Retired hurt vs retired out in cricket: the difference, and how often the batter comes back

Retired hurt and retired out look almost identical on a scorecard and mean opposite things. A batter who retires hurt has left the field because of injury or illness and keeps the right to come back. A batter who retires out has chosen to walk off for any other reason, and unless the opposing captain agrees to let him return, his innings is over and he is credited with a dismissal.

The question underneath both, and the one people actually search for, is whether the batter comes back. No explainer of this kind puts a number on it, so we counted it. Across men’s Tests, ODIs, T20Is and the IPL in the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive, a batter who retires hurt returns to the same innings 54.2 per cent of the time in a Test and 25.9 per cent of the time in a T20 international, with one-day cricket and the IPL in between. The longer the innings, the likelier he is to get back out there.

Retired hurt vs retired out: the difference in one table

	Retired hurt	Retired out
Reason	Illness, injury or another unavoidable cause	Any other reason, usually tactical
Can he resume?	Yes, as of right	Only if the opposing captain consents
Counts as a wicket?	No	Yes
Credited to a bowler?	No	No
Scorecard reads	Retired not out	Retired out
How often it happens	328 times in our sample	26 times

Both live in Law 25.4 of the Laws of Cricket. Law 25.4.2 covers the injury case and records the batter as retired not out. Law 25.4.3 covers everything else: he may resume only with the consent of the opposing captain, and if he does not, he is retired out. The distinction is about the reason for walking off, not about how badly hurt anyone is.

One detail that surprises people is who gets the credit. Neither counts against a bowler. A retired out is a wicket in the team column and in the batter’s own record, yet nobody is credited with taking it, which puts it in the same small category as a run out.

Can a retired hurt batter bat again?

Yes, but not whenever he likes. He may resume only at the fall of a wicket or when another batter retires, and only before his side’s innings ends. Miss both windows and the innings closes with him marked retired not out, which is what happens in most cases outside Test cricket.

Format	Retirements	Batter returned	Return rate
Test	107	58	54.2%
ODI	106	46	43.4%
IPL	30	11	36.7%
T20I	85	22	25.9%

The gradient runs exactly with the length of an innings and has no exception. A Test innings can stretch across two days, which is time enough for a bruise to be strapped and an X-ray to come back clean. A T20 innings lasts about eighty minutes and is usually finished before anyone could reasonably return, so three out of four T20I retirements are the end of that batter’s day whatever his intentions were.

Rishabh Pant illustrates both halves better than anyone. At Old Trafford in July 2025 he inside-edged a reverse sweep onto his right foot, retired hurt on 37 with a fractured metatarsal, and walked back out the following morning to make 54. Captaining Lucknow Super Giants against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on 15 April 2026, he was hit on the left elbow by Josh Hazlewood and went off after three balls, then returned when his side were 118 for five, which is the fall of a wicket and therefore the only moment Law 25.4.4 allowed. He lasted three more balls and was out for six-ball 1. He also went off after a blow to the wrist in the Test at Colombo this month, which our report on Padikkal’s hundred and Pant’s retirement covers.

Rohit Sharma is the counter-example, and a stark one. He has retired hurt five times across internationals and the IPL, in 2011, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026, and has never once resumed the innings. The most-retired batter in the sample is Ross Taylor on six.

What is retired out in cricket?

Retired out is a batter walking off while perfectly fit, and accepting a dismissal for it. It is nearly always tactical: the batter at the crease is scoring too slowly for the situation, so he makes way for someone who can hit from ball one.

It is also genuinely rare, and rarer than the coverage suggests. Our count found 26 instances across every men’s Test, ODI, T20I and IPL match in the archive, and not one of them was in a Test or a one-day international. Twenty came in T20Is and six in the IPL. In the longer formats there is simply no situation in which giving up your wicket to speed the scoring is worth more than the wicket itself.

Every retired out in IPL history

Date	Batter	Team
10 April 2022	Ravichandran Ashwin	Rajasthan Royals
17 May 2023	Atharva Taide	Punjab Kings
26 May 2023	Sai Sudharsan	Gujarat Titans
4 April 2025	Tilak Varma	Mumbai Indians
8 April 2025	Devon Conway	Chennai Super Kings
11 April 2026	Ayush Mhatre	Chennai Super Kings

Ashwin was the first, against Lucknow Super Giants at the Wankhede Stadium on 10 April 2022. He was 28 off 23 and walked off so Riyan Parag could take strike in the closing overs. Rajasthan defended 165 and won by three runs, which did the tactic no harm at all in the argument that followed. Every one of the six has come in April or May, and four of them in the first half of April, when sides are still working out their batting order.

The T20I list is the more surprising one. Of the twenty, only two involve Test-playing nations: Roston Chase for West Indies on 3 August 2025 and Brendan Taylor for Zimbabwe on 28 September 2025. The other eighteen are Associate cricket, spread across Bhutan, France, Gambia, Namibia, Greece, the UAE, Botswana, Nigeria, Switzerland, Japan, Ghana, Slovenia, Cyprus and Hungary. Retiring out has become a normal tool in the lower tiers of the international game while the Full Members have barely touched it.

How we counted this, and the trap in the data

The method is worth stating, because it contains the trap. Cricsheet records a retirement in the wickets data only when the batter does not come back. A batter who retires and resumes leaves no retirement entry at all; the only trace is a gap in the deliveries he was at the crease for, with other batters in the middle and no dismissal against his name.

Take the raw retirement entries at face value and you get a return rate of zero, which is obviously wrong. Counting the gaps instead gives the real figure. We validated it against a case with a known answer: Pant’s Old Trafford innings shows a gap of 207 deliveries between his last ball on day one and his first on day two, exactly as it should. Rohit’s Basseterre retirement in August 2022, which the earlier version of this page was built around, shows no gap and a retirement entry, because he did not come back.

Common questions

Is retired hurt out? No. The scorecard shows retired not out, the batter is not dismissed, and no bowler is credited.

Does retired out count as a wicket? Yes, in the team total and against the batter, but not to any bowler.

Can a retired out batter come back? Only with the opposing captain’s consent, under Law 25.4.3. In practice that consent is not given, because the whole point of the tactic is that the batting side has chosen to spend a wicket.

When exactly can a retired hurt batter return? At the fall of a wicket, or when another batter retires. Not at the end of an over, and not by simply walking back out.

What happens if he cannot come back? The innings ends with him not out. If a side loses batters to injury it can be all out with fewer than ten dismissals on the card.

For the rules that govern the other end of the pitch, see our explainers on no ball rules, the lbw law and the Decision Review System, plus a companion piece on the golden duck and how often each kind of duck actually happens.

Retirement counts and return rates derived from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive: 892 men’s Tests, 2,569 ODIs, 3,528 T20Is and 1,243 IPL matches, to 22 August 2026 (IPL to 31 May 2026). Scorecard entries labelled retired not out are counted with retired hurt, since both record an injury retirement. Law references are to the MCC Laws of Cricket, 2017 Code, 3rd Edition (2022).

Featured photo: AFP / JEWEL SAMAD

Browse more cricket features