Most sixes in IPL history: Gayle’s 357 still leads, and the season record now belongs to a 15-year-old

Chris Gayle has the most sixes in IPL history with 357. He last played in the competition on 28 September 2021, and nobody has got near him since. Rohit Sharma is second on 323 and Virat Kohli third on 316, both after the 2026 season, and both needed nearly twice as many innings as Gayle did.

Most sixes in IPL history: the full list

Figures below cover every IPL match from 2008 to the end of the 2026 season, counted from ball-by-ball records of all 1,243 matches.

Player	Sixes	Innings	Per innings
Chris Gayle	357	141	2.53
Rohit Sharma	323	275	1.17
Virat Kohli	316	275	1.15
MS Dhoni	264	241	1.10
AB de Villiers	251	170	1.48
Sanju Samson	243	185	1.31
KL Rahul	239	149	1.60
David Warner	236	184	1.28
Andre Russell	223	114	1.96
Kieron Pollard	223	168	1.33
Jos Buttler	211	136	1.55
Suresh Raina	203	200	1.01

One division reorders the whole table

Sixes divided by innings is the check worth running, and it separates the players who cleared the rope often from the ones who simply batted for a long time. Gayle comes out on 2.53 an innings, which nothing else on the list approaches. Andre Russell is next on 1.96 from 114 innings, then KL Rahul on 1.60 and Jos Buttler on 1.55.

The three men directly behind Gayle on the raw count drop to ninth, tenth and eleventh on this measure: Rohit Sharma 1.17, Virat Kohli 1.15, MS Dhoni 1.10. Nicholas Pooran, who is 14th on the raw count with 186, is hitting them at 1.86 from exactly 100 innings, a better rate than everyone bar Gayle and Russell.

At the other end, Suresh Raina hit 203 sixes and needed 200 innings to do it. Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli have both batted 275 times. Gayle reached 357 in 141. Put another way, Gayle would have finished on roughly 695 sixes had he been given the innings Rohit and Kohli have had, which is a number no cricketer will ever record.

Why published lists disagree, and how to tell which one is stale

Search for this list and the figures for the top two or three will differ from site to site. That is not because anyone has miscounted. It is because most of these lists are snapshots taken during a season and never revisited.

The tell is easy to spot. Every player on the list who has finished with the IPL carries the same number everywhere: Gayle on 357, MS Dhoni on 264, AB de Villiers on 251, David Warner on 236. Those numbers stopped moving when the players did. The figures that vary between sites belong to the men still playing, which at the time of writing means Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Sanju Samson, KL Rahul, Jos Buttler, Nicholas Pooran and Shreyas Iyer. Lists still showing Rohit around 309 and Kohli around 297 were compiled before the 2026 season finished.

So a page with Gayle on 357 and Rohit in the low 300s is internally consistent and simply out of date. Check the date on the list before you trust the order of the top three.

The single-season record fell in 2026, and by a distance

Gayle’s 59 sixes in the 2012 season stood for fourteen years. Vaibhav Suryavanshi, who plays for Rajasthan Royals and is also spelled Sooryavanshi on several reference sites, hit 72 in 2026.

Player	Season	Sixes
Vaibhav Suryavanshi	2026	72
Chris Gayle	2012	59
Andre Russell	2019	52
Chris Gayle	2013	51
Jos Buttler	2022	45
Chris Gayle	2011	44
Abhishek Sharma	2026	43
Abhishek Sharma	2024	42
Rajat Patidar	2026	42

He was born on 27 March 2011, so the 2026 season began the day after his fifteenth birthday. He had already become the youngest player in IPL history when he debuted at 14 years and 23 days in April 2025, and he hit 24 sixes in 122 balls in that first season.

The 2026 return was 776 runs from 16 innings off 327 balls, a strike rate of 237.31.

A worked example of why his number is quoted three different ways

Plenty of coverage puts Suryavanshi’s season at 65 sixes, 680 runs and a strike rate of 242.85. Those figures are all correct, and they are all measured at the same moment: the end of the Eliminator against Sunrisers Hyderabad on 27 May 2026, which is the match in which he passed Gayle’s record and the match most of the reports were written about.

Rajasthan then played Qualifier 2 against Gujarat Titans on 29 May. He made 96 off 47 with seven more sixes, which takes 65 to 72, 680 runs to 776 and drags the strike rate down from 242.85 to 237.31. Every one of those six numbers reconciles against the other set exactly. This is the same trap that catches the career list: an arithmetic check proves a table is internally coherent, never that it is current. Only a stated date does that.

Most sixes in an IPL innings

Gayle’s 17 in his unbeaten 175 against Pune Warriors on 23 April 2013 is still the record, and it has now survived thirteen seasons. Brendon McCullum’s 13 in the very first IPL innings, against Bangalore on 18 April 2008, is joint second with Gayle’s own 13 from 2012.

Suryavanshi hit 12 twice in 2026, against Sunrisers Hyderabad on 25 April and again in that Eliminator on 27 May, which puts him level with Gayle’s 12 from 2015.

The IPL now produces roughly twice as many sixes per match as it did in 2011

Season totals on their own are misleading, because the IPL has played anywhere between 57 and 76 matches in a year. Per match, the trend is clear enough.

Season	Sixes	Per match
2011	639	8.8
2016	638	10.6
2019	784	13.1
2022	1,062	14.4
2023	1,124	15.2
2024	1,260	17.7
2025	1,300	17.6
2026	1,426	19.3

The break sits at 2023, which is where a lot of IPL scoring measures move at once. That is the season the Impact Player rule arrived and let sides bat a specialist deeper, and it lines up with the jump in first-innings totals and with powerplay scoring over the same period. It is worth saying plainly that the timing does not prove the cause: bats, boundary lengths and squad depth all moved together.

The 2026 figure of 19.3 a match is the highest the competition has recorded, and 2026 also produced the highest successful run chase in IPL history.

Quick answers

Who has hit the most sixes in IPL history? Chris Gayle, with 357 in 141 innings between 2009 and 2021.

Who has the most sixes among Indian players? Rohit Sharma on 323, just ahead of Virat Kohli on 316.

What is the record for most sixes in one IPL season? Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s 72 in 2026, past Chris Gayle’s 59 from 2012.

What is the most sixes in a single IPL innings? Seventeen, by Chris Gayle in his 175 not out against Pune Warriors in 2013.

Will anyone catch Gayle? Rohit Sharma is 34 behind and played nine matches in 2026. On his 2026 rate that is several seasons of work, and he turns 40 in 2027. Sanju Samson and KL Rahul are both more than 110 short but are hitting them at a better rate than either of the men above them.

For the same list across formats, see our page on the most sixes in international cricket, and for how the margins in these matches feed a points table, our guide to calculating net run rate.

Feature image courtesy: AFP / Sajjad Hussain

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