Snooker Prize Money: £2.4m for 17 Days

The 2026 World Snooker Championship paid £2,395,000 in total, with £500,000 to the winner.

Wu Yize beat Shaun Murphy 18-17 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, in a championship that ran from 18 April to 4 May 2026.

For that fortnight, the champion earned half what a darts world champion earns in a single evening.

The full breakdown

Stage reached	Players paid	Each	Total
Last 112	32	£5,000	£160,000
Last 80	32	£10,000	£320,000
Last 48	16	£15,000	£240,000
Last 32	16	£20,000	£320,000
Last 16	8	£30,000	£240,000
Quarter-final	4	£50,000	£200,000
Semi-final	2	£100,000	£200,000
Runner-up	1	£200,000	£200,000
Winner	1	£500,000	£500,000
Highest break	—	£15,000	£15,000
			£2,395,000

That reconciles to the published total exactly, which is a useful check on figures that otherwise circulate without arithmetic attached.

The floor is the difference

Snooker and darts have converged at the top and diverged at the bottom.

	Snooker	Darts
Total fund	£2,395,000	£5,000,000
Winner	£500,000	£1,000,000
Winner’s share	20.9%	20.0%
Lowest payment	£5,000	£15,000

Both sports give their champion roughly a fifth of the pot. That is the same share Augusta National pays the Masters winner, and it looks like the natural landing point for an individual sport that wants a headline number without hollowing out the draw.

The floor is where they part. Darts guarantees £15,000 to every one of its 128 entrants. Snooker’s lowest scheduled payment is £5,000 — one third as much, from a fund less than half the size, as our guide to darts prize money sets out.

For a player ranked outside the top 60, that gap decides whether a season is viable.

Paid for time, or paid for the moment

The comparison people find counterintuitive is the effort involved.

A snooker world champion plays through a qualifying stage, then 17 days at the Crucible, finishing with a best-of-35-frame final played across two days. It is the longest championship match in mainstream sport.

A darts world champion plays a best-of-13-set final in one evening, and takes £1 million.

Prize money does not track duration, and this is the cleanest example anywhere in sport. What it tracks is broadcast value and commercial reach — and on that measure darts has moved faster over the past decade than any comparable indoor sport.

The highest break payment

One line on the schedule is worth pulling out: £15,000 for the highest break, counting the qualifying stage as well as the Crucible.

It is a rare thing — a payment tied to a single act of skill rather than to progression. A qualifier eliminated in the last 112 who makes the tournament’s best break earns £20,000 in total, four times what their run alone would pay.

Most prize structures pay only for survival. Snooker keeps one line for merit.

Against the rest of British sport

Event	Winner	Total fund
World Darts Championship	£1,000,000	£5,000,000
World Snooker Championship	£500,000	£2,395,000
Grand National	£500,000	£1,000,000

Snooker’s champion earns the same as the Grand National winner, from a fund more than twice as large — though racing’s money is divided among the connections rather than paid to one competitor, as our guide to horse racing prize money explains.

Set against football it disappears entirely. A single club collects €18.62 million for reaching the Champions League league phase before playing a match, covered in our guide to Champions League prize money — nearly eight times snooker’s entire world championship fund.

How we checked these numbers

The £2,395,000 total prize fund, the £500,000 winner’s share, the 18 April to 4 May 2026 dates at the Crucible Theatre and Wu Yize’s 18-17 final win over Shaun Murphy are from the Wikipedia entry for the 2026 World Snooker Championship.

The round-by-round breakdown is carried from the 2024 championship, which had an identical total fund and winner’s prize. We have used it because our own arithmetic across those stage payments reconciles to £2,395,000 exactly — which is strong evidence the structure is unchanged — but the per-round figures for 2026 are inferred rather than separately published. The column totals and the 20.9% winner’s share are our own calculation.

Review class: annual, event-driven. Recheck when World Snooker publishes the next championship’s prize breakdown.