Disclosure: Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. See our Privacy Policy for more information.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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.
Max
$531,125
Min
$219,209
Average
$403,222.10
Median
$400,120
Standard Deviation
$101,303.14
Statistics for how much the top 2 players of each discipline make.
Prize money for the top 2 players of each discipline. Rankings as of 7/3/2020.
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.
Thank you for reading! Our most popular posts are our badminton equipment posts, make sure to check them out next.
BadmintonBites is all about honest and authentic badminton content. Every piece of content is reviewed by the 2 BadmintonBites founders who have had over 15 years of badminton experience each in order to ensure that the information is accurate and honest.
The goal of BadmintonBites is to create real value for the badminton community, which is often plagued with subpar or downright false content on the internet. Badminton deserves so much more and we’re here to share our experience and expertise with you. You can read more about BadmintonBites and our purpose on our About Us page.
We would love to have you with us on our badminton journey and we hope to provide you with as much value as possible. Make sure to subscribe to our email list down below for a FREE downloadable PDF in the first email that contains our custom made badminton court and tactics template.
Also, we never spam. Hope to see you there!
Here’s some guides and reviews on badminton products. We update this list whenever we add new equipment content – hope you enjoy!
This is quite interesting to find. How did you collect information for players and their winnings? Do you look for this using script or browse then copy-paste? All the best.
Thank you for your comment Fernanda. The information is completely available on BWF’s website. We don’t use any scripts to get the information, but that is certainly possible.
This is quite interesting to find. How did you collect information for players and their winnings? Do you look for this using script or browse then copy-paste? All the best.
Thank you for your comment Fernanda. The information is completely available on BWF’s website. We don’t use any scripts to get the information, but that is certainly possible.