NFL MVP Winners (Most Wins and Recent List)

Peyton Manning holds the record for the most NFL MVP awards, with five. Aaron Rodgers is next with four, and the most recent winner is Josh Allen, who took the MVP for the 2024 season at NFL Honors in February 2025.

The award here is the Associated Press NFL MVP, the one treated as the league’s official version. It has gone to a quarterback in the overwhelming majority of recent seasons, and the multiple-winner list is almost entirely passers. Below are the recent winners by season and every player who has won it more than twice.

Recent NFL MVP winners by season

Here are the AP NFL MVP winners for the 2015 through 2024 seasons, each presented at NFL Honors the following February.

Season	Winner	Team	Position
2024	Josh Allen	Buffalo Bills	Quarterback
2023	Lamar Jackson	Baltimore Ravens	Quarterback
2022	Patrick Mahomes	Kansas City Chiefs	Quarterback
2021	Aaron Rodgers	Green Bay Packers	Quarterback
2020	Aaron Rodgers	Green Bay Packers	Quarterback
2019	Lamar Jackson	Baltimore Ravens	Quarterback
2018	Patrick Mahomes	Kansas City Chiefs	Quarterback
2017	Tom Brady	New England Patriots	Quarterback
2016	Matt Ryan	Atlanta Falcons	Quarterback
2015	Cam Newton	Carolina Panthers	Quarterback

Ten straight quarterback winners is not a fluke. As passing has come to decide games, voters have leaned almost entirely on the position, and a running back has not won since Adrian Peterson in 2012.

Every multiple NFL MVP winner

Here are the players who have won the AP NFL MVP more than twice.

Wins	Player	Seasons
5	Peyton Manning	2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2013
4	Aaron Rodgers	2011, 2014, 2020, 2021
3	Jim Brown	1957, 1958, 1965
3	Brett Favre	1995, 1996, 1997
3	Johnny Unitas	1957, 1959, 1964
3	Tom Brady	2007, 2010, 2017

Manning sits alone at the top. Below Rodgers, four players share three wins each, and only one of them, Jim Brown, was not a quarterback. Brett Favre’s three came in three straight seasons, a run only Brown and Manning otherwise approached.

Manning’s five, and how he got there

Peyton Manning’s five MVPs are spread across a decade and two franchises. He won back-to-back with the Indianapolis Colts in 2003 and 2004, added two more in 2008 and 2009, then took a fifth with the Denver Broncos in 2013, the season he threw a then-record 55 touchdown passes.

That spread is what makes the record hard to match. It required Manning to stay at an elite level across roughly 11 seasons, through a neck injury that cost him all of 2011 and forced a mid-career move to Denver. For the championship side of his career and his peers, see our list of the most Super Bowl wins by a quarterback.

Two-time winners and the near misses

A cluster of quarterbacks sit on two MVPs, including Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Joe Montana, Steve Young and Kurt Warner. Mahomes and Jackson are the youngest of the group and the most likely active players to climb toward the three- and four-win tiers if their primes hold.

The list also shows how close the award runs. Manning’s 2003 MVP was a tie with Steve McNair, and Favre’s third came in a shared 1997 vote with Barry Sanders. A single voting bloc has decided more than one of these seasons, which is why the multiple-winner list looks the way it does rather than being spread wider.

What the AP MVP is, and what it is not

The AP MVP is voted on by a panel of 50 national media members, each casting a single ballot after the regular season. It is separate from the Super Bowl MVP, which is decided by a game rather than a season, and from other outlets’ player-of-the-year awards. When people say a player “won MVP,” they almost always mean this one.

Because the vote closes on the regular season, postseason performance does not factor in, and the winner is revealed before the Super Bowl is played. For the college version of the honor, see our list of Heisman Trophy winners, and test your roster recall with our Guess the NFL Player game. Five MVPs is the record, and no active player is past two.