Most Sixes in International Cricket (All-Time List)

Rohit Sharma holds the record for the most sixes in international cricket, counting Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals together. He passed Chris Gayle’s mark of 553 during the 2023 World Cup and has kept adding to his total ever since, moving beyond 600 sixes.

For years this record belonged to Gayle, the West Indian whose flat-batted power defined big hitting for a generation. Rohit has now overtaken him and, because he is still playing one-day cricket for India, sits alone at the top with a lead that keeps growing. Gayle’s 553 is the number Rohit chased; it is now the second-place figure.

The all-time international sixes leaders

The table lists the leading six-hitters in international cricket across all three formats combined. Totals for active players change, so treat Rohit’s figure as a floor rather than a fixed number.

Rank	Player	Country	International sixes
1	Rohit Sharma (active)	India	600+ and counting
2	Chris Gayle	West Indies	553
3	Shahid Afridi	Pakistan	476
4	Brendon McCullum	New Zealand	398
5	MS Dhoni	India	359

Rohit is the only player to have cleared Gayle’s old mark, and the players closest behind are all retired. That combination, an active leader well clear of a field that has stopped moving, is why the record looks secure for the near future.

How Rohit passed Gayle

The efficiency is the striking part. Gayle reached his 553 sixes across roughly 550 innings; Rohit got to the same figure in well under 500. Opening the batting in white-ball cricket gave him the licence and the balls faced to attack from the first over, and he turned that into the fastest accumulation of international sixes the game has seen.

He hit the record-breaking sixes at the 2023 World Cup against Afghanistan, in front of a home crowd. Gayle, characteristically, congratulated him. Since then Rohit has stepped back from Test and Twenty20 international cricket, so those parts of his tally are frozen, but he continues to add sixes in one-day matches, which is why the top line keeps ticking upward.

Why all three formats matter to this record

The international sixes record rewards batters who scored across Tests, ODIs and T20Is, not specialists in one. Afridi, McCullum and Dhoni all played long white-ball careers, but Rohit’s blend of a heavy ODI output, a productive T20I run, and Test appearances stacked into the largest combined pile.

Format context also explains the shape of the list. Twenty20 cricket, which encourages six-hitting more than any other format, only became widespread in the mid-2000s, so older greats had fewer chances to inflate their totals. The players at the top of this list are almost all products of the white-ball era, when clearing the rope became a core skill rather than a risk.

Who leads the six count in each format

Split by format, the picture shifts, and it explains why Rohit’s combined total is so large. He leads the sixes list in one-day internationals, having passed the old marks of Afridi and Gayle, and he also sits top of the Twenty20 international list. Topping both white-ball formats at once is what stacks his combined total above everyone else.

Tests are the exception. The longest format rewards a different kind of hitter, and its six-count is led by aggressive Test specialists like Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum rather than the white-ball openers. Rohit’s Test sixes are a smaller slice of his total, which is why players who cleared the rope mainly in Tests do not trouble the top of the overall list.

Where this record sits among cricket’s big-hitting marks

Career international sixes is one measure of power; there are others. The single-innings six record rewards one violent afternoon, and the Twenty20-only lists, which fold in franchise leagues, still favour Gayle. Each captures a different kind of hitting, and no single number crowns the definitive biggest hitter.

If you want to go deeper on the format that made six-hitting a headline act, see our list of the most sixes in T20I cricket, or read about the biggest sixes in cricket for the longest strikes ever measured. And to put six-hitting in the context of run-scoring, the most runs in international cricket shows how the game’s leading accumulators built their careers. Rohit’s tally is the mark every big hitter now measures against, and it is still rising.