As we head into the first Major championship of 2025, the US Masters, much of the attention will be on Rory McIlroy. It is almost 11 years since he won his last Major and in that time he has suffered a lot of painful near misses. He is desperate to complete the career Grand Slam and has come close to winning at Augusta several times without managing to get over the line.
He has seen dips in form and dropped out of the top 10 in the world in 2017, ending 2018 in eighth and 2021 in ninth. He has had struggles off the course too, in his marriage, in navigating the LIV schism and, less seriously, in the continued failings of his football team, Man United. He has had heated bust-ups at the Ryder Cup and endured years of emotional heartache due to his repeated failures to land a fifth Major.
However, before we start to feel too sorry for the Northern Irishman, we should point out that he recently became just the second player ever to surpass $100m in career prize money on the PGA Tour. Money isn’t everything in life but most people would agree that it helps, not least when you can earn it playing the sport you love in some of the most beautiful places on the planet.
How Rory Joined Elite Club of Just Two
The first player to reach the magical nine-figure landmark for prize money won on the US Tour was, of course, Tiger Woods. Any golfer that is compared on just about any metric with Woods can probably be pretty happy about that and the fact that McIlroy has joined an uber-elite club of just two shows how special his achievement is.
Rory has enjoyed an excellent 2025 and the $338,000 he collected for finishing tied fifth at the Houston Open was enough to push him over the $100m mark. That event at the end of March was a good indication of where the Holywood ace’s game is at right now and he said he has never been in better form coming into the Masters.
Here are his earnings for events played in 2025 on the PGA Tour prior to the US Masters
| Date | Event | Finished | Earnings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2/2/25 | AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am | 1 | $3,600,000 |
| 16/2/25 | Genesis Invitational | T17 | $270,714 |
| 9/3/25 | Arnold Palmer Invitational | T15 | $349,000 |
| 17/3/25 | The Players Championship | 1 | $4,500,000 |
| 30/3 | Houston Open | T5 | $337,844 |
| Total | $9,057,558 | ||
To have earnt over $9m on the PGA Tour alone in the first three months of the year shows what a great start to 2025 Rory has made. It also illustrates the huge riches available in modern golf, with the US and European Tours having had to increase their prize money in response to the challenge of LIV.
That latter point is evident when we consider that in 2000, when Tiger won nine PGA events, three of which were majors, he won “just” $10.7m all season. Some of the increase is, of course, down to inflation, but it also reflects the way the game has changed dramatically in the past few years.
Rory’s best year as things stand came in 2023 when he won a similar amount to Tiger’s 2000 tally, taking home $10,654,758 in official prize money (excluding bonus winnings from the Tour Championship, Player Impact Program and Tour Top 10 bonus). He will surely surpass that this year and may well do so at the Masters, with the winner set to take home $3.6m out of a total purse of $20m.
Tiger Still Leads the Way
There are all sorts of different bonus funds available to players these days, and that is aside from sponsorship deals and endorsements. These commercial arrangements are worth far more to players than official prize money but here we are concerned only with what Rory has earnt on the course and specifically what he has won in direct tournament earnings, excluding the aforementioned bonus payments schemes that have been phased in since 2019.
According to the official PGA Tour standings McIlroy still has some way to go to catch Tiger. The list below shows the top five in career earnings on the PGA Tour.
- Tiger Woods – $120,999,166
- Rory McIlroy – $100,046,906
- Phil Mickelson – $96,685,635
- Dustin Johnson – $75,557,026
- Scottie Scheffler – $75,134,784
With DJ out to pasture in the unwatched and unloved world of LIV, and Tiger and Mickelson very much with their best days behind them, the battle to usurp Woods looks like a straight fight between the current top two in the world. World number one, Scheffler, has been producing Tiger-esque results over the past few seasons and has surged up the earnings table. But McIlroy, second in the Official World Golf Ranking heading into the Masters, has a substantial lead.
Prize funds have really leapt up over the past five years or so and that has allowed Scheffler to make up a lot of ground very quickly. If we rewind to December 2022, the 2022 and 2024 Masters champion was down in 87th in terms of career earnings, with $21.5m to his name. By the end of 2024 he had moved up to his current position of fifth, with almost $72m on the board.
He will almost certainly become the third player to reach $100m, with Jordan Spieth and Jason Day perhaps the only players with any chance of pushing him close. That pair are in 10th and 11th, with $62.7m and $61.1m respectively. Players like Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele and Hideki Matsuyama also have well over $50m but really it is hard to see past Scheffler becoming the next man to hit nine figures.
The bigger question is whether it will be him or Rory that gets past Woods first. The defending Masters champion took home over $104m in 2024, but much of that came from various bonuses, including a massive $25m for winning the FedEx Cup. It also includes around $28m in sponsorship. That said, he still claimed over $29m in basic prize money, so it is not out of the question that he could close the $25m gap to Rory, before the Northern Irishman gets the extra $20m he needs to move past Woods.
Ultimately though, sport is about glory – unless you prefer the LIV lucre – rather than cold, hard cash. The battle to top the career earnings list is an interesting subplot but the real stories are the ones told at Augusta and the other big events. Whether we measure the rivalry in cash, majors or world ranking points, we hope the Scheffler v Rory battle keeps on bringing the best out of both great players.