In a banner year for pro tennis earnings, four players made at least $10 million on the court in 2023. Even adjusting for inflation, that has only happened three other times: in 2012, 2015 and 2019.
All four top earners were men. Leading the pack was Novak Djokovic, who raked in just under $16 million. The 20-year-old Carlos Alcaraz closely followed with $15.2 million, former U.S. Open champion Daniil Medvedev secured $11.5 million, and the emerging Italian Jannik Sinner reached $10.5 million in a breakout year.
The most financially successful woman, Iga Swiatek, just missed the cutoff by pocketing $9.9 million in winnings — almost exactly the same amount she earned the previous year. Aryna Sabalenka, who briefly held the world No. 1 ranking after reaching the U.S. Open final, amassed $8.2 million in prize money.
Last year, Swiatek’s dominance nearly made her the first woman to be the highest-paid tennis player in a single season since 2003. This year, however, the gender pay gap at the top of the sport widened. The top 10 male players collectively earned $84.6 million in 2023, 62% more than the $52.1 million earned by their female counterparts. That disparity is the largest since all four majors introduced equal pay in 2007.
Tennis is still an outlier in the global sports landscape when it comes to earning potential for women at the professional level, as seven of the top 10 highest-paid female athletes in 2023 were tennis players. But there is still considerable work ahead to achieve the plan approved by the WTA last summer to reach equal pay across the tennis calendar by 2033.
Four women cracked the top 10 in tennis prize money for the year. Twenty-one men and 15 women earned at least $2 million on the court.
Male tennis stars benefit significantly from ATP bonus pools, which share additional profits with the game’s top players. Although the WTA once had a bonus pool, it was discontinued back in 2020.
For 2023, ATP Tour players enjoyed two bonus pools: a $1.3 million pool for the five men with the most points at 500-level events, and a substantial $20 million pool for the 30 men with the most points at 1000-level events and the ATP Finals.
In contrast to last season, when roughly $12 million was distributed among the top 12 players in year-end ranking points, this year’s distribution totaled $21.3 million. The formula for calculating the payouts was not disclosed, but those bonuses were game-changers for the sport’s financial elite.
Alcaraz boosted his year-end total by an additional $4.4 million, followed by Medvedev with $2.3 million and Sinner with $2.1 million. Andrey Rublev rounded out the group of players to earn at least $1 million from the bonus pool.
Notably, Djokovic did not receive any bonus payouts, which were predicated on participation in a certain number of Masters 1000 tournaments (the Serb only played four out of nine this season). He had such a huge lead in prize money before the bonus payments, though, that he remained in the top spot. In fact, the entire top 10 rankings stayed the same before and after the additional payouts.
Despite playing in only 12 events, Djokovic’s dominance in those appearances allowed him to win the fifth-most prize money ever in a season. He won the ATP Finals, the event with the most lucrative winner’s prize, as well as three of the four Grand Slams, but still came up well short of his own record of $21.1 million in 2015, or $27.1 million in 2023 dollars.
Alcaraz’s 2023 total ranks seventh all-time. Adjusting for inflation, both his and Djokovic’s campaigns would drop out of the top 10 most successful financial seasons, with the latter’s 2011 and 2012 seasons taking their places.
Despite a horde of exciting young players in both the men’s and women’s games, where the money goes is awfully similar to a decade ago. The top women can’t quite outearn the top men, and none of those men can outearn Novak Djokovic.
