How the salary estimates are made

No team publishes what it pays its riders. This site estimates it from three public things — team budgets, results, and the handful of salaries that get reported — with one method applied to everyone, published in full so it can be argued with. Model v0.4 (12 Sep 2026).

The short version

1. WorldTeams spend about 45% of their budgets on riders' wages (UCI figures for 2024: €226.5M of rider salaries across 18 teams against €499M of budgets — 45.4%). The share rises with budget, because staff, vehicles and travel are semi-fixed costs: the UCI's per-team extremes were €27.3M of rider wages on a ~€52M budget (≈52%) and €5.2M on ~€14M (≈37%). So each team's wage pool = budget × a share that runs from 37% at €14M to 50% at €55M (Uno-X 39%, UAE 52%); the league total stays at the UCI's 45%.
2. Reported salaries are fixed. 17 riders have a base salary reported by Gazzetta dello Sport or Cyclingnews in the last 12 months. We use those numbers as-is and subtract them from the pool.
3. The rest of the pool is split among the other riders in proportion to a value score, with an age adjustment and a wage floor.
4. Half of each rider's estimate comes from this within-team split, half from the same split run across the whole WorldTour — so a team leader on a small team isn't over-priced just because his team-mates score little.
5. The team's books balance. Finally, the unreported riders of each team are rescaled so that reported salaries + estimates = the team's wage pool. A team with many reported stars (UAE: €15.4M of its €27M pool is public) has correspondingly less left for everyone else, and the estimates say so.

The value score

VP = 0.6 × PCS points 2026 + 0.4 × (career PCS points ÷ pro seasons), where pro seasons = age − 19 (minimum 1). Blending this year with a career average keeps an injured or quiet star (Bernal, Roglič) from being priced like a domestique after one bad season.

Weight = VP1.15 × age factor. Salaries are more top-heavy than points, hence the exponent above 1. Age factor: under 23 → 0.75 (first and second contracts are cheap), 23–25 → 0.9, 26–32 → 1.0, 33–35 → 0.9, 36+ → 0.8.

Floors — what a roster place actually costs. Points alone price experienced domestiques absurdly low (a Grand Tour helper who never scores would land near the UCI minimum), so every rider gets a floor that reflects what WorldTeams actually pay for the job, scaled by team budget ((budget ÷ average budget)0.5, from 0.77 for the smallest budget to 1.33 for the largest): €50k for riders under 23 (UCI neo-pro minimum is €35,721 employed / €58,582 self-employed), €80k for 23–25-year-olds on a second contract, €120k for experienced domestiques (5+ seasons or 800+ career points), €160k for established pros with 5+ seasons and 1,500+ career points. On UAE that last floor is €213k; on Uno-X €123k. About a fifth of the peloton sits at its floor — that is the honest output for riders whose job doesn't score points. Riders under 23 without a reported salary are capped at €2.0M. Stagiaires are excluded.

Calibration against what the UCI publishes

What the estimate is and isn't

• It is a base salary for the 2026 season in euros, gross. It excludes bonuses (a Grand Tour stage is typically €20–100k, a Monument €50–500k), prize money, image rights and personal sponsors. For a star, total income can be 30–50% above base.
• Typical error on one rider is ±40%, shown as the "likely range" on each rider page. The method is much better at the shape of a team's wage bill than at any individual inside it.
• Team budgets are themselves journalistic estimates with ranges (see Sources). A team whose budget is off by 20% has every unreported salary off by 20%.
• PCS points reward winners; a super-domestique's value to his team is under-measured here. That's why the "weakest value" ranking needs reading, not just sorting.
• Employed vs self-employed status (43% / 57% of the peloton), tax residence (Monaco, Andorra) and the different cost of a neo-pro versus an established domestique are only partially captured.

Agencies

Agency attributions come from the agencies' own published rosters (FirstCycling's agency pages compile most of them), from agency websites, and from press reports naming a rider's agent. Each attribution carries a confidence (high = agency's own roster; medium = press report; low = single indirect source) and a source, shown on the rider page. 170 riders are unknown: not found on any published roster. "Family" and "self-represented" are real answers.

Contracts

Contract end years come from ProCyclingStats as of 13 September 2026, corrected with official team announcements where we found them (the source is linked on the rider page). "No contract for 2027" means PCS lists the current deal ending in 2026 and we found no announced extension — it does not mean the rider is leaving.

Prize money — generated, not kept

Each rider page shows the prize money attributed to him by ProCyclingStats for the 2026 season, summed across all WorldTour and ProSeries races to 12 September 2026 (races without published prize lists, and lower-category races, are not counted, so the true figure is slightly higher). PCS assigns prizes by result — the stage winner "earns" the stage prize, the GC winner the GC prize.

That is not how the money is paid out. In professional cycling prize money is pooled and divided among the team's riders, and at most teams also with the staff — mechanics, soigneurs, drivers — according to each team's own key; there is no UCI rule. So "€809k" on Pogačar's page is what he brought in, not what he received. We label it prize money generated everywhere for that reason.

Estimated share received. To show what a rider actually pockets we model the distribution: for every race, the team's total prize money (PCS) is split equally among the riders the team started in that race (PCS start list), after 15% set aside for the staff on the race. Three simplifications: (1) equal split — most teams do this, some weight it; (2) a flat 15% staff share — real keys run from about 10% to 20%, or a fixed "share" per staff member; (3) no leader waivers — when a leader gives his share to the helpers (Pogačar and Vingegaard have done this after Tour wins), the helpers' figure is higher than shown and the leader's is zero. Deductions (riders' association levy, income tax in the race country) are not modelled. Treat single-rider figures as ±30%; the pattern — helpers of a winning leader earn tens of thousands, everyone else a few thousand — is robust.

Why show it at all? Because of the ratio. The whole men's WorldTour generated about €8M in prizes this season against roughly €271.6M in salaries — under 3%. The median rider's share is 1.0% of his salary; 486 of 528 riders are below 5%. Even the most dominant rider in the world brings his team about a tenth of his own salary in prizes. In this sport you don't get rich by winning; you get rich by the contract that winning earns you. At the bottom of the pyramid the same arithmetic turns harsh: a Continental-team manager's summary is that "you essentially pay to race — win and you might get €800, and after tax, UCI fees and sharing you keep €100."

ProTeams — the second division (model v0.1)

The 422 riders on the 16 UCI ProTeams get the same machinery with four changes. Budgets are thinner-sourced — Tudor, Cofidis, Q36.5 and TotalEnergies have press estimates; for most Spanish and Italian teams our figure is an estimate from roster size and sponsor scale, marked T3 on the Sources page. Wage share uses the same budget-dependent curve, which bottoms out at 36% below €14M; for the smallest teams the floors alone exceed that, and the pool is then set at the floors + 5% — i.e. the UCI minimum wage is what determines a €3M team's wage bill. Floors start from the UCI ProTeam minimum (€35,392 employed; €58,043 self-employed): €30k under 23, €36k on a second contract, €50k experienced, €70k established, scaled by budget between ×0.6 and ×1.6 and never below the minimum. The tier-wide half of the blend is run across the 16 ProTeams, not against WorldTeams — a Tudor leader is compared with other ProTeam leaders. Riders under 23 are capped at €1M. Two reported salaries anchor the tier: Pidcock (€4M) and Alaphilippe (€2M). Team Novo Nordisk is a special case: a mission-funded team whose budget is not spent on buying results, so its pool is floors + 25% rather than budget × share.

Output: €50.4M of estimated wages across ~€137M of budgets; median €54k, mean €119k; 100 riders over €100k, 193 under €50k, 137 at their floor. Expect wider errors than in the WorldTour — ±50% on a single rider — because both the budgets and the reported salaries are scarcer. Agency attributions are not yet collected for ProTeams.

Continental teams are not covered. At that level most riders are unpaid or on expenses, there is no minimum wage, and no roster source we would publish from; a rider directory without money figures is planned as part of the road-to-pro material.

Salaries by season, 2021–2025 (season model v0.1)

The same machinery is run on each WorldTour season since 2021 with that season's rosters (ProCyclingStats), team budgets and reported salaries. Three things are weaker than for 2026. Budgets are press lists (SpazioCiclismo/Gazzetta 2022, tour-magazin 2023, ranges for 2024–25) rescaled so the league total matches the UCI's published aggregate (€379M in 2021, €473M in 2023, €499M in 2024, €570M in 2025; 2022 interpolated). Reported salaries come from L'Équipe (2021), Calcio e Finanza (2022–23, largely a recycled list), Gazzetta (2024) and Cyclingnews (2025). Floors are the 2026 floors scaled by that year's average team budget. Career points are the rider's PCS points up to and including that season. Treat a single rider-season at ±50%; the shape of the league — wage bill, median, how many riders above €1M — is more reliable than any one figure. Riders who have since left the WorldTour get their own page; ProTeam seasons before 2026 are not modelled.

Reproduce it

The model is one Python script and one CSV. Both are in the data download. Run it, change an assumption, tell us where we're wrong: corrections are credited in the changelog.