Few investments have performed better in recent years than a women’s sports team. A half-decade after Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis bought the cross-town Aces for $2 million, the WNBA’s defending champions are valued at $420 million, and all of the league’s teams are worth at least $250 million. Meanwhile, NWSL teams are now worth $200 million on average, four years after the $35 million valuation in healthcare entrepreneur Michele Kang’s purchase of the Washington Spirit was thought to be an exorbitant price.
Those advances are gradually trickling down from the ownership suite to the field of play. The WNBA, for instance, more than quadrupled its salary cap this season, to $7 million under the league’s new collective bargaining agreement, from $1.5 million in 2025.
But there’s still a wide gap between the top-earning female athletes and their male counterparts.
For the third consecutive year, no woman ranks among the world’s 50 highest-paid athletes, with top-ranked men’s tennis player Jannik Sinner setting the list’s cutoff at $54.6 million in income over the past 12 months. By contrast, fellow tennis star Coco Gauff led Forbes’ most recent ranking of the world’s highest-paid female athletes with an estimated $33 million in 2025 earnings, consisting of $8 million in prize money and a $25 million haul off the court from sponsorships, appearances, exhibitions and other business endeavors.
The last woman to crack the 50 highest-paid athletes overall was Serena Williams, whose estimated $45.3 million in income for the 2023 list came almost entirely from her brand deals as she transitioned into retirement. And only three other women—all tennis stars—have qualified for the top 50 at any point since 2012: Maria Sharapova, Li Na and Naomi Osaka, whose $60 million in 2021 remains an earnings record for a female athlete. (Following career breaks for her mental health and to give birth to her daughter in 2023, Osaka earned an estimated $12.5 million last year, tied for eighth among female athletes.)
Tennis has long been at the forefront of equal pay in sports, with all four major tournaments paying out the same prize money to men and women since Wimbledon finally made the switch in 2007, despite some lingering disparities at smaller events. It’s no surprise, then, that the sport produced half of last year’s 20 highest-paid female athletes. Meanwhile, just two of the world’s 50 highest-paid athletes overall—Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz—are men’s tennis players.
The pay gap is more glaring in team sports. For example, the NBA’s highest-paid player this year, LeBron James, hauled in an estimated $137.8 million over the past 12 months from his playing contract and business ventures, 11 times the estimated $12.1 million that Caitlin Clark, the highest-paid women’s basketball player, banked in 2025. The difference is even starker when comparing strictly their salaries, whether pitting Clark’s roughly $78,000 from last season or $529,000 this year against James’ $52.6 million in 2025-26.
In soccer, Cristiano Ronaldo’s estimated $235 million in on-field compensation in the Saudi Pro League—pushing his total windfall to a world-best $300 million over the past 12 months—has nothing close to an equivalent for women. Trinity Rodman’s contract extension with Kang’s Spirit, signed in January, reportedly pays her roughly $2 million annually—and that deal required a change in the NWSL’s rules to come together.
In large part, the gap between men’s and women’s salaries comes down to how much revenue each league generates. The WNBA is bringing in an annual average of $281 million over its 11-year national media rights agreements, a huge leap from the reported $43 million average of its previous deals, and teams averaged $33 million in revenue last season, according to Forbes estimates, up 76% year-over-year. Thanks to that growth—and a collective bargaining agreement signed in March that reportedly guarantees players around 20% of gross league revenue—maximum salaries jumped to $1.4 million this season, from about $249,000 last year.
But the NBA lives in a different stratosphere, making nearly $7 billion a year from its media rights deals, with franchises averaging an estimated $417 million in 2024-25 revenue and the league’s CBA giving players around 50% of all basketball-related income. This season, the NBA’s max salaries began at roughly $54 million for veterans and rose as high as Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry’s $59.6 million thanks to player-friendly extension rules. Twenty of this year’s top 50 highest-paid athletes are NBA players, making it the best-represented league on the list by a wide margin. And at $1.3 million, even the NBA’s minimum full-time rookie salary is almost as high as the WNBA’s new max deals.
The NWSL is considered to be a media rights cycle behind the WNBA, generating an annual average of around $60 million from a four-year broadcast package it sold in 2023, and teams allocate a $3.5 million salary cap to rosters of 22 to 26 players. The league did implement an exception in December, however, allowing teams to exceed the cap by up to $1 million to retain “high impact players”—informally dubbed the Rodman Rule because the system was created while the U.S. national team star was flirting with a move to Europe.
When it comes to qualifying for Forbes’ athlete earnings ranking, that extra $1 million might not move the needle much, particularly because the ongoing rise in men’s players’ income means the women are chasing a moving target. But there is reason to believe female athletes’ earnings will grow faster. Deloitte predicts that women’s elite sports will collectively reach about $3 billion in revenue for the first time this year, up 25% from 2025’s $2.4 billion and 340% from 2022, when the figure was under $700 million. Broadcast revenue, meanwhile, is projected to climb 38% year-over-year to $765 million in 2026.
And the gap is narrowing faster off the court. Four WNBA players—Clark, Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese—each make at least $9 million off the court, according to Forbes estimates, comparable to many of their NBA counterparts on the highest-paid athletes list, and all four are still early in their careers. Gauff, the world’s most marketable women’s athlete and a two-time Grand Slam singles champion, is still only 22.
In all, 17 of last year’s 20 highest-paid women’s athletes were still in their 20s while all ten of the highest-paid men’s athletes are over 30—and three are over 40. It takes time to build a global brand, and if Clark and Bueckers are the faces of the WNBA for the next decade or two, the way that James and Curry have been for the last generation of the NBA, their growing sponsor appeal might land them in the earnings top 50 someday. Or perhaps Gauff or the hard-hitting Qinwen Zheng, a Chinese tennis star with her own set of lucrative endorsements, will end the drought.
Regardless, expect women’s sports leagues to continue to serve up serious financial gains.
METHODOLOGY
Information about the methodology Forbes uses to compile the list of the world’s highest-paid athletes—which captures income collected between May 1, 2025, and May 1, 2026—can be found here.
With additional reporting by Brett Knight.
