How Much Do Jockeys Earn?
While I’ve always loved watching horse racing, I’ve still never been able to shake a bit of nervousness when watching a race.
After all, you can have serious accidents in these races.
While at a race recently with a friend of mine, we were talking about this and she said she felt the same sometimes, so we got talking about how much money they must make.
So, I decided to look into the question.
How much do jockeys earn?
In the U.S.A., the median jockey salary is $48,880, with the whole range from $10,000-$270,000. The answer will vary massively between jockeys, and while the best jockeys at the biggest races can earn a potential fortune, most typical jockeys really don’t earn that much.
It’s easy to think of horse jockeys as high rollers when what we see the Kentucky Derby or similarly large races.
There is tons of prize money to be won there and in all the races they compete in.
But the reality is that jockeying is extremely competitive, and most aren’t making all that much.
So, let’s break down how jockeys earn money in different ways, and how much they might expect to earn.
How much does a jockey earn per race?
In most races, there will be a prize pool that is divided between first, second and third place.
Sometimes the prize is divided between the top 5 riders.
Dependent on experience and track record of success, jockeys can earn as little as $28 per race at the lower end of the spectrum.
These are the kinds of races where jockeys get their start, and the prize money is really not very significant.
The top prize in a premier race be as much as $124,000, and sometimes there is a money pool of up to $2,000,000 to be divided between the winners.
What’s known as the “Triple Crown” of American horse racing—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes—can pay as much as $500 even for jockeys that don’t place in the top 5.
Most higher-end jockeys also have agents which will take a portion of their pay.
So, you really have to be at the big races to be earning enough money to live on as a jockey.
Most simply do it for the love of the sport.
How much do jockeys make per year?
Jockeys are different from a lot of sportspeople since they aren’t paid and contracted by a team.
So, they don’t really have a salary as such—they don’t have someone paying them a certain amount each month unless they have a sponsor or some similar arrangement.
Rather, a jockey’s yearly salary can be roughly worked out from how many races they participate in, and how many they win.
They will typically earn a mounting fee for each race (regardless of what position they finish), but the real money comes from prize money.
The average earnings of the top 100 jockeys in the U.S. in 2020 was $3.5 million.
Being a jockey is just like any other gig work, then.
No one is paying them just to be a jockey, and they have to find races to participate in. then, they have to be able to win in order to make serious money doing it.
How much does a jockey get paid for a win?
May and June are the highest-profile months in American horse racing, and the total purse in the 2021 Kentucky Derby was $3 million.
Of that, around $1.8 million went to the winner.
For some of us, that’s the kind of money you could retire on!
Obviously, most prizes for a win are not this large.
And the jockey will still have a lot of fees and people to pay before they can take home the money.
Horse races are happening everywhere, every day in America, so there’s understandably a lot of competition.
While there’s a lot of money in the horse racing industry, most races are still quite low stakes for the winners.
As a rule of thumb, jockeys earn around 3% of the place prize and 7% of the win prize.
If you’re able to break out into the big races in horse racing, you can indeed make a fortune racing horses.
For most jockeys, though, it’s simply a case of riding in as many races as you can and slowly building up your wins and mounting fees.
So, just like any sport, the big names earn a lot, and earnings drop quite sharply off after that.
It’s extremely competitive, but for those who can manage to break into the business, it can be very lucrative.
It all depends, really, on how well they perform.
Obviously, if you win more, you can earn more prize money and be promoted to bigger races.
Think about how much a college football player earns compared to someone in the NFL—horse racing is pretty much the same.