The World’s Highest-Paid Female Athletes 2025
With women’s sports on a financial fast break, the top 20 earners hauled in a combined $293 million this year, up 13% from 2024 and further gains look like a slam dunk.
After Elena Rybakina beat Aryna Sabalenka to win the WTA Finals last month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she didn’t just leave with a trophy. The 26-year-old tennis star also took home the largest single-event prize in women’s tennis history: a $5.235 million check.
But Rybakina is hardly the only one capitalizing on the influx of money and interest in women’s sports.
In November, for instance, LPGA Tour golfer Jeeno Thitikul claimed the CME Group Tour Championship, along with $4 million in prize money, matching the sport’s largest payday ever. And in women’s basketball, stars including Sabrina Ionescu and Angel Reese supplemented their WNBA salaries, capped this year at $249,244, by playing in the upstart winter league Unrivaled, which reportedly paid participants an average of around $220,000 in its inaugural season and has already committed to raising wages in 2026.
Together, the world’s 20 highest-paid female athletes a list that includes Sabalenka at No. 2, Rybakina tied for No. 8, Ionescu at No. 13, Thitikul at No. 14 and Reese at No. 15, along with superstars like No. 11 Caitlin Clark of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever raked in $293 million this year before taxes and agent fees, according to Forbes estimates, which account for both on-field income from salaries and prize money and off-field cash from endorsements, appearances, licensing and memorabilia. That total represents a 13% increase from 2024’s $258 million. Meanwhile, the cutoff for the top 20 is up to $8.1 million, from $6.3 million a year earlier.
Coco Gauff, recently honored on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the sports category, leads the earnings ranking for the second consecutive year, pulling in an estimated $33 million over the past 12 months. While the 21-year-old tennis phenom collected roughly $8 million on the court in a season that featured her second Grand Slam singles title, at the French Open in June, the majority of her money comes from a robust endorsement portfolio that includes New Balance, Bose and Baker Tilly. No other active female athlete tops her estimated $25 million in off-court income.
Gauff, who posted an estimated $34.4 million in total compensation in 2024, is also in rarefied air historically. In the 18 years that Forbes has published a women’s earnings ranking, only two female athletes have had bigger hauls: fellow tennis aces Naomi Osaka, who is tied for No. 8 on the 2025 list at $12.5 million, and Serena Williams, who is excluded from the new list because she retired in 2022 (although she recently had to deny reports that she was mounting a comeback). Both peaked in 2021, with Osaka at $57.3 million and Williams at $45.9 million.
This year, Gauff is one of 14 athletes to surpass $10 million, besting the record of 11 set a year ago. And there could have been two more in eight figures: Because the list is limited to athletes who were active in 2025, Simone Biles, who has not competed since the 2024 Paris Olympics and has not indicated whether she will return for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, was excluded, and Venus Williams was also held off the ranking given her extremely limited schedule, with three tournaments played in 2025 and a total of five over the past two years.
Even without Biles giving the list a gymnast, it features a variety of sports, with four basketball players, two golfers, two skiers and one athlete each from two sports that have never appeared in the ranking: track and field and rugby. As usual, tennis leads the way with ten representatives, but that figure is down from 11 and 12 the past two years, and it’s a far cry from 2019, when the entire top 11 came from the sport.
Despite the momentum across the women’s sports landscape, the top-earning female athletes have a long way to go to catch their male counterparts. No woman has qualified for Forbes’ annual list of the 50 highest-paid athletes overall since 2023, and the cutoff for that ranking rose to an eye-popping $53.6 million this year more than $20 million beyond Gauff’s total. Meanwhile, the combined income of the top 20 men on that list crossed $2.3 billion, approximately eight times the cumulative mark of this year’s highest-paid women.
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