Most runs in ODI cricket: the all-time list

Sachin Tendulkar has scored the most runs in ODI cricket, and no one has come close in the fourteen years since he stopped. The list below him has changed though, and it changed at the top: Virat Kohli is now second, having passed Kumar Sangakkara, and he is the only active batter anywhere near the record. This is the all-time list, what it took to build it, and the honest arithmetic on whether Tendulkar’s 18,426 can actually be caught.

Most runs in ODI cricket: the all-time top 10

Career aggregates in men’s one-day internationals, from the format’s first match in 1971 to today.

#	Player	Team	Span	Matches	Runs	Average	HS	100s
1	Sachin Tendulkar	India	1989-2012	463	18,426	44.83	200*	49
2	Virat Kohli	India	2008-present	314	14,941	Just under 59	183	54
3	Kumar Sangakkara	Sri Lanka	2000-2015	404	14,234	41.98	169	25
4	Ricky Ponting	Australia	1995-2012	375	13,704	42.03	164	30
5	Sanath Jayasuriya	Sri Lanka	1989-2011	445	13,430	32.36	189	28
6	Mahela Jayawardene	Sri Lanka	1998-2015	448	12,650	33.37	144	19
7	Inzamam-ul-Haq	Pakistan	1991-2007	378	11,739	39.52	137*	10
8	Jacques Kallis	South Africa	1996-2014	328	11,579	44.36	139	17
9	Sourav Ganguly	India	1992-2007	311	11,363	41.02	183	22
10	Rahul Dravid	India	1996-2011	344	10,889	39.16	153	12

Kohli’s figures run to the Lord’s ODI on 20 July 2026 and move every time he bats. Rohit Sharma has also gone past Dravid’s aggregate and belongs inside this ten; he is covered separately below, because printing a career total for an active player who is not Kohli would be out of date within a week.

Four Indians, three Sri Lankans, and one each from Australia, Pakistan and South Africa. No England batter has ever made the top ten of this list, which says something about how differently the two countries treated one-day cricket for most of its history.

How Tendulkar built 18,426

Tendulkar made his ODI debut against Pakistan in December 1989 and was out for a duck in each of his first two innings. He did not score a half-century until December 1990, more than a year in, when he made 53 off 41 balls against Sri Lanka. He finished twenty-two years later with 49 hundreds and 96 fifties, a highest score of 200 not out against South Africa in 2010, and 2,016 fours, which is still the most any batter has hit in the format.

The number that explains the record is not the average, it is the volume: 463 matches. That is the most any player has appeared in, and it is 149 more than Kohli has managed. Tendulkar was picked at sixteen and played almost every ODI India contested for two decades, in an era when India played a great deal of one-day cricket and very little else.

Can Virat Kohli catch Sachin Tendulkar?

This is the question the list actually gets asked, and it deserves arithmetic rather than an opinion. Kohli needs 3,485 more runs. At the rate he has scored across his whole career, a shade under 48 runs per match, that is roughly 73 more ODIs.

India play somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five ODIs in a typical year. So the gap is not four or five seasons of decline, it is three or four seasons of Kohli continuing to be Kohli, in a format where he turns 38 in November 2026. The record is reachable in a way it has never been for anyone else, and it still asks him to bat into his forties at close to his current output. Neither the “he will walk it” nor the “it is untouchable” framing survives the sum.

Everything else about his career is in our full breakdown of Virat Kohli’s records, and the head-to-head is in Kohli versus Tendulkar.

The averages tell a different story from the totals

Rank the same ten men by average rather than aggregate and the order falls apart. Kohli averages just under 59. The next best on the list is Tendulkar at 44.83, with Kallis a fraction behind on 44.36. Kohli is scoring roughly thirty per cent more runs per dismissal than anyone else who has made this much.

Put the same point through matches played and it is starker. Tendulkar averaged 39.8 runs per match across his 463 games. Kohli is on 47.6 per match. Give Kohli the 463 matches Tendulkar had, at the rate Kohli has actually scored, and the total comes out above 22,000. That is not a prediction, because nobody sustains a peak across 463 games, and it is exactly why Tendulkar’s longevity is the harder thing to copy. But it does show that the top two names on this list got there by completely different routes: one by lasting, one by scoring.

The bottom half of the table makes the same point in reverse. Jayasuriya and Jayawardene are fifth and sixth on runs with averages of 32.36 and 33.37, lower than any specialist batter would accept today. They are there because they played 445 and 448 matches.

Most ODI runs for India

India supply four of the top ten, more than any other country. Tendulkar leads, Kohli is second and closing, then Ganguly on 11,363 and Dravid on 10,889, with Rohit Sharma now past Dravid. The full national breakdown, including where MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh sit, is in our list of most runs for India in ODIs.

The active players still climbing

Only two active batters are anywhere on this map. Kohli is second and chasing the record. Rohit Sharma has passed 11,000 ODI runs and gone by Dravid into the all-time top ten, and he reached his 34th ODI hundred with 138 off 110 balls against England at Lord’s in July 2026. We have not printed an exact career total for him here because it moves with every innings and the published figures lag by a series.

Beyond those two the drop is steep. One-day international cricket has thinned out as T20 has taken its calendar space, so the modern player simply does not get 400 ODIs the way Tendulkar, Jayasuriya and Jayawardene did. That is the real reason this list has barely changed in a decade, and the reason it may not change much again once Kohli finishes.

Most runs in ODIs: quick answers

Who has scored the most runs in ODI cricket?
Sachin Tendulkar, with 18,426 runs in 463 matches between 1989 and 2012. The record has stood since he retired and nobody has been within 3,000 runs of it since.

Who is second on the list?
Virat Kohli, on 14,941. He passed Kumar Sangakkara’s 14,234 and is the only active player in reach of the record.

How many runs does Kohli need to pass Tendulkar?
3,485, which at his career rate of just under 48 runs per match is about 73 more ODIs.

Who has the best average among the top ten?
Kohli, at just under 59. That is nearly fourteen runs per dismissal clear of Tendulkar in second, and it is the widest gap anywhere in the table.

How many Indians are in the top ten?
Four: Tendulkar, Kohli, Ganguly and Dravid, with Rohit Sharma now past Dravid’s total as well. Sri Lanka are next with three.

What is the highest individual score on this list?
Tendulkar’s 200 not out against South Africa at Gwalior in 2010, the first double century in ODI history.

For the same lists in the other formats, see most runs in Test cricket and most runs in T20 internationals, or the wider set of ODI cricket records.

Featured photo: AFP / Munir Uz Zaman