Masters Prize Money: Full Payout Breakdown

The 2026 Masters paid out a record $22.5 million purse, and Rory McIlroy's back-to-back win was worth $4.5 million of it — 20 percent of the total pool, the same cut the champion has taken home since Augusta National raised the winner's share a year earlier. Below is the full ladder, top to bottom, plus how it got this big.

Key Takeaways

• The 2026 Masters purse was $22.5 million, up from $21 million in 2025 — the highest total in golf's four majors.
• Winner Rory McIlroy earned $4.5 million, or 20% of the purse, for his back-to-back victory.
• Runner-up Scottie Scheffler took home $2.43 million; every player finishing top-4 cleared seven figures.
• Every professional who misses the cut still gets a flat $25,000 — nobody at the Masters plays for nothing.
• The purse has grown from $5,000 total in 1934 to $22.5 million in 2026, a jump that's mostly happened in the last five years.

How Much Does the Masters Winner Get Paid?

$4.5 million, as of 2026. That's Rory McIlroy's number for going back-to-back at Augusta National, and it works out to 20 percent of the tournament's $22.5 million purse. A year earlier, McIlroy's first green jacket paid $4.2 million out of a $21 million pool — same 20 percent, smaller total. Go back one more year and Scottie Scheffler's 2024 win was worth $3.6 million out of $20 million, which is only 18 percent. Augusta bumped the winner's cut to match what the PGA Tour pays at its signature events starting in 2025, and it's stuck since.

Worth saying plainly: that's not appearance money, endorsement money, or anything tied to a sponsor logo. It's a check from the tournament itself, on top of whatever a player's clothing and equipment deals kick in for winning a major. Those numbers aren't public and I'm not going to guess at them.

How Is the Rest of the Purse Split Up?

Steeply at the top, then it flattens out fast. Here's the 2026 shape of it:

• 1st place — Rory McIlroy, $4,500,000
• 2nd place — Scottie Scheffler, $2,430,000
• T3 — Tyrrell Hatton, Russell Henley, Justin Rose, Cameron Young, $1,080,000 each
• Top 12 — every player, at least $517,500
• Last made-cut spot — around $55,350
• Missed the cut — flat $25,000, regardless of score

The shape held from 2025, too, when second place (Justin Rose, beaten in a playoff) was worth $2,268,000, and the last player to survive the cut still cleared $51,660. That flat $25,000 for missing the cut is the detail I find most telling about how Augusta runs this event — the club could pay bottom-of-the-field professionals nothing and nobody would blink, but it doesn't. Whether that's generosity or just protecting the field's willingness to show up every April, you can decide for yourself.

How Has the Masters Purse Grown Over Time?

Slowly for most of a century, then absurdly fast in the last five years. Horton Smith won the first Masters in 1934 for $1,500 out of a $5,000 total purse. Jack Nicklaus took home $20,000 for his first win in 1963, and by his sixth, in 1986, that had climbed to $144,000 — still real money, but nothing close to what a mid-pack finisher earns today.

The recent numbers are the ones that actually explain the current size of the purse:

• 2020 & 2021: $11.5 million purse, $2.07 million to the winner
• 2022: $15 million purse, $2.7 million (Scottie Scheffler)
• 2023: $18 million purse, $3.24 million (Jon Rahm)
• 2024: $20 million purse, $3.6 million (Scottie Scheffler)
• 2025: $21 million purse, $4.2 million (Rory McIlroy)
• 2026: $22.5 million purse, $4.5 million (Rory McIlroy)

That's the purse nearly doubling in six years. Some of it tracks broadcast rights and sponsorship growth across golf generally; a chunk of it is plainly Augusta keeping pace with — and now exceeding — what the PGA Tour pays out at its own biggest events, so a major doesn't look like the pay cut it used to be next to a regular Tour stop.

What's the Green Jacket Actually Worth?

In cash terms, essentially nothing, because it isn't for sale and the club makes sure it stays that way. The jacket belongs to Augusta National, not the player. A first-time winner gets to take it off the property for exactly one year; after that, it lives permanently in the Champions Locker Room and only comes out during Masters week, on club grounds. Gary Player famously broke that rule in the early '60s, flying his jacket home to South Africa before Augusta tightened the enforcement — the story gets retold every April, usually with a version of Player joking that the club was welcome to come get it themselves.

The one place a green jacket has ever carried a real price tag is when a genuinely historic one slips out through an estate sale — Horton Smith's original 1934 jacket sold at auction for $682,229 in 2013. That's the exception that proves the rule: current champions' jackets simply never enter that market, by design. So no, I wouldn't tack a dollar figure onto the jacket itself when totaling up what a Masters win is worth. The prize money is the number. The jacket is the point.

Sources

• 2026 Masters prize money, purse: full payout breakdown — CBS Sports
• Masters 2026: full purse breakdown — PGA Tour
• The history (and strict rules) of the Masters green jacket — Golf.com
• Masters winner prize money through the years — Fortune

For the full year-by-year champions list, see every Masters winner. If you're new to how the major championships fit together, start with the four golf majors explained, and for how the season's other big paydays work, see what the FedEx Cup is.