Most runs in T20 cricket: Kieron Pollard leads, and Chris Gayle is now third

Chris Gayle held the record for most runs in T20 cricket for twelve years. He does not hold it any more, and he is no longer second either.

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 6 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 28 August, hitting 65 from 26 balls for Trinbago Knight Riders against Saint Lucia Kings in the Caribbean Premier League.

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 28 August 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
Kieron Pollard	14,921	666	31.81	2	71	932	1,010	2006 to present
Jos Buttler	14,890	495	35.36	9	106	1,351	655	2009 to present
Chris Gayle	14,562	455	36.22	22	88	1,132	1,056	2005 to 2022
Alex Hales	14,489	526	29.81	7	92	1,562	597	2009 to present
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 the leader is last. Pollard tops the list on 31.81, the lowest figure of the five, and he got there by batting 666 times. Warner averages 37.29 and is fifth.

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 30.1, Hales 27.5 and Pollard 22.4. Pollard needed 228 more innings than Warner to finish 637 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 14,000 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

Thirty-one runs apart, and almost nothing else about the two innings columns matches.

Pollard has 1,010 sixes and 932 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 655 sixes and 1,351 fours. Pollard has two hundreds in 666 innings; Buttler has nine in 495, plus 106 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 finished within one good over of each other.

Why the record sat still for twelve years, then moved three times in ten 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. Buttler is 31 runs back with The Hundred and the winter leagues to come, Hales is 432 behind and Warner 637, and all three are still being picked.

What Chris Gayle still holds

Gayle has slipped to third and will stay there, 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 is still the highest individual score in T20 cricket, thirteen years on. 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 1,010 during 2026, 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 Pollard is a fair question and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on how long he keeps playing the IPL. The gap is roughly two good seasons. The four 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. Rohit Sharma leads it on 4,231 runs from 159 matches, a total that stopped moving when he retired from the format after India’s 2024 World Cup win, and Kohli is next 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: Gayle’s 175 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 CPL in progress as this is published, the top two totals are changing 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

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