F1 Driver Salaries and What the Reported Numbers Actually Mean

Ninety dollars is the first amount a racetrack ever paid me, for a day of teaching, and eleven days went by before the check reached the mailbox. The situation has changed since, although such an improvement is not as significant as outsiders of the industry tend to think. I am mentioning this for a particular reason. That ninety dollars is the only racing salary in this article which I am able to verify, having been the person who signed the back of it, and everything else here is merely an estimation by somebody else.

How much a Formula 1 driver makes is not something that’s readily available. No one reveals the salary. All contracts are made confidential, team representatives decline to comment, and any salary information that gets published comes from paddock sources, from agents in a good mood, or from the occasional leak. That is why this article starts with a warning instead of a table of numbers. Salaries are taken from sources like RacingNews365 and Forbes, and the numbers that differ have been noted.

What the top of the grid is reportedly paid

At the top of the pile stands Max Verstappen, on a salary put at roughly $70 million a year, with a Red Bull deal that is signed through 2028. Lewis Hamilton comes next, and it is at this point that the sources fall out among themselves. Sixty million is the number RacingNews365 gives him. Seventy is what gets printed elsewhere. Neither figure has ever been confirmed by anybody who signed a contract, and neither one ever will be.

Charles Leclerc and George Russell seem to get $34 million each. Foremost, Lando Norris has a few differences in the lists as his figures range from $30 million to much less.

In this group, the grid starts to shrink very quickly. Most of the field range from two million to 13 million and first-timers start from something like half a million. This figure looks trivial on this chart and big nearly everywhere else. All the gaps between these two figures create the plot of the whole article.

Forbes has been placing Verstappen and Hamilton at the top of its earnings ranking for two years in a row. The order between the two of them, however, keeps changing according to what exactly is being counted. Base salary is another story while bonuses, image rights, and personal sponsorship are different from that and can reach the same amount of money as salaries for the biggest names and go beyond that.

This season is going to see twenty-two seats, among which there have been added two through Cadillac. And it is said that twenty of them are worth a million at least. Which is a strange sentence to be writing about a sport where the entry fee, at the level I race, comes straight out of a checking account.

An ever-missing part of any list

Most lists go on without saying anything about the next step, where drivers receive payment based on their position in the race and in the championship, and under some contracts on the constructors’ result as well. Given they are negotiated individually and are never disclosed, this shows why what is written in Forbes differs radically from the figures coming from paddocks.

A bonus for a victory is the element which comes to mind first of all. However, there are more complicated elements of the financial picture. A driver can earn money depending on his team’s place in the standings, or by making appearances in a sponsor’s showroom, or through the use of his own face on a poster he never approved.

The second half of the income is explained by image rights. Endorsements, merchandise sales, personal appearances, as well as the use of a driver’s name, are usually covered by a separate contract, which may be held either by the team or by the driver’s own company. What Hamilton earns away from the track is reported to carry him from $60 million to about $100 million a year. Verstappen has been reducing that gap for several seasons.

So the figure printed next to a driver’s name is only the point at which the counting begins.

What causes the drivers’ salaries not to be included in the total costs

Those teams are working with a limit pertaining to all their expenses. However, they do not include salaries of drivers and three other most-paid members of the team. It was decided to increase the overall limit to $215 million starting from 2026, with some additional expenses included in this limit. However, driver’s salaries remain unconsidered here. This is the reason why one team can pay even $70 million to one driver, while constantly arguing about one hour of the wind tunnel.

Whether such an exclusion makes any sense is the sort of question the paddock enjoys arguing about at length. In its favor the argument is a simple one. Were the carve-out removed, a team would be made to choose between a world champion and an aerodynamics department, and nobody is keen to see that decision taken on a spreadsheet. Against it the argument is equally simple, and it is usually made by whoever has just lost a driver to a bigger budget.

The drivers who pay to be there

At the opposite end of the same sport there exists a tradition which nobody advertises, where the money travels in the other direction entirely. Backing from a sponsor or from a family arrives together with the driver. A seat that would otherwise be given to somebody else is secured by it. Commercial support is the polite name for the arrangement. Inside the paddock a less polite one is used.

I have watched the club version of this many times over. Nothing shameful is involved at that level. It is simply the manner in which the bills are paid. A friend of mine ran two seasons in a car belonging to a dentist who wished to see his name along the side of something fast. The dentist received his lettering. My friend received his seat time, and neither of them complained about the arrangement.

What changes at the top of the sport is the scale of the thing and nothing besides. A junior arriving with fifteen million dollars of backing is purchasing exactly what my friend purchased, namely the chance of being seen. The argument over whether any of that is fair has been running for fifty years without a resolution, and it tends to go quiet whenever one of those drivers turns out to be quick.

Racing money seen from my side of the fence

Every entry fee was split four ways by the endurance team I raced with, and the arithmetic was done on a clipboard. Tire money we argued about in a parking lot afterward, usually in the dark. Our best season cost each of us something north of twelve thousand dollars, paid out of ordinary jobs, and a bad weekend meant the difference came out of a savings account, since no sponsorship budget existed.

Set against twelve thousand dollars a season, a rookie salary of half a million is not a small number at all. It is a life-changing number; the only reason it reads as small is the company which it keeps on the page. How it looks beside Verstappen’s contract says considerably more about the top of the grid than it does about the bottom.

There is a column in an old notebook where I wrote down what every season cost me. Nobody has ever asked to see it, and I have never once been tempted to add up the total of it.

The worst line in that column comes from an August weekend at Road Atlanta, where an engine let go on the Saturday morning and the replacement was taken out of a fund my wife and I had been keeping for a bathroom. The bathroom waited another two years. She has never once brought it up, which is its own kind of sponsorship.

How to read the numbers you see in January

Every January the salary lists are published, and three things are worth holding in mind while reading them. The figures are estimates, assembled from sources who have reasons of their own for the number they give. Base salary leaves out bonuses and personal sponsorship, which for the top five drivers is where most of the money lives. And the lists hardly ever agree with one another, the gaps between them running larger than an entire midfield salary.

None of which makes them useless. It makes them a map, and a map is still worth having when the territory is closed to visitors. I read them every year for exactly that reason, then close the tab and go back to counting entry fees.

As for the ninety dollars, what it bought is still in my memory. Two sets of used tires and a tank of fuel for the trailer, which at the time felt like being paid for something I would have done for free, and which remains the only part of this subject I fully understand.

What readers ask me about driver pay

How much do F1 drivers earn in 2026?

Reported base salaries run from around half a million dollars for a rookie to about seventy million for Max Verstappen. Every figure is an estimate.

Who is the highest-paid F1 driver?

Verstappen by base salary, and by total earnings he and Lewis Hamilton have traded the top spot depending on who counts the bonuses.

Are driver salaries inside the budget cap?

No. Driver pay is excluded, along with the salaries of the three highest-paid team members.

Do any drivers pay for their seat?

Commercial backing still exists, and at every level below Formula 1 it is simply how a season gets funded.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.