World Athletics Relays prize money

Gaborone 2026 put up $558,000 across six events and Guangzhou 2025 put up $529,000, so the two championships carry $1,087,000 between them. $1,067,000 of that was handed over. Every event is worth $93,000, paid eight places deep.

$40,000, and it is paid to the country rather than to any of the four who ran. The ladder runs $40,000, $20,000, $10,000, $8,000, $6,000, $4,000, $3,000 and $2,000 for first down to 8th, the same in all six events.

No, and this is the one World Athletics championship where that is true of the whole programme. Every event here is a relay, so every one of the 87 payments across the two championships went to a federation. 293 athletes ran on a paid team and not one of them appears on a prize list in their own name. How a federation divides a purse between the four who ran the final, and the reserves who ran the heats, is its own business. At the World Championships $70,000 of the same weekend's money would go to an individual; here none of it does.

Eight places. 8th is worth $2,000 and there is no 9th, because eight teams is the whole final. That makes every finalist a paid finalist, which is not true anywhere else in the sport, and it is why $20,000 went unpaid: a final that loses a team to a dropped baton leaves the bottom of its ladder empty.

The United States, on $178,000 from 7 paid finals and 3 titles, out of 23 countries paid at all. 24 athletes ran on those teams. South Africa is next on $136,000 and Jamaica third on $124,000.

No. Jamaica ran 39.62 in the mixed 4 × 100 metres relay in 2026, the first world record the event has had, and took the winner's $40,000 and nothing more. The card is the ladder and there is nothing else on it.

It was the first time the event had been run, and Guangzhou put it on a lower ladder than the other five events: $28,000 to the winners against $40,000, and $64,000 for the event against $93,000. That single ladder is the whole of the $29,000 difference between the $529,000 in Guangzhou and the $558,000 in Gaborone, where all six events pay alike.

Nine rungs of the ladder had nobody on them, and every one of them is a dropped baton. Nine teams failed to finish a final across the two championships, so those finals placed seven teams or fewer and the bottom of the ladder stayed where it was. $1,087,000 was put up, $1,067,000 was handed over, and the $20,000 between them is those nine places.

Paula Sevilla, Marie-Éloïse Leclair and Akani Simbine are at the top of the list, on teams paid $80,000. It ranks teams rather than people: the money belongs to the federation, so four runners off one winning quartet sit level with each other and above a team that finished second. 47 of the 293 athletes ran on a paid team at both championships.