Most runs in T20 cricket: Jos Buttler leads, and Chris Gayle is now fourth

Chris Gayle held the record for most runs in T20 cricket for twelve years. He does not hold it any more, and he is now fourth on the list. The record has changed hands four times since June, and Jos Buttler holds it on 15,062, the first man past 15,000.

Kieron Pollard passed him on 20 June 2026, playing for MI New York against Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket, and reached the mark with an unbeaten hundred from 56 balls. Jos Buttler took it off him on 5 August with 51 not out from 20 balls for Manchester Super Giants against Welsh Fire, going ahead of Pollard with the first of three consecutive sixes off Marco Jansen. Pollard reclaimed it on 26 August, hitting 65 from 26 balls for Trinbago Knight Riders against Saint Lucia Kings in the Caribbean Premier League. Buttler went back ahead on 17 September, opening for England in a T20I against Sri Lanka at Cardiff, and his 30 from 16 balls took him to exactly 15,000. Alex Hales, meanwhile, passed Gayle on 11 September with 22 for Trinbago against Guyana Amazon Warriors at Providence.

Most runs in T20 cricket

All figures below are for every form of men’s T20 cricket, internationals and franchise leagues together, and are current to 1 October 2026. The top two are still playing, so treat the gap between them as a snapshot rather than a standing.

Player	Runs	Innings	Average	100s	50s	Fours	Sixes	Career
Jos Buttler	15,062	498	35.60	9	108	1,370	661	2009 to present
Kieron Pollard	14,999	671	31.71	2	71	939	1,013	2006 to present
Alex Hales	14,581	531	29.69	7	93	1,567	604	2009 to present
Chris Gayle	14,562	455	36.22	22	88	1,132	1,056	2005 to 2022
David Warner	14,284	438	37.29	10	118	1,464	505	2007 to present

This is a durability record, not a batting record

Look down the average column and it does not follow the order of the list. Warner, fifth, has the best average of the five at 37.29. Pollard, second, averages 31.71 and has batted 671 times, far more than anyone else here.

Run it per innings and the order inverts almost completely. Warner has scored 32.6 runs every time he has walked out, Gayle 32.0, Buttler 30.2, Hales 27.5 and Pollard 22.4. Pollard needed 233 more innings than Warner to finish 715 runs ahead of him.

That is not a criticism of Pollard, who has spent twenty years being picked in every league on earth as a finisher, a role that hands you fewer balls and asks you to spend them fast. It is just what the record measures. Nobody accumulates 15,000 T20 runs by being the best batter in the format. They do it by being wanted for two decades.

Pollard and Buttler got there by opposite routes

Sixty-three runs apart, and almost nothing else about the two innings columns matches.

Pollard has 1,013 sixes and 939 fours, the only man in this table who has cleared the rope more often than he has found the boundary along the ground. Buttler has 661 sixes and 1,370 fours. Pollard has two hundreds in 671 innings; Buttler has nine in 498, plus 108 fifties to Pollard’s 71.

So one of them arrived by clearing the rope more often than anyone except Gayle, in short bursts at the end of innings, and the other by batting at the top and converting. They are separated by one good innings.

Why the record sat still for twelve years, then moved four times in thirteen weeks

The dates in that last column explain the whole thing.

Pollard started in 2006, Warner in 2007, Buttler and Hales both in 2009. Four of the five men at the top of this list began within three years of one another, at the moment T20 was turning from a novelty into a full-time career, and they are the first cohort to have spent an entire working life in it. Gayle, who began in 2005 and stopped in 2022, got to the mark first and by a much shorter route, then stood still for four years while the rest kept batting.

So the record was frozen while everyone else caught up, and it is now being passed around because four active players arrived at the same altitude within a few hundred runs of each other. Expect it to change hands again. Pollard is 63 runs back with the winter leagues to come, Hales is 481 behind and Warner 778, and all three are still being picked.

What Chris Gayle still holds

Gayle has slipped to fourth and can only fall further, having last played a T20 in 2022, but the records that made his name are mostly intact.

His 22 hundreds are twice as many as Pollard and Buttler have managed between them. His 175 not out from 66 balls for Bangalore against Pune in 2013 was the highest individual score in T20 cricket for thirteen years, until Lhuan-dre Pretorius made 188 not out for Titans in October 2026. He reached his hundred in 30 balls, and the 17 sixes in that innings remain an IPL single-innings record. With 13 fours as well, 154 of his 175 runs came in boundaries, which is 88 per cent of them.

One line on this page did need correcting. Gayle was for years the only batter to pass 1,000 sixes in T20 cricket. Pollard reached 1,000 during 2026 and is on 1,013, so there are two of them now, and Gayle’s 1,056 is no longer out of reach.

Virat Kohli and the India picture

Kohli became the first Indian to 14,000 T20 runs on 13 May 2026, during Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s IPL match against Kolkata Knight Riders, and he got there faster than anyone ever has. It took him 409 innings. Gayle needed 423.

The same innings brought up his tenth hundred in T20 cricket, the most by an Indian batter. He was the sixth man to reach 14,000, and he did it on a narrower diet than any of the five above him: Indian players are not released to play overseas franchise leagues while they hold a BCCI contract, so Kohli’s total comes almost entirely from one league and India’s own fixtures. The others have had the run of the world’s circuit.

Whether he catches the leaders is a fair question and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on how long he keeps playing the IPL. He is sixth on 14,218, 844 behind Buttler, with James Vince just 31 behind him on 14,187. The gap to the top is roughly two good seasons. The five men above him have all had two decades and most of the world’s leagues to work with.

T20 cricket and T20 internationals are different lists

This is where most versions of this page go wrong, including ours until now.

Everything above counts all men’s T20 cricket. The T20 international list is a much smaller thing, because most of these runs were scored in leagues. Babar Azam leads it on 4,596 runs from 145 matches, ahead of Buttler on 4,384. Rohit Sharma is third on 4,231 from 159, a total that stopped moving when he retired from the format after India’s 2024 World Cup win, and Kohli is fourth on 4,188 from 125 at an average of 48.69.

Put another way, Kohli’s entire T20 international career is less than a third of his T20 run total. The single-innings records separate too: Lhuan-dre Pretorius’s 188 not out for Titans in October 2026 is the T20 mark, while the T20 international best is Aaron Finch’s 172 from 76 balls for Australia against Zimbabwe at Harare in 2018. Anyone comparing a franchise aggregate with an international one is comparing two different things.

Why the totals differ between sources

If you check these numbers elsewhere you will find small disagreements, and they are usually not errors.

The question is which matches count. Every source includes internationals and the major leagues. They part company over domestic competitions in smaller cricketing nations, over exhibition and legends fixtures, and over how quickly they update while a tournament is running. With the leaders still playing, the top totals can change week to week, which is why the date on this table matters more than usual.

For the related lists, we also keep the most sixes in T20 cricket, the most sixes in international cricket and the most runs in T20 internationals. And if you want the distance records rather than the run totals, our piece on the longest six in cricket history explains why almost every number on those lists is a projection.

Featured photo: AFP / Alexander Joe

More cricket records and analysis