How does the IPL make money?

Mostly by selling the right to show its matches. The BCCI sold IPL media rights for 2023-27 for Rs 48,390 crore. It also sells sponsorships, led by Tata's title deal worth Rs 2,500 crore for 2024-28, and collects franchise fees from the ten teams.

How much does BCCI earn from IPL?

BCCI's annual reports, as compiled by Dataful, put total IPL income at Rs 12,005.55 crore and IPL spending at Rs 6,892.73 crore in the latest year reported. In FY24, the IPL made up Rs 5,761 crore, or about 59%, of BCCI's Rs 9,741.7 crore revenue, according to a Rediffusion report.

How do IPL teams make money?

Teams get a share of the central media-rights and sponsorship pool from BCCI, and they also earn from their own jersey and team sponsors, home ticket sales, merchandise and prize money. For Chennai Super Kings, central rights brought in Rs 430.4 crore of its Rs 622.1 crore operating revenue in FY26.

How much is the IPL media rights deal worth?

Rs 48,390 crore for the five seasons from 2023 to 2027. Disney Star bought the India TV rights for Rs 23,575 crore and Viacom18 (now part of JioStar) bought the India digital rights for Rs 20,500 crore. Together, TV and digital rights in India work out to Rs 107.5 crore per match.

Which is the most valuable IPL team?

Royal Challengers Bengaluru. Houlihan Lokey's 2026 study put its brand value at US$312 million, the highest in the league. In March 2026, Diageo's Indian unit agreed to sell the team to a consortium of Aditya Birla Group, Times Group, Bolt Ventures and Blackstone at an enterprise value of Rs 16,660 crore.

How much prize money does the IPL winner get?

In IPL 2026, champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru received Rs 20 crore and runners-up Gujarat Titans got Rs 12.5 crore, according to Outlook India. Prize money is small next to a team's central rights income.

Did the online gaming ban hurt the IPL?

Yes, at the margin. The 2025 online gaming law banned real-money games and their advertising. Dream11 ended its India jersey deal, and D&P Advisory estimated that Rs 1,500-2,000 crore a year in advertising and sponsorship spend was wiped out.

How IPL Makes Money: The Business of Cricket

The short answer: The IPL makes money by selling about two months of cricket to broadcasters, sponsors and fans. The BCCI owns the league. It sells the TV and streaming rights and the league-wide sponsorships, then shares about half of that central pool with the ten team owners. Teams add their own income from jersey sponsors, tickets and merchandise. Their biggest bill is player salaries, which a cap keeps in check.

Key numbers
IPL media rights, 2023-27 (all packages)	Rs 48,390 crore [1]
India TV + digital value per match	Rs 107.5 crore [12]
Title sponsorship, Tata Group, 2024-28	Rs 2,500 crore [3]
IPL income, latest BCCI annual report figures	Rs 12,005.55 crore [16]
Paid out to the ten teams, 2023-24	Rs 4,578 crore [15]
Team salary cap, 2026 season	Rs 151 crore [4]
IPL business value, 2026 (Houlihan Lokey)	US$20.6 billion [10]
RCB sale, March 2026 (enterprise value)	Rs 16,660 crore [7]
IPL 2026 reach across TV and digital	Over 1.2 billion [8]

One league, ten shops, one landlord

The IPL is not a company you can buy shares in. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) owns and runs it. The ten teams are franchises: their owners pay the BCCI for the right to field a side, much as a restaurant chain’s franchisee pays for the brand.

That makes the business work on two levels:

The league (BCCI) sells everything that belongs to the whole tournament: broadcast rights, the title sponsorship, league-wide partners and the playoff tickets.
The teams share in that central money, and also run their own small businesses: jersey sponsors, home-match tickets, merchandise, and events.

Think of the BCCI as a mall owner. It builds the mall, brings in crowds and sells the giant hoardings. The ten teams are anchor stores that pay rent, share the mall’s earnings, and keep what they sell themselves.

The big cheque: media rights

What was sold, and to whom

In June 2022, the BCCI ran a three-day e-auction for the IPL’s media rights for the five seasons from 2023 to 2027. The final total was Rs 48,390.32 crore [1]. The rights were cut into four packages [12][13]:

Package A, TV in the Indian subcontinent: Disney Star, Rs 23,575 crore, or Rs 57.5 crore per match.
Package B, digital in the Indian subcontinent: Viacom18, Rs 20,500 crore, or Rs 50 crore per match.
Package C, a special digital package of about 18-22 marquee matches a season, including the opener and playoffs: Viacom18, at Rs 33.24 crore per match.
Package D, overseas rights: Viacom18 took Australia, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. Times Internet took the Middle East for Rs 205 crore and the USA for Rs 258 crore.

Put together, TV and digital rights in India were sold at Rs 107.5 crore per match [12]. Across all packages, the deal works out to about Rs 118 crore for each of the 410 matches planned over five years (our calculation). The new deal was 2.96 times the 2018-22 deal of Rs 16,347.5 crore [12]. At the time, ESPNcricinfo reported that only America’s NFL earned more per match [12]. In 2026, Houlihan Lokey said the same ranking still held [10].

The buyer is now one company

Reliance’s Viacom18 has since merged with Disney’s Indian media business to form JioStar [28]. The two rivals that bid against each other in 2022 are now one company holding both TV and digital rights. JioStar reported operating revenue of Rs 10,946 crore for April-June 2026, the quarter with the IPL, up 14% from a year earlier. It called the IPL its main engine for winning new customers [31].

How the broadcaster earns it back

JioStar recovers its outlay by selling ad slots and sponsorships during matches, and through JioHotstar subscriptions. For IPL 2026, industry sources told BestMediaInfo that a 10-second TV spot during a regular league match cost Rs 18 lakh. The rate rose to Rs 40 lakh during the playoffs and Rs 50 lakh during the final [30]. That is a 30-second ad in the final for about Rs 1.5 crore (our calculation).

The audience justifies the price. JioStar says IPL 2026 reached over 1.2 billion people and clocked 870 billion minutes of watch-time. The final alone reached over 400 million [8].

Sponsorships: renting out the name and the screen

Title sponsor. In January 2024, the Tata Group kept the IPL title rights for five seasons (2024-28) for Rs 2,500 crore. The BCCI called it the highest sponsorship amount in the league’s history [3]. That is Rs 500 crore a season (our calculation).

Associate partners. In March 2024, the IPL named My11Circle, Angel One and CEAT as official partners for five years, and RuPay for three [5]. Houlihan Lokey reported that these four slots brought in Rs 1,485 crore, 25% more than the previous cycle [11]. CEAT pays to brand the strategic time-out [5].

New categories. Ahead of IPL 2026, the BCCI signed Google’s Gemini as an AI sponsor for Rs 270 crore over three years [26]. Artificial intelligence was a category that did not exist on the IPL’s sponsor list a few years ago.

The central pool: how BCCI shares with the teams

The BCCI pools central income, mainly media rights and league sponsorships, and pays out roughly half of it to the franchises [16]. ICRA, a rating agency, said in a 2024 report that after the BCCI’s share, most of the media-rights money is split equally among the ten teams, with a smaller part paid by league position [9].

The BCCI’s own accounts show the scale. According to The Economic Times (as reported by Cricexec), in 2023-24, the year that covers IPL 2023, the league earned about Rs 11,703 crore, including Rs 8,744 crore from media rights, Rs 2,163 crore from franchise fees and Rs 758 crore from sponsorships. Of this, Rs 4,578 crore was paid out to the teams [15]. That works out to about Rs 458 crore per team on average (our calculation).

Finishing position matters at the margin. Chennai Super Kings’ central rights income fell from Rs 468.5 crore in FY25 to Rs 430.4 crore in FY26. Its annual report linked the drop to finishing 10th in IPL 2025 after finishing 5th in 2024 [19].

Inside a franchise: income and costs

Where a team’s money comes from

Central rights share. This is the bulk of a team’s income. For CSK, central rights made up Rs 430.4 crore of Rs 622.1 crore of operating revenue in FY26, or about 69% (our calculation from [19]). Media Partners Asia (MPA) estimates that media rights now make up about 75% of franchise revenue, up from 48% in 2017 [29].
Team sponsorships. These are the logos on the shirt, helmet and kit. For IPL 2026, principal sponsors included Etihad Airways (CSK), Nothing (RCB), Hero’s VIDA (KKR), Birla Estates (GT) and JK Super Cement (LSG) [37]. The amounts are rarely disclosed.
Ticketing. Teams sell tickets for their home league matches [9]. Playoff ticket sales sit in the BCCI’s IPL accounts, and came to Rs 33.93 crore in the latest year reported [16]. Fans now pay more: from the 2026 season, GST on IPL tickets went up from 28% to 40% [35].
Merchandise and other income. Jerseys, licensing, hospitality and events bring in money, but it is small next to media income.
Prize money. In IPL 2026, champions RCB received Rs 20 crore and runners-up Gujarat Titans Rs 12.5 crore. Rajasthan Royals and Sunrisers Hyderabad, who finished third and fourth, got Rs 7 crore and Rs 6.5 crore [32]. That is helpful, but it is not what makes a team valuable.

Where it goes

Players. Under the IPL’s 2025-27 player rules, a team’s total salary cap includes its auction purse, performance pay and match fees. The cap is Rs 146 crore for 2025, Rs 151 crore for 2026 and Rs 157 crore for 2027. Each playing member also gets a match fee of Rs 7.5 lakh per game [4]. Teams had a Rs 125 crore purse to build squads for the 2026 auction [33]. KKR bid Rs 25.20 crore for Australia’s Cameron Green, the most of any team at that auction [34]. But overseas players’ pay is capped at Rs 18 crore, and anything above that goes to the BCCI’s player development programme [33].
The franchise fee. Older teams pay the BCCI a share of revenue. ICRA reported that RCB pays 20% of its revenue as its franchise fee [9]. The two teams that joined in 2022 paid fixed prices instead. In October 2021, the BCCI awarded Lucknow to RPSG Ventures for Rs 7,090 crore and Ahmedabad (now Gujarat Titans) to CVC-linked Irelia for Rs 5,625 crore [2]. Lucknow’s fee works out to Rs 709 crore a year until 2031, according to the ET report [15].
Staff, travel and operations. Coaches, support staff, hotels, charter flights and marketing all cost money. CSK said its expenses in FY26 rose with higher operating costs and more full-time staff [19].

What is left

The results vary a lot. CSK earned a net profit of Rs 161.6 crore in FY26 [19]. ICRA’s figures show RCB had an operating income of Rs 640.4 crore and a profit of Rs 221.8 crore in FY24 [9]. Mumbai Indians earned Rs 697 crore in revenue and Rs 84 crore in profit in FY25. Lucknow Super Giants, with its fixed fee, lost Rs 72 crore on Rs 557 crore of revenue that year [15]. A fixed cost is heavy in a lean year.

What BCCI makes overall

The IPL is the main source of the BCCI’s money. A Rediffusion report, covered by Storyboard18, said the BCCI earned Rs 9,741.7 crore in FY24, of which Rs 5,761 crore (59%) came from the IPL. The ICC’s share was Rs 1,042 crore and interest was Rs 987 crore [17].

The IPL’s own accounts are bigger, because they count money that later goes to the teams. BCCI annual reports, compiled by Dataful, show IPL income rising from Rs 1,194.73 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 12,005.55 crore in the latest year. IPL spending in that year was Rs 6,892.73 crore, including Rs 76.24 crore of prize money [16]. For the IPL 2023 season alone, the BCCI’s annual report showed an IPL surplus of Rs 5,120 crore, up 116% from 2022 [14].

The BCCI had a surplus of Rs 3,358 crore in FY25. Papers presented to its Apex Council, as reported by Cricbuzz and MyKhel, project Rs 8,963 crore of income and a Rs 6,728 crore surplus for FY26. Rs 3,320 crore was set aside for income tax [18].

What the teams are worth

Houlihan Lokey, July 2026. This US investment bank values the IPL’s whole business at US$20.6 billion, up 11.4%. It puts the IPL’s stand-alone brand value at US$4.3 billion. RCB became the first cricket team with a brand value above US$300 million, at US$312 million. Mumbai Indians (US$264 million), KKR (US$245 million) and CSK (US$244 million) came next. Lucknow Super Giants came last, at US$122 million, and was the only team whose brand value did not grow [10].

D&P Advisory, October 2025. This advisory firm uses a different method and was more cautious. It put the IPL ecosystem at Rs 76,100 crore (US$8.8 billion) in 2025, down 8% from 2024 and down from Rs 92,500 crore in 2023. It blamed the media merger and the gaming ban [27].

Real deals tell the clearest story:

Gujarat Titans, March 2025: Torrent Group bought 67% at an enterprise value of Rs 7,522 crore. CVC kept 33% [22]. CVC had paid Rs 5,625 crore for the team in 2021 [2].
Royal Challengers Bengaluru, March 2026: Diageo’s Indian unit, United Spirits, agreed to sell 100% of the team’s owner to a consortium of Aditya Birla Group, Times Group, Bolt Ventures and Blackstone. The enterprise value was Rs 16,660 crore [7], about US$1.78 billion. The team had cost about US$111.6 million in 2008, and Diageo called cricket a non-core business [20].
Rajasthan Royals, May 2026: A group led by Lakshmi Mittal and Adar Poonawalla agreed to buy the team for US$1.65 billion. The Mittal family took about 75%, Poonawalla about 18%, and existing investors, including Manoj Badale, kept about 7%. The deal includes the Royals’ teams in South Africa’s SA20 and the Caribbean Premier League [21].

Why the model works

A short, packed window. The season runs for about two months, with a match almost every evening. IPL 2026 ran from 28 March to 31 May [19]. A short season keeps demand intense, which lets broadcasters charge a premium for each match.
Shared money keeps teams close. Equal central payouts and a salary cap stop rich owners from simply buying the title. That keeps matches close and fans watching.
Scale that advertisers can’t get elsewhere. A reach of over 1.2 billion [8] in a country where mass audiences are scattered across OTT apps makes the IPL one of the few events that brands see as essential to buy.
Many small slices. One tournament is sold as TV, digital, overseas, title, associate and time-out rights, then sold again by each team.

The cracks

Streaming economics. MPA expects the next media-rights cycle (2028-32) to stay flat at about US$5.4 billion, with the value per match falling 13%, from US$13.2 million to US$11.5 million, as the league moves to 94 matches. It says the current rights holders face cumulative losses of US$1.8-2.0 billion this cycle. In its view, streaming costs are rising faster than streaming revenue [28]. With JioStar as the only big buyer left, there is less bidding pressure [27][28].

The gaming ban. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, received the President’s assent on 22 August 2025. It bans online money games and their advertising, with up to two years in jail or a Rs 50 lakh fine for advertising [24]. Its effect on cricket was immediate. ESPNcricinfo reported that Dream11 and My11Circle together put about Rs 1,000 crore into the BCCI through team and IPL sponsorships, with My11Circle alone paying about Rs 125 crore a year as the IPL’s fantasy partner [23]. Dream11’s India jersey deal, worth about Rs 358 crore for 2023-26, ended [23]. In September 2025, the BCCI replaced it with Apollo Tyres in a deal reported at Rs 579 crore that runs to March 2028 [6][25]. D&P Advisory estimated that Rs 1,500-2,000 crore a year in advertising and sponsorship spend was lost [27].

Ad growth is slowing. MPA says IPL ad revenue grew about 7% a year over the last three seasons, compared with 18% in the previous cycle. Ed-tech and gaming advertisers have left, and the BCCI has banned crypto ads [28].

Player workload. The calendar is already full. In 2025, IPL chairman Arun Dhumal said a 94-match, home-and-away season is the goal for the 2028 cycle. But the planned move to 84 matches in 2025 was shelved because of a crowded schedule: “There’s been so much cricket,” he said. ESPNcricinfo noted that broadcasters see viewership dip mid-season, which they put down to viewer fatigue [36]. More matches mean more inventory to sell, but also more strain on players and audiences.

The jargon, in plain words

Media rights: Permission to broadcast or stream matches, sold in packages by region and platform.
Central rights: League-level income (mainly media and title sponsorship) that the BCCI pools and shares with teams.
Salary cap: The maximum a team can spend on its players in a season, including auction buys, match fees and bonuses.
Enterprise value: What a buyer pays for the whole business, including any debt it takes on.
Brand value: An estimate of what the name and fan following alone are worth. It is different from what a buyer pays for the team.

Lessons for founders

Sell one asset in many slices. The BCCI sold the same matches as TV, digital, special digital and overseas packages. Splitting them brought in more bidders than one bundle would have. Look for the separate buyers hiding inside your one product.
Prefer costs that move with revenue. RCB pays a fee tied to its revenue. Lucknow pays a fixed Rs 709 crore a year and lost money in FY25 [9][15]. Wherever you can, negotiate rent, royalties or licence fees as a share of revenue, not a fixed amount.
Watch your customer concentration. About 75% of team revenue comes from one source, and that source now has one main buyer [28][29]. A law change took out a whole sponsor category within weeks [23][27]. If one customer or one sector makes up most of your income, start building a second leg now.
Share to grow the pie. Equal payouts and a salary cap keep ten rivals close enough to make every match worth watching. In platforms, marketplaces and franchise businesses, keeping your partners healthy is often what keeps the whole business valuable.

An explainer for general reading, based on public records as of 11 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.