Bigger budgets, bigger gaps: WorldTour spending hits €663 million
Men’s WorldTour team budgets will total €663 million in 2026, a figure that underlines how expensive the top tier of cycling has become. The numbers were presented at the UCI WorldTour seminar in Geneva in December and were reviewed by La Gazzetta dello Sport, which reported that the data was not released publicly.
What emerges from the figures is a familiar pattern at a new scale. Budgets continue to rise, and rider salaries are rising with them, stretching the gap between the biggest operations and the teams trying to compete on far leaner resources.
Although the men’s WorldTour officially remains a division of 18 teams, the UCI calculations used a group of 20 squads. According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, the study also includes two ProTour teams that, under current rules, are guaranteed entry to all WorldTour events, including the Grand Tours and the major Classics. The expanded sample does not soften the trend line.
Using the traditional 18-team view, total budgets rose from €473 million in 2023 to €570 million in 2025. For 2026, with 20 teams included in the calculation, the combined budget climbs to €663 million. That pushes the average budget from €31.6 million in 2025 to €33.1 million in 2026.
Averages only tell part of the story. La Gazzetta dello Sport suggests that UAE Team Emirates XRG and Visma | Lease a Bike now operate close to €50 million, with Lidl Trek, Red Bull Bora hansgrohe and INEOS Grenadiers around €45 million. The implication is clear: the headline growth is real, but the internal spread is just as significant.
The women’s WorldTour follows the same upward arc. After rising from €46 million in 2023 to €70 million across 15 teams in 2025, the total budget is expected to rise again to €80 million in 2026. That increase comes even as the women’s top tier is set to drop from 15 teams to 14.
Salaries remain the biggest line on the balance sheet. The UCI figures are gross amounts and distinguish between self-employed riders and employed riders, with the employed group accounting for 43 per cent of the men’s WorldTour peloton. The split matters for taxation and social costs, but the direction is the same in both categories.
For 2026, the average salary for self-employed riders is listed at €654,000, up from €636,000 in 2025 and €557,000 in 2023. Employed riders average €384,000, compared with €366,000 last year and €300,000 in 2023. La Gazzetta dello Sport notes that many self-employed riders are based in Monaco or Andorra and tend to be leading riders within teams, which helps explain the higher figure.
At the very top, the numbers become extreme. Tadej Pogacar remains the peloton’s highest-paid rider, earning roughly €8 million a year from UAE, excluding bonuses and personal sponsorships that reportedly lifted his total income to around €12 million this year.
The early move of Remco Evenepoel to Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe, a year before his contract with Soudal Quick-Step was due to expire, is described as reaching football-level money, around €20 million once the buyout and multi-year deal are combined.
The financial picture is also why Jonathan Vaughters has been so outspoken about where cycling is heading. In the Domestique Hotseat Podcast, the EF Education EasyPost CEO recently argued that the sport is trying to operate at a major league price point without major league revenue streams.
“Certainly the biggest cost increase in cycling is the riders' salaries and then all the peripheral, you know, sports science and whatnot that support that goes around that,” he said.
He warned that the biggest budgets inevitably ripple through the rest of the peloton. “A team like UAE… we will spend as much as we need to spend to win everything. Well, that’s going to just bleed out into the rest of the marketplace. That’s going to inflate everything.”
On the income side, he argued that cycling lacks the revenue mix that props up other major sports. “We’re trying to float the entire ship on just sponsorship because these other sources of revenue don’t exist,” he said. “We don’t have collective merchandising. The teams do not receive anything from media rights.”
In other words, the numbers La Gazzetta dello Sport has surfaced are not just a snapshot of growth. They are a pressure test of a system that is getting more expensive, while still leaning on the same single pillar to hold it up.
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