Williams	~$43.1m
5	Simona Halep	~$40.2m

Figures from the WTA career prize money records, with Swiatek having passed Venus Williams for a top-two spot, per the WTA’s own report. These are live totals that rise week to week, so treat them as a July 2026 snapshot. Serena Williams’ figure is the standout: roughly $95 million, close to double her sister’s and untouched by the current generation, though Sabalenka and Swiatek are climbing fast enough to challenge second place within a few seasons.

Note what the career list is not: it excludes endorsements entirely. Serena’s on-court total is enormous, but her off-court income across a two-decade career dwarfed it, which is the same prize-money-versus-endorsements split that defines the single-season lists. For the players behind these numbers, our ranking of the greatest female tennis players of all time weighs titles rather than dollars.

Why the women’s game pays so well off the court

Tennis produces the highest-paid female athletes in the world, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. It is an individual sport with a global, year-round calendar, so a star is a recognisable brand in dozens of markets rather than one member of a team in one country. Sponsors buy that reach, which is why the endorsement column is so large for the women at the top and why tennis supplied nine of the fifteen highest-paid female athletes of 2024.

The flip side is how narrow the money is. The rankings reward a handful of singles stars with the fame that attracts eight-figure deals, and everyone below that earns far less both on and off the court. Doubles specialists sit lower still: doubles prize money is a fraction of singles at the same event, and endorsement portfolios cluster on singles champions, so even a prolific doubles winner earns a fraction of a singles contemporary. The pay-gap conversation in women’s sport usually compares women with men, and our explainer on WNBA salaries and the revenue gap covers that side; within tennis, the sharper divide is between the marketable few at the top and everyone else.

The number to carry around

For a current-season snapshot, use Forbes’ 2024 list: Gauff around $30 million total but only about $9 million on court, with Sabalenka the top prize-money earner. For the career benchmark, Serena Williams at roughly $95 million. And remember the two structural facts underneath: Grand Slam pay has been equal since 2007, but tour-level pay is still being equalised on a timeline running to 2033. Re-check the career figures each season, since the WTA leaderboard updates continuously. The women’s game is the highest-paying in women’s sport; the pay-gap story within it is at the tour level, not the majors.