How Golfers Get Paid, Including How Much the Pros Make

In most professional sports, an athlete signs a contract and earns a combination of a salary and a signing bonus. They are employees of the team and receive a W2, just like many of us, when tax time rolls around. 

PGA Tour players, on the other hand, do not earn a salary. The PGA Tour considers its players to be independent contractors. Players who earn tens of millions of dollars receive a 1099 tax form, which is amazing in itself.

Paying for all expenses related to your job is part of being an independent contractor. This means professional golfers pay for their airfare, meals, lodging, tournament entry, and more. Players must often multiply many of those costs by two to pay for their caddie. 

For the most successful players on tour, these expenses aren’t as much of a worry for reasons we’ll detail below. For players who are struggling to keep their tour status, these expenses only magnify the pressure to make cuts and finish high on leaderboards.

According to pgatour.com, the average PGA Tour player earned $1,293,564 in 2024. That number spans from that year’s money leader, Scottie Scheffler, who earned a cool $30,228,357, all the way to the four players who finished tied for 418th (also known as last) with a haul of $2,571.

Each PGA Tour event has a purse, which is the total amount of money paid out to the field of players. Tournaments pay each player by the order in which they finish.

PGA Tour purses for regular events are typically between $8 and $9 million, while elevated events offer $20 million purses. The Player’s Championship offers the largest payout on tour with a total purse of $25 million.

Now that we have some baseline information, let’s take a deeper look into how professional golfers get paid.

As detailed above, professional golfers make a huge chunk of their money by competing in tournaments. The winner’s share is typically 18 percent of the total purse and a top-20 or top-10 finish secures a healthy payday.

In many ways, professional golfers survive and thrive on endorsement deals. The possibilities of what a professional golfer can endorse are seemingly endless. Some examples of industries represented by professional golfers include:

• Golf Equipment
• Clothing
• Financial Businesses
• Auto Manufacturers
• Medical Businesses
• Alcohol
• Technology Companies

A large part of the endorsement deal for a professional golfer includes logo placement and visibility. For example, a company will pay a player a premium to have its logo on their hat or the chest of their golf shirt, which is reported to run as high as $500,000. 

Golf bag logo placement is also a premium location and even caddies can earn some extra money by wearing a sponsored hat or a logo on their shirt sleeve.

Using Tiger Woods as the ultimate example, he earned less than $200,000 on the PGA Tour in 2021 due to injuries. Yet, Tiger managed to earn nearly $62 million that year due to his lofty endorsement deals with Nike, TaylorMade, Bridgestone, Take-Two Interactive Software, Hero MotoCorp, and more.

Larger equipment companies such as Titleist are known to have a base amount for new players of around $200,000. The incentives and actual details, however, are rarely disclosed.

Depending on the endorsement deal, a player may be obligated to attend a certain number of events throughout the year. For a player like Morikawa, who has had sponsors like Omega and Cadillac, this can include appearing at company meetings, golf outings, and more.

Players who don’t have the top lucrative deals are free to earn as they please when it comes to appearances. Companies can contact the player’s agent and arrange for them to attend an array of events from black-tie dinners to company outings.

According to allamericanspeakers.com, players such as Jim Furyk and Fred Couples earn $10,000 or more to attend a single event.

Introduced in 2021, the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program (PIP), was a new way for the PGA Tour to pay players for their impact off the golf course, and that program ran its course, giving way to the Player Equity Program beginning in 2025.

The PIP was a hot topic because the PGA Tour did not provide a clear formula as to how individuals could win the prize money. In the end, the inaugural payout amounted to $40 million dollars spread across the top-10 finishers and it was reported to include aspects such as television coverage, social media, and internet searches, among others. 

The new Player Equiety Program will grant $100 million to players based on their performance in various metrics, including some metrics used to calculate PIP standings.

In 2023, the PGA Tour reported a net loss of $62,119,019 with total revenue of $1.83 billion but over $1.9 billion in expenses. 

With revenue in the billions, there’s no denying that the PGA Tour is a big business. Here are a few of the highlights from the PGA Tour’s 2023 balance sheet.

Let’s take a look at the reported net worth of several top-name PGA Tour players compared to some other big names in the world of sports. The information on this list was obtained from celebritynetworth.com.

The LPGA has come a long way not only in popularity but also in the amount of money professionals earn on and off the course. Here are some statistics from 2024 according to lpga.com.

In 2024, 132 LPGA Tour players earned more than $100,000 and 34 players earned more than $1,000,000.

Jeeno Thitikul won the money list, cashing $6,059,309 in 17 events, while Nelly Korda made $4,391,930 in 16 events.

No matter how you look at it, getting into the world of professional golf takes immense talent and dedication. Once you reach the big show, however, nothing is guaranteed and you need to produce results in order to continue your journey. 

For the top players in the world, golf as a job seems to be a dream come true, but it’s all about sustainability.