Professional tennis has a math problem that nobody wants to talk about: the numbers don’t work for anyone outside the top 100.
I was speaking with a top-80 doubles player at the Miami Open last year who said something that stuck with me. He and his partner had made the finals of a previous tournament, and the split was $20,000 in prize money so $10,000 each. He did the “quick math” on his phone: flights for him and his coach, $3,200. Hotel for the week, $1,800. Ground transportation between courts, hotel, practice facilities, and airport over 8 days, $1500. 10% cut to his coach, $1,000. He looked up and said, “We made the final, and I’m gonna net maybe two grand for the week”.
The combined Uber and local taxi bills for both players was almost $3000. For making a professional tournament.
How Much Do Professional Tennis Players Spend Annually?
Let’s run through the estimated costs of a professional tennis player competing at ATP or WTA 250-level tournaments. You need a coach—budget $50,000 to $100,000 a year for someone competent. Flights, hotels, meals across 25-30 tournaments? Another $60,000 to $80,000. Physio and fitness trainer for injury prevention? Add $30,000. Rackets, strings, shoes, and gear? $10,000. Entry fees for smaller tournaments? $5,000.
We’re at roughly $155,000 to $225,000 in annual costs before you’ve won a single match.
Tennis Doubles Prize Money Breakdown
Now here’s the prize money reality: if you make the doubles second round of a WTA 250 tournament, you and your partner split about $6,000 (or less). That’s $3,000 each. If you win the whole thing, you split maybe $30,000. That’s $15,000 each for winning an entire professional tournament.
At most ATP 250 events, the doubles winners split around $35,000. The runners-up split about $18,000. First-round losers split $4,000.
Which means if you’re a professional doubles specialist playing 25 tournaments a year, making the semifinals on average, you might gross $60,000 to $80,000 annually. After you pay your coach, your travel, your physio, and your taxes, you’re not making a living. You are subsidizing your career.
And this isn’t some fringe complaint from players ranked 500th. These are top-100 doubles players who are genuinely elite at their craft and still operating at a loss.
Even at the US Open, the most lucrative doubles event of the year, an undefeated doubles team splits $1M or $500,000 each. That sounds massive until you realize that’s the single biggest payday in professional doubles tennis and only eight teams qualify for it each year. Everyone else is fighting over the very small purses.
The Prize Money Gap Between Singles and Doubles
The gender pay gap in tennis gets significant attention, and rightly so. But there’s a class structure within tennis that’s just as broken: the gap between singles and doubles, and the gap between top-20 players and everyone else.
At the 2024 Australian Open, the singles champions each took home $2.1 million. The doubles champions split $520,000 or $260,000 each. For context, that’s roughly what the singles player who lost in the fourth round made.
The disparity gets worse at smaller events. At ATP 500 tournaments, the singles winner takes home around $350,000. The doubles winners split $120,000. The singles player who loses in the first round makes more than the doubles team that wins the title.
Why Tennis Doubles Prize Money Stays Low
Tennis tournaments argue that singles sells tickets and drives viewership, so it deserves the lion’s share of prize money. Fine. That’s capitalism. But the current split isn’t reflective of market dynamics; it’s structural exploitation masked as meritocracy.
Doubles matches are used as filler programming on outer courts. They’re scheduled at 11 AM on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching, then tournaments point to low attendance as justification for low prize money. It’s circular logic. You can’t starve something of resources and promotion, then use its poor performance as evidence it doesn’t deserve investment.
Elite Doubles Players Are Going Broke
And here’s the thing that should bother anyone who cares about the sport: many of the best doubles players in the world are broke.
Some elite doubles specialists take on part-time coaching gigs during the season to cover costs. Others rely on family money or endorsement deals that barely move the needle. A few play singles at lower-tier Challenger events just to chase bigger prize money, even though they’re far better at doubles.
The whole system is backwards. Tennis has never been more commercially successful, generating over $2 billion in annual revenue, but the wealth distribution is staggeringly narrow.
Tennis’s Pyramid Scheme Economics
In 2023, the top 10 male tennis players earned a combined $150 million in prize money and endorsements. The next 90 players in the top 100 shared about $120 million. And outside the top 100? You’re probably losing money.
Now add doubles players to that equation, and you see a professional sport that functions more like a pyramid scheme than a meritocracy. A tiny group at the top makes generational wealth while everyone else is churning through savings and hoping for a breakthrough that will probably never come.
What It Would Cost to Fix This
What makes this especially frustrating is that fixing it wouldn’t even require radical surgery. If Grand Slams increased doubles prize money by 50%, it would cost them roughly $15 million annually, a rounding error in events that generate an estimated $400 million to $500 million each. If ATP and WTA 250 tournaments doubled their doubles prize pools, it would cost about $5 million per event. In other words, doubles prize money is being sacrificed for canapé budgets and LED boards.
But there’s no incentive to change because doubles players have no leverage. They can’t threaten to skip tournaments. They can’t unionize effectively because the player pool is too fragmented. They can’t demand better conditions because someone else will always take their spot for less.
The only reason this system persists is because the people with the power to change it, tournament directors, tour executives, and top singles players, benefit from keeping it exactly as it is.
Tennis loves to market itself as a global sport with opportunities for everyone. It’s not. It’s a sport where a tiny elite extracts enormous wealth while hundreds of professional players operate at a loss, funding their careers out of pocket just to keep the infrastructure running for the people at the top.
The ugly truth is that professional tennis isn’t a career path for most people who pursue it. It’s a gamble funded by personal savings and family money, with odds worse than the betting markets that sponsor the tour.
And unlike those betting sponsors, there’s no disclaimer warning players about the risks.
Methodology: Prize money figures are sourced from public tournament payouts. All costs and figures are estimated and vary by player, tournament, and support team.
