Open Championship: Prize money back on the rise in golf as all four majors boost payouts
Top golfers are earning more than ever as the cream of the men’s game prepare to tee off at the Open Championship on Thursday.
Prize money for the 150th edition of the oldest major has been raised to record levels, mirroring increases at the game’s other biggest events.
Payouts on the PGA Tour are also up substantially this season and organisers of the leading professional circuit have announced plans to boost them even further.
The uplift is in part due to revenues recovering following the Covid-19 pandemic but is also related to the threat to the established tours from the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series.
The increase at the Open, where Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods and England’s newest major champion Matt Fitzpatrick are among the field, is indicative of the wider trend.
Prize money is up 22 per cent to a total pot of $14m (£11.6m), with the winner of the Claret Jug in line to receive $2.5m (£2.1m). Both sums are new records for the tournament.
All three other majors have also seen big hikes in prize money this year.
The Masters and the US PGA Championship both boosted their total pots to $15m, from $11.5m and $11m respectively, and increased their winner’s payout to $2.7m, from $2.1m.
Last month’s US Open, meanwhile, bumped up its prize fund by 40 per cent, retaining its status as the most lucrative of the majors. Fitzpatrick scooped $3.15m from a pot of $17.5m.
Martin Slumbers, chairman of Open organisers the R&A, said: “We have made this substantial investment while balancing our wider commitments to developing golf at all levels around the world and to continuing to elevate the AIG Women’s Open.”
The growing paydays on offer at the majors can be seen as the continuation of a trend that had been firmly established before the pandemic.
Covid-19 largely halted decades of swelling prize funds, with the Masters, US PGA and US Open pots frozen from 2019 until 2022, although they avoided the reductions seen in other sports, such as tennis, where all of the Grand Slams cut payouts.
As elite golf has returned to normal, with this year being the first full season to feature crowds at all events since 2019, so has the trajectory of prize money.
The $2.7m won by world No1 Scottie Scheffler at the Masters in April was equal to the total prize fund when Woods won his first Green Jacket at Augusta in 1997.
But it is not just at the majors where the world’s best male golfers are earning more than ever.
Prize money on the PGA Tour increased from $367m last year to $427m for the 2022 season, while organisers also boosted various bonus schemes.
The move is in part a response to the threat of LIV Golf, which has lured several of the PGA Tour’s biggest names, including major winners Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau to play in its string of mega-money events.
Each tournament on the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational Series carries a prize fund of at least $25m, with a first prize of $4m. That eclipses all the majors and the Players Championship, the most lucrative tournament on the PGA Tour, which has a $20m fund and $3.6m top prize.
The majors have less need to match LIV payouts as players want to play the game’s most historic tournaments anyway. But it is a different matter for the PGA Tour, which has reacted to the threat by pledging a series of big increases for 2024.