How Forbes estimates what an athlete earns — and what the estimate cannot include

Almost every "how much does X earn per second" figure on the internet traces back, eventually, to one of a small number of annual estimates. For athletes that is usually Forbes' World's Highest-Paid Athletes. It is worth knowing how that list is assembled, because the properties of the estimate become the properties of every counter built on top of it.

What the number is

The 2026 list covers income collected between 1 May 2025 and 1 May 2026 — a rolling twelve months, not a calendar or fiscal year. The figures are before taxes and before fees paid to agents. Forbes is explicit that these are estimates rather than audited figures, and that they move from year to year.

Each total combines two components. On-field earnings cover salaries, prize money, fight purses, bonuses and, for some footballers, club-based image-rights agreements; Forbes rounds these to the nearest $100,000. Off-field earnings cover endorsements, licensing and business ventures. For the top of the 2026 list the split is stark: of Cristiano Ronaldo's estimated $300 million, roughly $235 million is his Al Nassr contract and $65 million everything else.

The sourcing is a mixture. Forbes describes working from conversations with industry executives, agents and other insiders, alongside news reports and public salary databases such as Capology, Over the Cap and Spotrac. Figures in other currencies are converted at current exchange rates.

What it therefore cannot be

Being pre-tax and pre-agent means the figure is not what anyone receives. Both deductions are substantial, and they vary by country, sport and income type, so there is no single multiplier that converts one into the other. A counter built on the headline figure is describing gross money attached to a name, not spending power.

Being an estimate assembled partly from private conversations means it cannot be independently verified line by line. This is not a criticism — contract terms in most sports are not public, and a defensible estimate is more useful than no figure at all. But it does mean two careful outlets can publish different numbers for the same athlete and neither be wrong, and it means the right way to cite the figure is "Forbes estimates X", never "X earns".

Being a rolling twelve months means it will not line up with anything else. A club's financial year, a tax year and a sponsor's contract year all start elsewhere. Comparing a Forbes athlete figure with a company's fiscal-year revenue puts two differently-bounded periods side by side.

The four people on this site, and why only four

This site runs per-second counters for twenty people. Four of them are indexed: Cristiano Ronaldo at $300 million, Lionel Messi at $140 million, LeBron James at $137.8 million and Lewis Hamilton at $100 million — ranks one, three, four and ten on the 2026 Forbes list. Each page names the list, its year, the period it covers and the figure as Forbes prints it.

The other sixteen are not indexed, and the reason is worth stating because it is the same reason a lot of celebrity-earnings content on the internet cannot be checked.

The list that stopped

Forbes published the Celebrity 100 — its ranking of the highest-paid entertainers — annually from 1999. The final edition appeared in June 2020. There has not been one since.

That matters more than it sounds. Figures still circulate widely for musicians, actors and media personalities, and they are still attributed to Forbes, but there is no current annual list to point at. Eight of the people pages here fall into that gap. Their previous source field read "Forbes, Celebrity Net Worth estimates" and pointed at a section index — two outlets and a genre, aimed at a page that states no figure at all. That vagueness was not sloppiness so much as a symptom: the field was vague because there was nothing specific to name.

Four more pages have a different problem. Counters for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are built on changes in net worth, which is not earnings in any sense a payroll would recognise. Net worth moves when share prices move; no money changes hands, and there is no published annual figure of the right kind to cite. The remaining four are athletes outside the part of the Forbes ranking published free of the paywall, or in Roger Federer's case retired since 2022 and off the list entirely.

What to ask of any figure like this

Three questions separate a citable estimate from an uncheckable one, and they work on any source, not just this genre. Which specific document states the figure — not which publication, which document. What period does it cover. And does the publisher call it reported or estimated.

An estimate that answers all three is perfectly usable; "Forbes, The World's Highest-Paid Athletes 2026, $300 million, for the twelve months to 1 May 2026, an estimate" is a claim a reader can go and check. One that answers none of them is not a weaker version of the same thing. It is a different kind of statement, and the honest response to it is to leave it out.