Do these earnings figures include equity in companies athletes co-found?

Only when it converts to cash. Forbes counts cash returns from business equity stakes, so a stake that has not been sold or paid a dividend does not appear. This understates athletes such as LeBron James and Kevin Durant, whose venture portfolios carry paper value that the annual lists deliberately exclude.

Are the figures before or after tax and agent commission?

Before both. Forbes states its numbers cover income collected before taxes and agent fees. An athlete on a $100 million headline figure with a 10 to 20 per cent representation cost and a top-bracket tax rate in a high-tax jurisdiction may retain under half. That gap is why 'earnings' and 'net worth' rankings never line up.

Why do Forbes and Sportico publish different totals for the same athlete?

They cover different windows. Forbes uses a rolling twelve months to 1 May; Sportico's athlete list runs on the calendar year and was published in January 2026 for 2025. Sportico put Cristiano Ronaldo at $260 million for calendar 2025; Forbes put him at $300 million for the year to May 2026. Both can be right.

How much can a single endorsement deal be worth to a mid-tier athlete?

Far less than the top of the market implies. Below roughly the world's 200 best-paid athletes, seven-figure individual deals are rare and most portfolios are built from a boot or racket contract plus several five-figure regional agreements. The distribution is extremely top-heavy: Forbes reported the 50 highest-paid athletes alone earned $4.1 billion in 2026.

Does a signature shoe make more money than a straight endorsement fee?

It can, because signature lines usually carry a royalty on sales rather than only a flat retainer, and the royalty compounds if the shoe sells. It also carries risk that a flat fee does not: a line that underperforms is discontinued, and the athlete loses the royalty and the marketing spend that came with it.

Most Marketable Athletes: Who Earns Most Off the Field

Shohei Ohtani earned an estimated $125 million off the field in the twelve months to 1 May 2026, the largest endorsement haul Forbes has recorded for an active athlete in 36 years of tracking. That figure is 98 per cent of his total income for the period, because most of his $700 million Dodgers contract is deferred to 2034 and beyond. No athlete in any sport has ever depended so completely on commercial income while playing at the top of their game.

Ohtani is the extreme case of a pattern that runs through every earnings list published this year. Salary tells you what a team is willing to pay. Off-field income tells you what the wider market thinks an athlete is worth, and the two diverge more than most rankings admit.

The 2026 earnings list, split by source

Forbes published its 2026 ranking on 22 May, covering income collected between 1 May 2025 and 1 May 2026, before taxes and agent fees. Splitting it into on-field and off-field columns changes what the list says.

Rank	Athlete	Sport	Total	On-field	Off-field	Off-field share
1	Cristiano Ronaldo	Soccer	$300m	$235m	$65m	22%
2	Canelo Álvarez	Boxing	$170m	$160m	$10m	6%
3	Lionel Messi	Soccer	$140m	$70m	$70m	50%
4	LeBron James	Basketball	$137.8m	$52.8m	$85m	62%
5	Shohei Ohtani	Baseball	$127.6m	$2.6m	$125m	98%
6	Stephen Curry	Basketball	$124.7m	$59.7m	$65m	52%
7	Jon Rahm	Golf	$107m	$97m	$10m	9%
8	Karim Benzema	Soccer	$104m	$100m	$4m	4%
9	Kevin Durant	Basketball	$103.8m	$54.8m	$49m	47%
10	Lewis Hamilton	Motorsport	$100m	$70m	$30m	30%

The off-field share column is my own calculation from the Forbes figures, and it separates two very different careers sitting side by side in the same top ten. Álvarez and Benzema are paid enormous sums to compete and are close to commercially irrelevant outside their sports. James, Curry and Durant would each still rank among the world’s best-paid athletes if they never took another dollar in salary.

Hamilton is the one to watch. His $100 million made him the first Formula 1 driver to reach nine figures, breaking his own $82 million record from 2021. Only $30 million of it came from off-track work — and yet he tops the industry’s leading marketability ranking. That contradiction is the point of the next section.

Marketability and earnings are not the same list

SportsPro’s 50 Most Marketable ranking, produced with NorthStar Solutions Group, applies 16 qualitative and quantitative drivers to a pool of 150 athletes and scores each out of 100. Its most recent top ten reads: Lewis Hamilton, Simone Biles, Ilona Maher, Stephen Curry, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Caitlin Clark, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Coco Gauff.

Compare that with the Forbes top ten above. Biles, Maher, Clark and Gauff appear on neither Forbes’ nor Sportico’s overall top-50 earnings lists. Ohtani, the single largest endorsement earner in the world, does not appear in the marketability top ten at all.

The two lists are measuring different quantities and both are useful. Earnings lists are backward-looking and count contracts already signed. Marketability rankings are forward-looking and score what a brand would pay for next: audience growth, cultural reach, reputational risk, how well an athlete converts attention into action. Ohtani’s commercial income is heavily weighted toward the Japanese market, where his saturation is close to total; that concentration is worth $125 million a year and simultaneously limits how much headroom a global brand sees.

The honest read: if the question is “who earns most from brands,” the answer is Ohtani. If the question is “who would you sign today for a five-year global campaign,” the evidence points at Hamilton, and behind him a cohort — Biles, Maher, Clark — whose commercial value is growing faster than their prize money.

Why some athletes out-earn better players

Three mechanisms explain almost every case where the more commercially successful athlete is not the better competitor.

Market size beats trophy count. Neymar has not won a Ballon d’Or and sits sixth on the marketability list; his social reach exceeds most of the players ranked above him on the pitch. Sponsors buy audiences, not medals.

Scarcity within a category. Ilona Maher’s rugby sevens career would not put her near any earnings list. Her position as the most-followed rugby player in the world, in a sport with almost no competing commercial figures, does. Being the only recognisable name in a category is worth more than being the fourth-best name in a crowded one.

Deferred and structured pay distorts the salary column. Ohtani’s $2.6 million on-field figure is an accounting artefact of deferral, not a measure of his value to the Dodgers. Read salary columns knowing they reflect contract structure as much as ability. The same effect appears across baseball, where our guide to MLB’s highest-paid players and the gap between total value and AAV sets out how those contracts are built.

Where the women’s figures sit

None of 2026’s 50 highest-paid athletes are women, per Forbes — the same result Sportico reported for its top 100 for a third consecutive year. The separate women’s list, published in December 2025 for calendar 2025, was led by Coco Gauff at $33 million, of which $25 million came from off-court sources. Aryna Sabalenka followed at $30 million and Iga Swiatek at $25.1 million.

The composition is the more interesting number. Forbes reported that the top 20 women earned $293 million between them, up 13 per cent year on year, with roughly 72 per cent of it coming from off-court income. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu earned $23.1 million with $100,000 of it from competition. For the men’s top ten, the off-field share averages closer to 38 per cent.

Women’s sport, in other words, is currently a commercial-income business with a competition income attached, and the men’s top tier is the reverse. That is a consequence of prize and salary structures rather than of relative marketability, and it is why endorsement contracts carry so much weight in negotiations on the women’s side.

What to check before quoting a figure

Confirm the window, the source and the direction. Forbes runs to 1 May; Sportico runs on the calendar year, which is why Ronaldo appears at $260 million in one list published January 2026 and $300 million in another published four months later. Confirm whether a number is earnings, brand value or net worth, since the three are routinely mixed. And treat any “athlete net worth” figure with no named methodology as unusable — no credible publisher produces one.

Fresh figures arrive twice a year on a predictable cycle: Forbes publishes the women’s list in December and the main ranking the following May, and Sportico’s top 100 lands in January. Anything on this page should be re-checked against the next edition in each series.

For sport-by-sport detail on where the salary half of these totals comes from, our breakdowns of the world’s highest-paid soccer players and what Formula 1 drivers earn go through the contract structures behind the headline numbers.