How Much Money Do Professional Badminton Players Make?

It might be surprising to some people that badminton players can make quite a bit of money. While badminton may not be as lucrative as some other sports like basketball or soccer, top badminton players still have net worths in the tens of millions.

Badminton players create wealth in several ways - such as through sponsors/funding, prize money, advertisements, and their own businesses. In this post, we will be focusing on just prize money since all of the other categories don’t have publicly available information for us to look up.

What we did was look at the top 2 players/teams in each badminton discipline and calculated how much prize money they earned in 2019. We have a summary below of all the players/teams sorted by most prize money and then we broke down how they made the money in the sections below.

Here are the details on a per player basis.

Wow, that’s a lot of money! Kento Momota leads the charge with $531,125 in tournament winnings. You can also think of the prize money as a rough indication of how dominant the players are in their respective disciplines. For example, Kento Momota is very dominant in men’s singles while Tai Tzu Ying is less dominant in women’s singles as shown by the prize money difference.

Keep in mind that all of this data is pre-tax money and that the prize money split is the same between the two different singles disciplines and is also the same between the three doubles categories. The doubles categories has a larger pot than the singles’ pots but will have to be split any prize money between two players.

If you would like to see how prize money is broken down, take a look at BWF’s official document here. And below, we have a table indicating the level of the tournaments. Lastly, also keep in mind that not all tournaments have prize money, such as the BWF World Championships, but is extremely prestigious. We wrote all about the most prestigious tournaments that players all over the world want to win in What are the Most Prestigious Badminton Tournaments? We also wrote about the BWF World Tour and how much money is in the prize pools in Major Badminton Tournaments and Prize Money, the BWF World Tour Explained.

Men’s Singles Rank 1: Kento Momota

Women’s Singles Rank 1: Tai Tzu Ying

Men’s Doubles Rank 1: Marcus Fernaldi Gideon/Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo

Women’s Doubles Rank 1: Chen Qing Chen/Jia Yi Fan

Mixed Doubles Rank 1: Zheng Si Wei/Huang Ya Qiong

Men’s Singles Rank 2: Chou Tien Chen

Women’s Singles Rank 2: Chen Yufei

Men’s Doubles Rank 2: Hendra Setiawan/Mohammad Ahsan

Women’s Doubles Rank 2: Yuki Fukushima/Sayaka Hirota

Mixed Doubles Rank 2: Wang Yi Lyu/Huang Dong Ping