The total 2026 Wimbledon prize fund is a record £64,200,000, up 20 per cent on the £53,500,000 awarded the year before. The men’s and women’s singles champions each receive an equal £3,600,000 for winning the tournament outright, the largest single cheque in the sport. Even a player eliminated in the very first round of the singles draw still receives £80,000, before a single match of the second round has been played.
The 2026 prize fund: a record £64.2 million
The total 2026 fund comes to £64,200,000, made up of £62,550,000 across the tennis events themselves and an estimated £1,650,000 in player per diems. That is up from £53,500,000 in 2025, a rise of £10,700,000, and the largest single-year increase in the tournament’s history.
“I am delighted to announce a total prize money fund of £64.2 million for The Championships 2026, a very significant increase of 20% from £53.5 million,” said Deborah Jevans CBE, Chair of the All England Club, announcing the figures. The increase followed sustained pressure from players across the tour for a larger share of Grand Slam revenue, and the AELTC frames it as a deliberate, significant step rather than a routine annual adjustment.
To put the scale of the rise in context, the £10,700,000 single-year increase is close to half of the entire prize fund on offer as recently as 2013, when the total pool stood at £22,500,000. Few sports move that quickly on player pay.
Alongside the cheque, each singles champion also keeps a three-quarter size replica of their trophy, as the originals never leave the All England Club. Our Wimbledon trophy guide explains why.
Singles prize money by round
Here is what each round of the singles draw pays, from a first-round exit through to the champion’s cheque.
| Round | Prize money | Change vs 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Winner | £3,600,000 | +20% |
| Runner-up | £1,800,000 | +18% |
| Semifinalist | £900,000 | +16% |
| Quarterfinalist | £480,000 | +20% |
| Fourth round | £300,000 | +25% |
| Third round | £185,000 | +23% |
| Second round | £126,000 | +26% |
| First round | £80,000 | +21% |
Each singles event totals £23,632,000, and the men’s and women’s singles draws together account for £47,264,000, roughly three quarters of the entire tennis events fund.
That concentration is deliberate rather than incidental. Singles tennis draws the largest television audiences and the largest crowds on the show courts, and the AELTC’s prize structure reflects that directly in how the overall fund is split between events.
The percentage increases are not spread evenly across the draw. The biggest rises sit in the early rounds: second round money is up 26 per cent and fourth round money up 25 per cent, both larger increases than the winner’s own 20 per cent rise. That pattern is deliberate. It continues the AELTC’s stated policy of supporting players who exit early, for whom Grand Slam prize money is a much larger share of annual income than it is for the game’s top earners. It is a redistribution as much as an increase, weighted toward the players ranked outside the top fifty who make up the bulk of every draw.
What each match is worth
The table above shows what each round pays. This one shows something more specific: what a single match is worth to the two players walking on court.
| Winning this match | Guarantees | Additional to a loss |
|---|---|---|
| First round | £126,000 | £46,000 |
| Second round | £185,000 | £59,000 |
| Third round | £300,000 | £115,000 |
| Fourth round | £480,000 | £180,000 |
| Quarterfinal | £900,000 | £420,000 |
| Semifinal | £1,800,000 | £900,000 |
| Final | £3,600,000 | £1,800,000 |
Watch a quarterfinal on Centre Court, and each player is competing for a semifinal place worth £900,000, with £420,000 separating the winner from the loser in that single match. On finals day, the gap between champion and runner-up is £1,800,000, the largest single-match swing in the sport.
Keith Prowse Travel sells reserved show court seats for the specific rounds where those sums are decided, from the early days of the first week through to the final itself. If a particular stage of the draw has caught your attention here, that is also the session our packages are built around.
Quarterfinal day in particular tends to offer the best balance of stakes and availability: the draw has narrowed to genuine contenders, but demand and pricing have not yet reached the levels seen on semifinal or finals weekend. Semifinal day carries the single largest jump anywhere in the tournament, the £900,000 gap between reaching the final and falling one match short of it.
Doubles, mixed doubles and qualifying
Doubles and mixed doubles prize money is paid per pair, not per player, and qualifying money is earned before the main draw even begins.
| Round | Doubles (per pair) | Mixed doubles (per pair) | Qualifying (singles) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winners | £760,000 | £148,000 | n/a |
| Runners-up | £380,000 | £74,000 | n/a |
| Semifinalists | £190,000 | £37,000 | n/a |
| Quarterfinalists | £95,000 | £19,000 | n/a |
| Third round | £48,000 | n/a | £50,000 |
| Second round | £29,000 | £10,000 | £32,000 |
| First round | £18,000 | £5,200 | £20,000 |
A player eliminated in the first round of qualifying, before The Championships proper have even begun, still receives £20,000. That figure alone tells you how significantly the qualifying event has grown as a piece of the wider prize pool, and it is money earned before a single point is played on the main show courts.
Total prize money across the qualifying competition alone now stands at £6,200,000, up 25 per cent on 2025 and roughly a quarter of the entire figure on offer at Wimbledon barely a decade ago. Doubles pairs split their winnings between the two players, so the figures in the table above represent the team’s total, not what either individual takes home.
Wheelchair and quad events
| Round | Wheelchair singles | Quad singles | Wheelchair doubles (per pair) | Quad doubles (per pair) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Winners | £82,000 | £82,000 | £36,000 | £36,000 |
| Runners-up | £43,000 | £43,000 | £18,000 | £18,000 |
| Semifinalists | £29,000 | £29,000 | £11,000 | £11,000 |
| Quarterfinalists | £20,000 | £20,000 | £6,500 | n/a |
| First round | £12,800 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
The wheelchair and quad singles events received a 21 per cent increase this year, the largest percentage rise of any event category in the entire prize fund, ahead even of the early rounds of the main singles draw. Wimbledon’s wheelchair draws have grown substantially in recent years, with the singles fields expanding to make room for more competitors, and prize money increases have tracked that growth rather than lagged behind it. Wheelchair and quad doubles are paid per pair, the same structure used for the able-bodied doubles and mixed doubles events.
Equal prize money since 2007
Wimbledon has paid its men’s and women’s singles champions equally since 2007. Before that, the gap was real, if narrowing year on year. In 2006, the men’s champion received £655,000 against £625,000 for the women’s champion, a difference of £30,000, down from a much wider gap in earlier decades.
Wimbledon was the last of the four Grand Slams to equalise prize money across the board. The US Open had done so in 1973, the Australian Open in 2001, and the French Open in 2006, the year before Wimbledon followed. The change applied to every round of both singles draws at once, not just the final, and it has held without exception in every year since. Doubles and mixed doubles events had already reached parity by that point, which left the singles draws as the last piece of the puzzle.
How the prize fund has grown
The scale of the increase becomes clearer against the tournament’s own recent history. The total fund was £25,000,000 in 2014. Twelve years later, in 2026, it stands at £64,200,000, more than double.
That growth has not been a straight line. The 2021 total was lower than 2019, the only decline in the modern era, a direct consequence of the pandemic. The 2020 Championships were cancelled outright, and no prize money was contested that year. Instead, the AELTC distributed £10,000,000 to the 620 players who would have competed, funded through the Club’s own pandemic insurance policy, a payment made outside the normal prize structure entirely.
Wimbledon first paid prize money in 1968, at the start of the Open Era, when professional players were permitted to compete for the first time. The men’s singles champion that year, Rod Laver, received £2,000. The fund has grown from there into the largest single-tournament prize pool in tennis, a rise of more than thirty thousand per cent across just under six decades.
Seeing it decided in person
Every figure above is decided on court, round by round, in front of whoever is sitting in the stands that day, not in a boardroom afterwards. Keith Prowse Travel sells reserved show court seats for the specific rounds covered in this article, from the early days of the first week through to the final itself, so you can choose exactly which stakes you want to watch play out. Visit our The Championships, Wimbledon page to see which sessions are available.
