Highest-Paid Female Athletes 2025: Top 15 All Make $10M+

December 3, 2025

Money is pouring into women’s sports, with athletes in basketball, hockey, soccer, softball and volleyball reaping the rewards. But the top tier of the world’s highest-paid female athletes is dominated by tennis, as it has been for decades.

The 15 top-earning female athletes in 2025 include 10 tennis players, up from nine last year, plus a pair of golfers and one each from basketball (Caitlin Clark), gymnastics (Simone Biles) and skiing (Eileen Gu).

Tennis star Coco Gauff leads the way for the third straight year with $31 million, a tick ahead of her rival Aryna Sabalenka ($30 million). Sabalenka is the fourth woman in sports to earn more than $30 million in a given year, after Naomi Osaka, Serena Williams and Gauff.

Tennis remains the only major professional sport where women’s pay stacks up near par with men’s. WTA Tour prize money trails the ATP, but the money is the same at the Grand Slams and Masters 1000 events. On the sponsor front, six women earned at least $10 million off the court, versus four active men at $10 million-plus.

Gauff made an estimated $23 million off the court on top of her $8 million in prize money. In April, she launched Coco Gauff Enterprises in conjunction with talent firm WME to manage her career after seven years aligned with Roger Federer’s agency, Team8. WME does not have any ownership in the business.

Gauff’s most lucrative endorsement deal is with New Balance. The Boston-based brand first signed her when she was 14 and redid the contract in 2022 to make it one of the richest in the women’s game. The top-ranked American player has a deep endorsement roster of more than a dozen partners that also includes Baker Tilly, Bose, Head, Rolex, Mercedes-Benz and Chase Bank.

Sabalenka lost the Australian Open and French Open finals before emerging victorious at the U.S. Open, as well as two WTA 1000 tournaments. The U.S. Open win was worth $5 million, up from $3.6 million in 2024, and it helped push her total prize money for the year to $15 million. It smashed the previous record set in 2013 when Serena Williams won $12.4 million. At $45.2 million, Sabalenka is up to second all-time in WTA career prize money, but she has some work to catch up with Williams’ $94.8 million. Sportico