What a cycling team is paid, and pays

The allowance is paid to the team for starting, and it is the same whether the team wins the race or loses every rider on the first climb. It runs on its own scale rather than the prize ladder, and the two do not overlap: a WorldTeam is paid its €8,500 and its riders are then paid whatever they place for.

A team that starts a race short of the maximum number of riders loses 10% of the allowance for every rider missing, so a WorldTeam one rider down is paid €7,650 rather than €8,500. The two Nations Cup classes are the ones nobody is paid for: the scale lists an allowance for a national team and none for a trade team of any level. The grand tours are the one class the UCI leaves open: their allowance is negotiated between the teams and the organiser, so there is no published figure for the three biggest races on the calendar.

What a WorldTeam is paid, by class

Whether the allowances cover the fee

The two calendars land on opposite sides of the same line

Both figures below are the allowances a UCI WorldTeam would collect for riding every race on its own calendar, set against what that team pays to be registered for the season. The men's figure covers 33 of the 36 races: the three grand tours negotiate their allowance and publish nothing, so they are counted separately rather than folded into a total that would then read as covering the whole calendar.

So the two calendars work in opposite directions. A men's WorldTeam starts the season €315,500 down and rides 33 races to recover 89% of it, and everything past that comes from the grand tours, its riders' prize money and its sponsors. A Women's WorldTeam clears its registration inside the first half of the calendar. The difference is not that the women's races pay well: it is that the men's registration fee is 8.3 times the women's, driven almost entirely by an anti-doping contribution of €215,000 against €25,000.

A team applying for a UCI WorldTeam licence for the first time pays a further €22,000 with the application, on top of the €315,500 the season itself costs. The WorldTeam fee rose from €300,500 to €315,500 this season, a rise of €15,000. A Continental team's fee depends on which of the four federation groups its country sits in, running from €7,150 down to €1,430.

A season’s registration, by team type

What the organiser has to house

A stage race pays for the teams’ rooms as well as their prizes

At a stage race the organiser's obligation does not stop at the prize list. It has to accommodate a set number of people per team for the length of the race, and the number is set by the class of race rather than by the size of the team. One-day races carry no accommodation obligation at all.

The Tour de France is the one race obliged to house 26 people a team, one more than the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España. With 15 men's stage races on the WorldTour calendar and 10 women's, it is a standing cost on every stage race organiser in the sport and it never appears in a prize table.

What a race pays to be on the calendar

The organiser’s own fee, set by the class of race and the host federation

A race pays the UCI for its place on the calendar before it pays anybody else anything. The fee is set by the class of race, and below ProSeries level it also depends on which of four groups the host country's federation sits in, so the same class of race costs a Belgian organiser more than a Rwandan one.

A men's ProSeries race and a Women's WorldTour race pay the same €1,500 wherever they are held, and a women's ProSeries race €650. Only the classes below that vary by federation group. Set against the €8,500 such a race owes a single WorldTeam in allowances, the calendar fee is the smallest number on this page.

A men's ProSeries race also pays a supplement of €3,500 on top of its prize ladder, which is what lifts a ProSeries one-day race clear of a Class 1 one on the prize money scale.

Which races pay which allowance

All 61 races on the two 2026 WorldTour calendars

Men’s WorldTour one-day races, €8,500 to a WorldTeam

Men’s WorldTour stage races, €8,500 to a WorldTeam

The grand tours, negotiated

Women’s WorldTour one-day races, €3,600 to a WorldTeam

Women’s WorldTour stage races, €2,400 to a WorldTeam

Where to next

The whole UCI prize money scale holds all 32 ladders place by place, which is the money the riders are paid rather than the money the teams are. World Championships prize money is the one place the men's and women's scales are identical at elite level. Men's against women's prize money puts the twenty paired races side by side. What a professional cyclist is paid is where the team's budget ends up: the salaries it covers, from the highest in the sport down to the minimum it may not pay less than. And cycling is the whole section.