Table of Contents
Serena Williams spent the better part of two decades as the richest name in women’s sport. The top of the table looks different now, and the gap between the first five and everyone else keeps widening for reasons that have surprisingly little to do with trophies.
Coco Gauff, still in her early twenties, led the pack in 2024 with total earnings north of $30 million, according to estimates from Forbes and Sportico. Behind her sits a mix of Grand Slam champions, a freestyle skier who competes for China, and a gymnast who can bank eight figures without a full competitive season. The mechanics of how these athletes get paid are worth understanding, because they explain almost everything about where women’s sport is heading.
Coco Gauff and the $30 Million Year
Gauff’s rise has been unusually well timed. She won the 2023 US Open at 19, backed it up with the 2024 WTA Finals title, and by the end of that season had become the first woman other than Williams or Naomi Osaka to top the annual earnings list in years.
What makes her numbers interesting is the split. Roughly $9 million of that total came from prize money. The other $20 million-plus came from a portfolio that includes New Balance, which built a signature shoe around her, along with Rolex, Bose, Barilla, UPS, Naked Juice and Fanatics. She was already a household name before she had a driver’s licence, and brands paid accordingly.
That ratio, roughly 30 percent sport and 70 percent commerce, is now normal at the very top of the game. It is also the single biggest reason tennis players dominate these lists.
Why Tennis Keeps Winning the Money Race
Tennis has four things working in its favour at once. Grand Slam prize purses are enormous, with the US Open singles champion collecting around $3.6 million. The sport has paid equal prize money at all four majors since 2007, when Wimbledon finally fell in line. Players compete as independent contractors, which means they keep control of their own endorsement deals. And the tour runs almost year-round, giving sponsors near-constant visibility across dozens of markets.
Compare that with basketball or gymnastics, where league salary caps and union-negotiated pay structures keep base wages low no matter how famous the athlete becomes. A WNBA rookie in 2024 earned about $76,000. No amount of charisma fixes that number on its own. What fixes it is endorsement income, which is exactly why the modern female athlete’s business team matters as much as her coach.
The Names Currently Near the Top
- Coco Gauff – around $30 million in 2024, with roughly $9 million from prize money and the rest from New Balance, Rolex, Bose and Barilla.
- Iga Swiatek – five Grand Slam titles and a portfolio anchored by On Running, Lancome and Visa.
- Zheng Qinwen – Paris Olympic gold turned her into one of China’s most marketable athletes, with Nike, Rolex, Wilson and Audi on the books.
- Eileen Gu – roughly $22 million, almost none of it from prize money.
- Aryna Sabalenka – the world No. 1 for much of 2024, backed by Nike and Wilson.
- Naomi Osaka – still among the highest earners in the sport years after her last major title.
What stands out is how few of those athletes depend on winning. Osaka has not lifted a Grand Slam trophy since 2021 and still clears eight figures annually. Gu has won Olympic gold twice in a sport most people watch for two weeks every four years.
Eileen Gu and the Two-Market Career
Gu is the clearest example in sport of what a genuinely global brand looks like. Born in San Francisco, competing for China, fluent in both cultures, she won two golds and a silver at Beijing 2022 and immediately became the face of a market that Western athletes rarely reach properly.
Her endorsement list reads like a department store: Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Estee Lauder, Red Bull, Anta and Bank of China. The freestyle skiing prize money she collects in a season is a rounding error next to that. It is the same logic behind any long-running set of celebrity business ventures: the sport creates attention, and the attention gets converted into contracts that outlast the career.
Beyond the Baseline: Golf, Gymnastics and Basketball
Golf has quietly become the second-strongest pipeline. Nelly Korda’s run of five straight LPGA wins in 2024 pushed her into the top ten of earnings lists, with Nike, TaylorMade, Rolex and Delta behind her. Mikaela Shiffrin, who holds the record for most alpine skiing World Cup wins, has built a similar structure on a much smaller television footprint.
Simone Biles sits in the same bracket at roughly $11 million a year, carried by Athleta, Visa, Powerade and United Airlines. Her value is less about competition frequency and more about the fact that she is one of the most recognised people on earth.
Caitlin Clark and the WNBA Pay Reality
Clark’s 2024 rookie season is the best case study in how this works. Her WNBA salary was about $76,500. Her total earnings were estimated at over $11 million, driven by an eight-year Nike deal reported at $28 million, plus Gatorade, State Farm, Wilson and Panini. The league’s new media rights agreement, which starts in 2026, will lift salaries eventually, but no player at the top of the WNBA is waiting on that to get rich.
That imbalance is also why so many players now treat their playing contract as the smallest line item on the spreadsheet and build everything else themselves.
Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka Changed the Blueprint
Williams earned $94.8 million in career prize money, more than any female athlete in any sport. That figure is remarkable and still less than half of what she made off the court. Her portfolio ran to dozens of brands, and her Serena Ventures fund has backed more than 60 startups.
Osaka’s 2021 earnings of $57.3 million stood as a record for a female athlete, most of it from Nike, Louis Vuitton, Levi’s and Mastercard. Both women proved that a female athlete could be a bigger commercial property than a male one in the same sport, and they did it before brands had any benchmark for what that was worth. Follow the playbook athletes use to turn fame into lasting wealth and you can trace most of it back to them.
What’s Actually Pushing the Numbers Up
Three things changed in the last decade. Broadcast rights for women’s sport went from an afterthought to a bidding war, with the WNBA, women’s football in Europe and NCAA basketball all signing deals that would have been unthinkable in 2015. Social media gave athletes a direct audience, so a following became an asset they owned rather than rented from a network. And brands stopped treating women’s sport as a corporate responsibility line and started treating it as reach.
The result is a group of athletes whose earnings look more like tech founders than competitors. Gauff’s team negotiates equity, not just fees. Osaka has her own skincare and media companies. Gu has been an ambassador for brands in three continents simultaneously.
Who to Watch Next
Zheng Qinwen is the most obvious candidate to break into the very top tier. An Olympic gold medal in Paris, an Australian Open final and a Chinese market of 1.4 billion people is a combination no sponsor ignores. Mirra Andreeva, still a teenager, has the game to get there if her results hold.
In basketball, the 2026 WNBA collective bargaining agreement will decide whether Clark, Angel Reese and A’ja Wilson start earning salaries that reflect the league’s actual viewership. A jump from a $200,000 maximum to something in seven figures would change the composition of these lists within two seasons.
And watch golf, where the LPGA’s growing purse sizes and a younger, more online fanbase are starting to produce athletes with genuine crossover appeal. The next name at the top of the highest-paid female athletes list probably has not signed her biggest contract yet.
