Liège-Bastogne-Liège prize money

Where the money actually goes

Charted as what each band collects between them rather than what one rider in it gets, which is the view the table cannot give you. The winner takes 40% of the race alone and second place 50% of what the winner does, so the shape looks settled by the top three. It is not. 10th to 20th is eleven riders on €500 each, and between them they collect €5,500 , more than 3rd place is paid alone. That band is 11% of the race, and the winner is paid 40 times what any one rider in it collects.

What it costs the race, and what the rider keeps

Six contributions, running both ways past the same prize

Every prize on this page passes through the UCI's prize money platform, and six contributions are charged against it. Four are paid by the organiser on top of the prize, so they cost the race and not the rider. Two come out of the prize itself. So a €20,000 win costs Liège-Bastogne-Liège €22,364 and reaches the rider as €19,260, a gap of €3,104 between the two ends of the same prize.

The end of career fund is the largest single line and has no equivalent anywhere else on this site: 5% of every prize won in professional road cycling is set aside for riders leaving the sport, and it is charged to the race rather than docked from the rider. Income tax is separate again, is a matter for the rider's own country, and is in none of the figures above.

What a team is paid for turning up

The participation allowance, owed whatever the result

Prize money is not the only thing an organiser owes a team. Riding Liège-Bastogne-Liège is worth €8,500 to a UCI WorldTeam and €3,500 to a ProTeam, before a wheel turns and regardless of where anybody finishes. A team that starts the race a rider short of the maximum loses 10% of that per missing rider. Set against the ladder that is more than 3rd place pays, so a team can finish outside the top 2 and still leave with more than any of the riders it beat.

Every race group 1 classic is paid exactly the same

Five rates cover all 61 races on the two 2026 WorldTour calendars

There is no ladder of races, only a ladder of classes. Five races on the 2026 calendar are race group 1 classics, and the scale obliges every one of them to pay €50,000 for the race and €20,000 to the winner. Nothing in the UCI scale separates Liège-Bastogne-Liège from any of them. What separates them is what the organiser chooses to pay above the floor, and no organiser publishes that.

The three grand tours share the men's stage rate and add a whole-race floor nothing else on the calendar carries: €1,000,000 for the Tour de France, €850,000 each for the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España. Otherwise the one-day figure is a whole race and the stage figure is a single stage, so the two halves of the table are not the same unit. Read down a half rather than across: the men's one-day classics run €50,000 and €40,000 against €7,700 for a women's, and a men's stage €10,000 against €3,930. The whole UCI scale has all 32 ladders, including the ones below this calendar.

Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes, on the same roads

The same organiser, the same week, a different scale

Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes are run by the same organiser over the same roads, and the UCI sets them different floors. The men's race is obliged to pay €50,000 and the women's €7,700, which is 6.5 times. The winners' shares are €20,000 against €1,690, and 20th place is €500 against €130.

Twenty races on the 2026 calendar are run for both, and the gap is the same shape at every one of them. Men's against women's cycling prize money sets all twenty side by side, and finds the one event in the sport where the two figures are identical. Or read Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes prize money on its own.

The other race group 1 classics

Five races on the 2026 calendar are paid on the UCI WorldTour, race group 1 ladder

Around this on the 2026 calendar

What else the men were racing for either side of it

Racing in Belgium

Sixteen of the 2026 WorldTour races are held here, across both calendars

Where to next

The whole UCI prize money scale holds all 32 ladders, from the €50,000 a race group 1 classic owes down to the bottom of the calendar. What a cycling team is paid, and pays covers the participation allowances across every class and what it costs to register a team for a season. World Championships prize money is the one place the men's and women's scales are identical. Men's against women's prize money is the twenty paired races. What a professional cyclist is paid is the salary the riders in this race are on, which is the money they actually live off. And cycling is the whole section.