How we estimate cyclist pay

The Pay-vs-Output gauge

Every rider page shows a small horizontal gauge in the banner labeled Premium / Balanced / Value. It compares the rider's pay percentile against their UCI-points percentile across the entire active men's WorldTour peloton. It's the single fastest way to see whether a rider's pay matches their on-the-road output.

How it's calculated

1. Output percentile — the rider's UCI points ranked against every other active WorldTour rider with non-zero UCI points and a salary estimate. 87 %ile means the rider has more points than 87% of the peloton.
2. Pay percentile — same cohort, ranked by estimated annual compensation (the displayed figure, after any vote adjustments and the CPA-AIGCP minimum-wage floor).
3. Diff = output percentile − pay percentile. The marker on the gauge sits that many percentile points to the right of center. Diffs within ±5 read as Balanced; bigger swings shade toward Value (right, teal) or Premium (left, coral).

Riders with no UCI points yet (neo-pros, pure domestiques) show "Insufficient data" rather than a misleading rating. Riders bumped to the WorldTour minimum salary still get a real rating — the floor pushes their pay percentile down, which is exactly the signal "high value for the money" is meant to capture.

1. The formula

Three inputs drive the estimate: a rider's prior-season UCI points, their team's annual budget, and their age. Combined multiplicatively:

salary = BASE × (priorPoints / P_REF)^k          ← performance leverage
              × (teamBudget   / B_REF)^m          ← team-budget leverage
              × ageFactor(age)                     ← career-stage shape
              × (1 + contractAdjustment)           ← optional ±10% lever

Each input enters multiplicatively, so doubling a rider's prior-season points doesn't add a fixed amount of pay — it scales their pay by 1.62×. Same logic for team budget: a rider moving from a €22M team to a €44M team has their estimated pay scaled by 1.52×, all else equal.

The constants BASE, k, and m are fit by regression against several dozen known points across the pay scale — every rider on the site whose salary has been credibly reported by Cyclingnews, Velo, Escape Collective, La Gazzetta, etc. The fit minimizes log-space error, which means a 10% miss on a €100K rider counts the same as a 10% miss on a €5M rider. P_REF and B_REF are fixed reference scales (roughly the median rider's points and the median team's budget), chosen so the fitted BASE lands in a human-readable range.

Current fitted constants

2. Worked example

Plug a few combinations of (prior points, team budget) into the formula at prime age (28) to see what falls out. Every cell is the formula evaluated end-to-end, before the WT minimum-wage floor in §3 is applied:

Notice how a domestique on a superteam still earns substantially more than a similar domestique on a smaller team — that's the budget exponent (m) at work. The formula bakes in the structural advantage of being on a rich team.

3. Age and contract adjustments

On top of the points × budget core, two small smooth adjustments shape the estimate around a rider's career stage and contract situation:

4. Neo-pro fallback

About 110 active WT riders had no 2025 UCI individual points — neo-pros entering their first year, riders promoted from ProTour mid-cycle, or veterans returning from injury layoffs. The main formula divides by their prior points, which would blow up at zero, so these riders take a separate path:

salary = NEOPRO_BASE × (teamBudget / B_REF)^m × ageFactor(age)

NEOPRO_BASE is set to €75K — about twice the WT minimum salary at a median-budget team, which matches the rough range neo-pros have been reported to earn in cycling press. Budget still matters here: a neo-pro on a superteam earns more than a neo-pro on a small team for the same age, even before either of them has scored a UCI point.

5. Industry context: where the money sits

The peloton's financial landscape is stratified and stratifying. According to a confidential PwC report prepared for a UCI working group obtained by Escape Collective, the average WorldTour team budget grew 40% from 2021 to 2024 — from €20M to €28M — and almost all of that growth accrued to the top 5–6 superteams. For 2026, La Gazzetta dello Sport reporting via Cycling Magazine puts UAE Team Emirates and Visma–Lease a Bike near €50M, with Lidl-Trek, Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe, and INEOS Grenadiers around €45M. The remaining WT teams range from roughly €17M to €34M. That spread is the single biggest driver of the budget exponent in section 1.

5a. CPA-AIGCP minimum-wage floor

The team-tier domestique floor is itself capped below by the negotiated WorldTour minimum salary. No active WT rider can be paid less than the CPA-AIGCP-mandated minimum, so we use it as a hard floor everywhere we display a salary estimate. The 2026 minimums are frozen at 2025 levels:

We display the employed-rider number because it's the lower bound and we don't track who's self-employed (typically top stars in Monaco etc.). Source: Velora Cycling — CPA-AIGCP Joint Agreement details. Increases paused for 2026; next change expected 2027.

6. Voting math (with consensus signaling)

Once an estimate is published, fans can vote it Higher or Lower. The first 5 net votes do nothing; beyond that, movement asymptotes within the rubric range. Critically, when the higher/lower split is roughly 50/50, that's an implicit endorsement of the estimate — surfaced as a "consensus" badge on the rider page. Votes that include a credible source URL are weighted more heavily in the calculation.

T1Tier 1 — primary cycling press

Cyclingnews, Velo (Outside), L'Équipe, Het Nieuwsblad, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Marca, AS. Direct UCI / team / rider statements. Verified social media.

T2Tier 2 — reference databases & secondary press

ProCyclingStats, Wikipedia (when properly cited), Bikexchange, established cycling podcasts.

T3Tier 3 — uncorroborated

Forum threads, fan sites, single-source reports. Marked clearly. Never used alone for a salary anchor.