Ask a casual NASCAR fan who has made the most money in the sport’s history and you will probably hear a handful of active names tossed around. The real answer belongs to two men who have not buckled into a Cup car in nearly a decade, and one of them has not won a championship since the Clinton administration.
That is according to Forbes’ SportsMoney desk, which spent more than a decade building the closest thing to a rigorous, driver-by-driver accounting of NASCAR pay that exists anywhere. NASCAR does not publish driver salaries, and team owners guard contract numbers about as tightly as their spotter’s radio codes, so outside estimates built from sponsorship data, merchandise royalties and race-purse math are about as close to ground truth as anyone outside a handful of Charlotte-area accountants ever gets.
Two Guys Who Have Not Raced In Years Still Own The Record
By that accounting, Jeff Gordon retired in 2015 having pulled in roughly 425 million dollars over 23 seasons in salary, endorsements, and his cut of race winnings and licensing revenue, making him NASCAR’s all-time leading earner. Dale Earnhardt Jr. sits right behind him at an estimated 410 million dollars across 18 seasons, a figure Forbes calculated as he wound down his career in 2017. Between the two of them, that is more money than the sport’s next several highest earners combined, and it is not particularly close.
Neither total is driven mainly by trophies. Gordon won four championships and 93 points races, a genuinely great résumé, but the bulk of both men’s fortunes came from somewhere else: merchandise. NASCAR during its boom years, roughly the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, ran less like a racing series and more like an apparel company with a very loud marketing arm, and Gordon and Earnhardt Jr. were, without much argument, the two biggest sellers of hats and T-shirts the sport has ever produced. At his peak with Dale Earnhardt Inc. and later Hendrick Motorsports, Earnhardt Jr.’s share of the sport’s total licensed merchandise sales reportedly ran as high as 25 to 35 percent in a given year, a market share most professional sports leagues would consider antitrust-adjacent.
Earnhardt’s Eight-Year Reign
Because of that merchandise machine, Earnhardt Jr. held the title of NASCAR’s single highest-paid driver for eight consecutive years, from 2008 through 2015, according to Forbes. In 2012 alone he pulled down an estimated 25.9 million dollars, split between his on-track compensation with Hendrick and off-track income from sponsors including Chevrolet, Nationwide, Wrangler and Goody’s. Jeff Gordon, driving the sister car at Hendrick, was not far off that year either, with Forbes crediting him with 18 million dollars.
The streak finally snapped in 2016, and it snapped because of a concussion rather than a sponsor pulling out. Earnhardt Jr. missed the final 18 races of that season with concussion symptoms, which cost him race winnings and the champion’s bonus that instead went to teammate Jimmie Johnson, who clinched a record-tying seventh Cup title that November. Forbes credited Johnson with 21.8 million dollars for the year against 21.1 million for an injured Earnhardt Jr., a gap of well under a million dollars for a driver who barely raced the back half of the season.
Earnhardt Jr. got the crown back for one last lap. In his 2017 farewell season, in which he scored a single top-five finish, Forbes still had him earning an estimated 22 million dollars, ahead of Johnson’s 19.2 million, on the strength of a sponsorship package on his No. 88 car that reportedly commanded close to 1 million dollars per race and merchandise sales that once again led the entire sport. Popularity, it turns out, ages a lot better than lap times.
The Numbers Get Smaller After That
With Gordon and Earnhardt Jr. both retired, the torch passed to whoever was left standing, and the dollar figures involved got noticeably smaller. Johnson and Kyle Busch spent the back half of the 2010s trading the top spot, with Busch finally claiming it outright in 2019 at an estimated 17.8 million dollars, edging Johnson’s 17.6 million. Forbes was blunt about what that number represented: half of what Earnhardt Jr. had been making a decade earlier. By that point Busch and Johnson were reportedly the only two Cup drivers left drawing salaries north of 10 million dollars, in a garage where most new contracts start in six figures with a cut of winnings tacked on.
Two things happened to shrink the pot. The obvious one is sponsorship: the recession-era pullback in corporate marketing spend never fully reversed for NASCAR the way it did for stick-and-ball sports, and the retirements of merchandise-moving stars like Gordon, Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart and Danica Patrick left team owners with less star power to sell to sponsors in the first place. The less obvious factor is structural. NASCAR’s 2016 charter system, built to guarantee steadier income for team owners by spreading purse money more evenly across the field instead of concentrating it at the front, quietly gutted championship bonuses along the way. Winning the Cup title paid Johnson a bonus of 7.2 million dollars in 2008 and 5.2 million in 2013; by 2016, the bonus for the same accomplishment had shrunk to roughly 1.9 million. As Johnson put it after clinching title number seven, “The last time I stood on stage, it was 7-and-a-half million.”
A Different Way to Keep Score
There is a second, entirely different way to measure NASCAR earnings, and it produces a different leaderboard. Strip out salary, endorsements and licensing and look only at official race-purse winnings, the money tracked on NASCAR’s own results sheets, and Gordon still tops the chart at roughly 153.7 million dollars across his Cup career, with Johnson a close second at 150.9 million, according to career statistics compiled by Racing Reference. Earnhardt Jr. sits well back at 95.7 million in official Cup winnings, and Kyle Busch, despite still actively racing, shows just 78.7 million in that same column. That is not because Busch has been underpaid. It is because NASCAR and its tracks stopped publicly disclosing per-race purse breakdowns after the 2015 season, right as the charter system took effect. Every driver’s official on-track earnings total in NASCAR’s record books has effectively been frozen since 2015, an unglamorous but very real example of a sport’s finances getting less transparent even as its athletes stay just as famous.
So Who Is The Highest-Paid Driver Today?
Forbes has not published an updated highest-paid-drivers list since that 2019 edition, and no other outlet has stepped in with comparable sourcing, so pinning down today’s single highest earner is mostly guesswork dressed up as a headline. What has changed the compensation picture more than any raise is ownership. Denny Hamlin, for one, co-owns 23XI Racing on top of his driving contract, meaning his real earnings now run through team equity and race winnings alike rather than a single Joe Gibbs Racing paycheck. That ownership stake has also pulled him into headlines that have nothing to do with lap times, from the team’s ongoing legal fight with NASCAR over the charter system to a team employee’s recent suspension following an alleged golf cart altercation with an elderly fan at a race weekend. None of that moves Hamlin’s driving salary directly, but it is a reminder that the money conversation in today’s garage happens as much in ownership meetings as it does in contract talks for the seat itself.
None of these figures are adjusted for inflation, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Gordon’s 425 million dollars, spread across dollars earned from 1992 to 2015, is worth meaningfully more in today’s money than the raw number suggests, and it also means a modern Cup star would need a considerably bigger figure to actually match his real earning power. The Earnhardt name, notably, still draws outsized attention in the garage even today, right down to arguments involving the next generation of the family. Whoever eventually resets this list will need more than a hot streak on the track. Based on the last decade of data, they will need a sponsor willing to spend like it’s 2005, a face that sells merchandise in an era when most young fans would rather clip a highlight than buy a hat, and a very good year running the same kind of sponsorship-and-endorsement math Forbes has been applying to NASCAR’s books for more than a decade now.
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