Cycling prize money

What a race is obliged to pay covers a different span on each of the three kinds of row, so the table says which beside every figure. A one-day race is priced as a whole race. A grand tour is given one figure covering its stages and its general classification together. Every other stage race is priced per stage, and the figure is what one stage of it owes.

Three races on the calendar are handled differently from the other twenty-two stage races. Instead of a per-stage rate they are given one figure covering the stages and the general classification together, and they negotiate their team allowances rather than take them off the scale. The Tour de France is obliged €1,000,000 of the €2,700,000.

Tour de France prize money carries the ladder place by place, and Tour de France Femmes prize money carries the women's. The men's against women's comparison puts all twenty paired races side by side.

Every Women's WorldTour stage race carries a stage count, so this is the one calendar of the two that adds up to a season. The thirty-six men's races cannot be totalled the same way: the stage counts for the twelve men's stage races outside the grand tours are not on the scale, and a total built on a guessed one would be a number nobody could check. The fifteen one-day races all pay the same €7,700, so the bottom of the table is one figure repeated fifteen times.

The Tour de France alone is obliged €1,000,000, which is 2.4 times what the twenty-five races above are obliged between them, and the three grand tours together are obliged €2,700,000, or 6.4 times it. Nothing on the women's calendar comes near it: the largest obligation on it is the €53,055 for a nine-stage race, which a men's WorldTour stage race passes in six stages.

Belgium holds sixteen of the 61 races, 26% of the calendar and more than any other country. Eight of the fourteen hold two races or fewer, so the WorldTour is a European calendar with a handful of long-haul rounds at either end of the season.

The calendar opens with the Women’s Tour Down Under on 17 January and closes with the Tour of Guangxi on 18 October. March and April hold twenty-seven of the 61 races between them, 44% of the season in two months, and July holds one: the grand tour takes the month to itself.

Four contributions are charged on top of every prize an organiser puts up and two are deducted from it before the rider sees it. So the €20,000 for a race group 1 win is not one figure but three: what the organiser pays out, what the scale prints, and what reaches the rider.

The whole UCI prize money scale names all six contributions and works them at every rung of every ladder, and what a cycling team is paid, and pays covers the side of the money that never passes through a prize at all.

Where to next

The whole UCI prize money scale holds all thirty-two ladders place by place, which is every figure the 61 races above are paid from. Men's against women's prize money takes the twenty races that run on both calendars and puts them side by side. World Championships prize money is the one place the two scales pay the same figure at elite level. What a cycling team is paid, and pays covers the participation allowances and the registration fees, which is the money that reaches a team without ever being a prize. And what a professional cyclist is paid is the other question entirely, because none of the figures above is a salary: the median WorldTour rider earns more in a year than any one race on this page is obliged to pay its winner.