Most Home Runs in a Season

Barry Bonds holds the record for most home runs in a single MLB season, with 73, hit in 2001 for the San Francisco Giants. That is the official mark in the record book, and it has stood for more than two decades.

It is also the most argued-over number in baseball. The six highest single-season home run totals ever recorded all come from a four-year window, 1998 to 2001, and all belong to players tied to the steroid era. So the honest answer to “what is the home run record” has two layers: the number the sport recognizes, and the number many fans actually trust. This article covers both, and the older caveat almost no list mentions.

The single-season home run record list

Here are the top single-season home run totals in MLB history. Bonds sits at the top; note how tightly the leaderboard clusters around one short era.

Player	Home runs	Year	Team
Barry Bonds	73	2001	San Francisco Giants
Mark McGwire	70	1998	St. Louis Cardinals
Sammy Sosa	66	1998	Chicago Cubs
Mark McGwire	65	1999	St. Louis Cardinals
Sammy Sosa	64	2001	Chicago Cubs
Sammy Sosa	63	1999	Chicago Cubs
Aaron Judge	62	2022	New York Yankees
Roger Maris	61	1961	New York Yankees
Babe Ruth	60	1927	New York Yankees
Cal Raleigh	60	2025	Seattle Mariners

The top six totals were produced by just three men, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa, between 1998 and 2001. Everything from Judge’s 62 downward comes from outside that window. That clustering is not a coincidence, and it is the whole reason this record is contested.

The steroid-era context, stated honestly

There is no way to write about this record accurately without the drug context, so here it is plainly. Mark McGwire admitted in 2010 to using steroids during his career, including his 70-homer 1998 season. Barry Bonds was the central figure in the BALCO scandal; he never failed a drug test but was convicted of obstruction of justice in that investigation, and the evidence of use is extensive. Sammy Sosa was reported to have been on the list of players who tested positive in MLB’s 2003 anonymous survey testing, which he has denied.

None of these totals carries an official asterisk. MLB recognizes Bonds’ 73 as the single-season record, full stop. But the reason a large share of fans still name Maris or Judge instead is not stubbornness, it is that the record book and the drug findings point in different directions, and the sport has never reconciled them. Reporting the number without the context would be the dishonest version.

Aaron Judge and the “clean” record

Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs in 2022 broke Maris’ American League record of 61, which had stood since 1961. Judge has no connection to performance-enhancing drugs, so his 62 is widely treated as the highest legitimate single-season total, even though it is officially the AL record rather than the MLB record.

This is the split worth understanding. Bonds’ 73 is the official record. Judge’s 62 is the record among players with no PED cloud over them. Both statements are true, and which one you cite depends on whether you are reading the rulebook or making a judgment about it. Judge is now firmly among the greatest baseball players to swing a bat, and his 2022 season is a large part of why.

The pre-1947 caveat almost nobody mentions

There is an older asterisk that the steroid debate has buried. Babe Ruth’s 60 in 1927, and every home run record set before 1947, was achieved before Major League Baseball integrated. Until Jackie Robinson debuted that year, the sport barred Black players and many dark-skinned Latino players, so Ruth and his contemporaries never faced the full talent pool.

Two more wrinkles sit alongside it. Ruth’s 60 came in a 154-game season; Maris broke it in 1961 in the first 162-game American League season, which drew a famous controversy over whether the extra games made the marks comparable. So even the “old-fashioned” records are not clean like-for-like comparisons. A 1927 total and a 2022 total were set under different schedule lengths against differently constituted competition. Records this old are reference points, not equivalents.

The 60-home-run club

Reaching 60 in a season is the milestone that separates a great power year from a historic one, and only seven players have ever done it: Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh. Because McGwire and Sosa each cleared 60 more than once, there have been 10 individual 60-homer seasons in all.

The membership tells the era story in miniature. One name comes from the 1920s, one from the 1960s, five seasons from the 1998-2001 steroid window, and the two most recent, Judge in 2022 and Raleigh in 2025, from the current game with no PED questions attached. Raleigh’s is the most unusual of the group: 60 home runs from a catcher and a switch-hitter, positions that rarely produce that kind of power.

So who really holds the record?

Officially, it is Barry Bonds with 73. If you discount the 1998-2001 totals as products of the steroid era, the highest mark is Aaron Judge’s 62. If you want the pre-steroid, live-ball benchmark, it is Roger Maris’ 61 from 1961. Each answer is defensible, and an honest write-up gives you all three rather than pretending there is only one.

For where the game’s money now sits, see the highest-paid MLB players; power hitting like this is exactly what the biggest contracts pay for. Cal Raleigh’s 60 in 2025, from a catcher and a switch-hitter with no PED questions, is a reminder that the milestone still gets reached the hard way. The number to know is 73. The debate around it is the part worth carrying.