Lionesses Pay: Equal Since 2020, on £2,000

England’s women have been paid exactly the same as England’s men for representing their country since 2020.

The equalised figure is a nominal match fee of around £2,000.

Both of those sentences are true, and holding them together is the only way to understand what the Lionesses actually earn.

Match fee	~£2,000, equal to the men’s team since 2020
Euro 2025 bonus, collective	£1.75m
Average per player	~£73,000, by minutes played
Tax and National Insurance	~£788,000
Combined take-home	~£1m
WSL average salary	~£47,000

Equality arrived on the smallest line

This is the part worth sitting with.

The FA pays its women’s players the same match fee and the same match bonus as the men. That is a genuine and meaningful policy, and England adopted it earlier than most.

It is also the cheapest form of equality available. A match fee of around £2,000 is a rounding error to a Premier League footballer and a real sum to many Women’s Super League players. Equalising it costs the association very little, because the number is small for everybody.

The gaps that remain are in the lines nobody equalised: club wages, commercial income and the size of the prize funds the two teams compete for.

That is not a criticism of the FA’s policy. It is the reason the policy was possible.

The bonus is the actual money

Match fees are not what a tournament is worth to these players. The negotiated bonus is.

For Euro 2025 the squad agreed a collective package of £1.75 million for winning, averaging about £73,000 per player depending on minutes played — £18,000 more per player than the equivalent bonus three years earlier, which implies roughly £55,000 at the previous tournament.

Then the arithmetic that almost nobody publishes: a tax specialist estimated the squad would pay approximately £788,000 in tax and National Insurance, leaving a combined take-home in the region of £1 million.

£1.75m − £788,000 ≈ £962,000. The headline figure and the money that reaches the players differ by 45%.

What changed before Euro 2025

One structural reform sits behind all of this, and it is more important than any individual figure.

Before Euro 2025, UEFA’s executive committee required participating teams to distribute between 30% and 40% of their tournament prize money to their players — for the first time.

Until then, prize money went to national associations, and whether players saw any of it depended entirely on what each association chose to negotiate. That is precisely why the 2023 Women’s World Cup bonus dispute happened: talks between the England squad and the FA ran unresolved into the tournament itself before agreement was reached.

The Euro 2025 arrangement was settled before a ball was kicked. A mandated floor turned an annual argument into a negotiation about the amount above it.

£73,000 against £47,000

Put the bonus next to the league it comes from and the scale becomes clear.

The average Women’s Super League salary is reported at around £47,000. An average Euro 2025 bonus of £73,000 is more than a year’s typical club salary for a player in England’s top division.

For a handful of the highest-paid players that is not the case. For most of the squad, and for most professionals in the league, one successful tournament is worth more than a season.

No comparable statement could be made about the men’s team, where a £2,000 match fee and a tournament bonus are both immaterial against club contracts.

The money in the English men’s game sits somewhere else entirely: promotion from the Championship carries a revenue uplift put at £205 million, as our guide to Premier League promotion value sets out.

The same pattern, three times

This site has now looked at women’s earnings from three directions and found the same shape each time.

Where	Gap
England national team match fee	Equal
Golf’s biggest majors	1.7×
Golf across a full season	3.4×
Forbes top 50 highest-paid athletes	No women, three years running

Our guide to LPGA vs PGA prize money found the gap at the summit of golf roughly half what it is across the season. Our guide to the highest paid female athletes found no women in Forbes’ top 50 for a third consecutive year, with about three-quarters of leading earner Coco Gauff’s income coming from off-court sources.

Parity has arrived fastest at the most visible points and slowest everywhere behind them. A national-team match fee is visible and cheap. A league’s wage bill is neither.

How we checked these numbers

The equal pay between England’s men’s and women’s national teams since 2020, and the nominal match fee of around £2,000, are from Yahoo Sports’ explainer on Lionesses pay. The £1.75 million collective Euro 2025 bonus, the average of around £73,000 per player varying by minutes played and the £18,000 increase on three years earlier are from OneFootball and Yahoo Sports. The estimated £788,000 in tax and National Insurance and the resulting take-home of about £1 million are from Grazia’s breakdown of a tax specialist’s calculation. UEFA’s requirement that teams distribute 30-40% of prize money to players before Euro 2025 is from the same reporting. The 2023 Women’s World Cup bonus negotiation is from CBS Sports. The reported ~£47,000 WSL average salary is from FootyStats.

The ~£55,000 previous-tournament figure and the 45% gap between headline and take-home are our own arithmetic from the published numbers. Bonus packages are performance-related and paid by minutes, so £73,000 is an average rather than an amount any individual received. Match fee figures are reported as nominal amounts and have appeared in both sterling and dollars; treat them as an order of magnitude.

Review class: event-driven, annual. Recheck after each major tournament and on any new FA or UEFA payment agreement.