The record buy is ₹27 crore. The typical buy is ₹1.5 crore.

The most expensive player in the history of the IPL auction is Rishabh Pant, who went to Lucknow Super Giants for ₹27 crore in 2025. The typical player bought at that same auction went for ₹1.5 crore. Both of those facts are true at once, and the gap between them is the single most useful thing to understand about how this market works. Almost every headline about the auction is about the top of the list. Almost every actual decision a franchise makes is about the middle of it.

This article walks through nineteen auctions of IPL data, from 2008 to 2026, and tries to describe the shape of the price list rather than just its peak. It uses only what is in CricOptics's own records: the published sale prices, the team that bought each player, and the format of each auction. Everything is in nominal rupees, which means a 2011 price and a 2025 price are not the same money and nothing here has been adjusted for inflation. The first six seasons were auctioned in US dollars; those figures have been converted to rupees at each year's average rate, and the original dollar amount is kept alongside them on the auction pages.

The record has climbed in steps

Start with the headline number, the single highest price paid at each auction. In 2008, at the very first auction, it was MS Dhoni at ₹6.53 crore (converted from dollars) to Chennai Super Kings. In 2011 it was Gautam Gambhir at ₹11.2 crore to Kolkata Knight Riders. In 2014 Yuvraj Singh went to Royal Challengers Bangalore for ₹14 crore, and a year later Delhi Daredevils paid ₹16 crore for the same player. Chris Morris reached ₹16.25 crore in 2021. Sam Curran was ₹18.5 crore in 2023. Mitchell Starc was ₹24.75 crore in 2024. Pant was ₹27 crore in 2025. And in the most recent auction, in 2026, Cameron Green went to Kolkata Knight Riders for ₹25.2 crore.

Read that list as a sequence and two things stand out. The first is that the record has roughly quadrupled in seventeen years, from about ₹6.5 crore to ₹27 crore. The second is that it has not climbed smoothly. The all-time record moved from ₹14 crore in 2014 to ₹16 crore a year later, to ₹16.25 crore in 2021 and to ₹18.5 crore in 2023, and then jumped by more than ₹6 crore in a single year with Starc in 2024. A bidding record is set by the two teams that most want one player and have the room to chase him, so it behaves like a collision, not a trend. That is worth remembering whenever someone says a new record "resets the market". It resets what one player cost on one afternoon.

The second thing to notice is how often the record holder changes team and role. In the sixteen seasons where the top buy has a recorded role, nine were all-rounders, two were wicketkeepers, two were batters and three were bowlers. Nothing about a role guarantees the top of the list; what guarantees it is a person each year whom two teams both decide to chase.

The typical buy has barely moved

Now look at the other end. The median price at each auction, meaning the price of the player in the exact middle of that year's list, tells a very different story. In 2022 it was ₹1.05 crore. In 2025 it was ₹1.5 crore. In 2026 it was ₹1.0 crore. In the mini auctions of 2023 and 2016 it was as low as ₹0.5 crore, and in 2015 it was ₹0.3 crore. Across nineteen auctions the median has lived between roughly ₹0.3 and ₹1.76 crore, with no sustained upward drift.

So the record quadrupled and the typical price did not. What changed is how much room there is above the middle, not what the middle costs. That has a practical consequence for anyone trying to estimate what a player will fetch. A model that predicts an average of everything will be off by a few lakh for most players and by a very large amount for the handful at the top, and the handful at the top are the ones people care about.

Another way to see the same thing is to count how many players cross a threshold. At the 2022 mega auction, 11 of the 204 players bought went for ₹10 crore or more. At the 2025 mega auction, 21 of 180 did. At the 2026 mini auction, 5 of 77. Over the same three auctions the number of players bought for ₹1 crore or less was 102 of 204 in 2022, 78 of 180 in 2025 and 41 of 77 in 2026. In every one of those years, somewhere between 43 and 53 per cent of the players bought cost a crore or less. The league did not become a market where everyone is expensive. It became a market where a few more people are very expensive.

How concentrated the money is

The cleanest summary of a skewed list is to ask what share of the total the biggest cheques account for. In 2022 the five most expensive purchases made up 11.5 per cent of everything spent, and the top ten made up 21.0 per cent. In 2025 the top five took 17.8 per cent and the top ten took 28.4 per cent of ₹636.9 crore. In 2018 the top ten took 23.1 per cent and in 2014 27.9 per cent. In the mini auctions the numbers are much higher, simply because fewer players are bought: the top ten took 52.7 per cent in 2024 and 58.0 per cent in 2026, and in 2026 the top five alone took 39.3 per cent of the ₹215.4 crore spent.

Put plainly, at a mega auction between a fifth and a quarter of the money goes on about five per cent of the players. At a mini auction more than half the money goes on about thirteen per cent of them. In both cases the rest of the squad is built from a long tail of small cheques. For a team, that long tail is where squads are won or lost, because a team needs a full squad and cannot afford a ₹25 crore player in every slot. For a fan, the long tail is invisible, because nobody writes a headline about a ₹30 lakh signing.

The 2025 numbers are a good example of both halves at once. Punjab Kings spent ₹110.2 crore at that auction, more than any other team by some distance, on 23 players, including Shreyas Iyer at ₹26.75 crore, Arshdeep Singh and Yuzvendra Chahal at ₹18 crore each. Rajasthan Royals spent ₹40.7 crore on 14 players. Both teams filled a squad. They simply filled it in very different ways, and the gap between them, about 2.7 to one, is as big as the gap between the first and the last of any year's list of teams at a mega auction.

What the whole auction cost

The total spent at each auction tells you how big the event was, and it moves much more than the median does. The inaugural auction in 2008 cost ₹165.5 crore across 89 players. The 2011 mega auction cost ₹293.0 crore across 127. In 2014 it was ₹265.5 crore across 153, which is lower than 2011 in nominal terms even though more players were bought; the 2011 figure is a conversion from dollars, so that comparison depends on the exchange rate used. In 2018 the total was ₹431.7 crore for 169 players, in 2022 ₹552.5 crore for 204, and in 2025 ₹636.9 crore for 180.

Divide the total by the number of players and you get the average price, which is pulled up by the big cheques: ₹1.86 crore in 2008, ₹2.31 crore in 2011, ₹1.74 crore in 2014, ₹2.55 crore in 2018, ₹2.71 crore in 2022 and ₹3.54 crore in 2025. The average at the most recent mega auction is therefore more than double the median, which is the arithmetic signature of a skewed list. If the price list were symmetric the two numbers would be close.

The mini auctions are a different animal and are better thought of as top-ups. The 2023 auction bought 80 players for ₹167.8 crore, the 2024 one 72 players for ₹234.8 crore and the 2026 one 77 players for ₹215.4 crore. A mini auction can include a record price, as 2024 did, while costing well under half as much as a mega auction in total.

Multiples of the base price

Every auction buy starts from a base price, the reserve a player is listed at. The ratio of the final price to the base price is a rough measure of how contested a player was. The data has some of these ratios, and the biggest ones are striking: at the 2025 auction, Rasikh Salam went for twenty times his base price, ₹6 crore, and Naman Dhir for 17.5 times, ₹5.25 crore. In 2026, Kartik Sharma and Prashant Veer each went for ₹14.2 crore against a base price of about thirty lakh, a multiple of 47. Back in 2013, Chris Morris went for 31 times his base and in 2016 Murugan Ashwin for 45 times.

These are the cases people call steals or overpays depending on which side they are on, but what they really show is that the base price carries little information about the final price once two teams want the same player. A player listed at ₹30 lakh can end up costing fifty times that. Models that lean on base price will explain the cheap end of the list well, because most players do sell at or near their base, and will miss the cases that matter.

Roles and what they cost

It is natural to ask whether some kinds of player cost more. Across all nineteen auctions the average price by role is close: wicketkeepers at ₹2.85 crore, all-rounders ₹2.74 crore, batters ₹2.58 crore and bowlers ₹2.37 crore, over 120, 399, 312 and 554 purchases respectively. About 260 of the sales in the older seasons have no role recorded at all, and those average ₹1.16 crore, which tells you the unlabelled ones are mostly smaller cheques.

Within a single year the picture moves around quite a bit. In 2025 the seven wicketkeepers bought averaged ₹8.06 crore, because they include Pant at ₹27 crore, while the 47 all-rounders averaged only ₹1.77 crore, and the 72 bowlers averaged ₹4.23 crore. In 2024 bowlers averaged ₹3.79 crore, helped by Starc and a handful of others, and in 2021 all-rounders averaged ₹3.17 crore. The average for a role in any one year is mostly set by whether one or two very expensive players happened to have that label, which is the same story as the record, told again.

What this means for estimating a price

A few lessons follow, and they are the reason CricOptics treats price estimation the way it does.

First, a single number is the wrong answer. If the top of the market is set by contested bidding and the middle is set by quiet reserve prices, the honest output of any estimate is a range, and the useful questions are about which end a player is likely to fall at. That is why the player price check on this site shows a likely price together with what a steal could look like and what a bidding war could look like, rather than one figure.

Second, ordering is more reliable than amounts. It is much easier to say that one player will cost more than another than to say exactly how many crores either will fetch. The player price check therefore ranks players against everyone active and then reads the price off the real pay scale at that rank, so the top of the scale is available to the players at the top of the ranking instead of being averaged away.

Third, the format matters as much as the player. A ₹1.5 crore median at a mega auction and a ₹1.0 crore median at a mini auction are not the same market, because a mini auction is mostly the same squads with a few holes filled. That is the subject of another article in this series, but it is relevant here: comparing a 2026 price with a 2025 price without saying which kind of auction each came from can mislead.

The limits of this analysis

Some caveats belong next to any of these numbers. The auction data records only players who were sold. It has no record of who went unsold, so the middle of the list is really the middle of the list of players who found a buyer; the true median of everyone who entered an auction is lower. Prices are nominal, so a player who sold for ₹1 crore in 2011 is not directly comparable with one who sold for ₹1 crore in 2025. The first six auctions were in dollars and the conversion to rupees is an approximation using yearly averages. About one sale in nine across the IPL and WPL tables could not be matched to a single player record and appear on the auction pages as sales with no profile link; they are counted in the season totals used here but not in any analysis that needs a player's career record.

None of that changes the main point. The IPL's biggest price has quadrupled while the price of the typical player has stayed roughly where it was. The money has moved up the list, not through it. When you look at the next auction, look for the five or ten big cheques, but remember that the other seventy or a hundred and fifty players are where most teams actually decide whether they have a squad.

If you want to explore the numbers behind this article, every auction has its own page under Auctions, with the full list of purchases, each team's spending and what was retained or traded alongside the bids. The player price check explains where any one player would sit among the others who are active now.