The $100 million season that changed golf
A golf season now ends with $100 million on the line. That is not a typo. In less than two decades, the FedEx Cup went from a bold idea with a $35 million pool to the richest prize structure in the sport, reshaping how the PGA Tour rewards its best players.
Back in 2007, the Tour rolled out a season-long race and promised something unheard of at the time: $10 million to the winner, paid from a $35 million pot. For 12 seasons, that anchor number never moved. Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Jim Furyk, Jordan Spieth, Justin Rose—it did not matter who won; the bonus stayed the same.
The first big jump arrived in 2019. The pool jumped to $60 million, and the champion’s take moved to $15 million. The Tour also tried to simplify the finale with a “staggered start,” where the points leader began the Tour Championship at 10-under par and everyone else chased from behind. It made TV graphics cleaner, but plenty of fans never warmed to net scoring in a stroke-play event.
Money kept climbing. In 2022, the total rose to $75 million and the winner’s share to $18 million. In 2024, the Tour set a new watermark: $100 million overall and $25 million to the champion, which Scottie Scheffler claimed. That surge did not happen in a vacuum. The Tour was fighting to keep stars amid competition from LIV Golf and had fresh capital behind it—most notably a multibillion-dollar investment led by Strategic Sports Group in PGA Tour Enterprises. Bigger bonuses became both a defense mechanism and a headline.
Then came 2025, which changed more than the dollar signs. The Tour moved away from an all-or-nothing finish. The money now flows in three stages so that regular-season excellence matters, playoff form matters, and one shaky week does not erase 10 months of work.
What changed in 2025: three stages, fewer flukes
The $100 million pool is no longer tied solely to the Tour Championship. It is sliced up to reward performance at three points in the season. Here is the breakdown:
- $20 million paid after the regular season to the top 10 in points. The regular-season No. 1 pockets $10 million.
- $22.93 million paid after the BMW Championship to the top 30 in points. The points leader takes $5 million.
- $57.08 million paid based on the Tour Championship results. The Tour Championship winner earns $10 million.
Add it up and a player who runs the table—finishing first after the regular season, first after the BMW, and then winning at East Lake—can collect $25 million from the FedEx pot. On top of that, the separate Comcast Business Top 10 bonus can add up to another $8 million for the regular-season No. 1.
Two more changes stand out. First, the Tour dropped the staggered start. Everyone now begins the Tour Championship at level par, which restores a clean, traditional leaderboard. Second, the payout curve is wider. Strong seasons are protected even if the finale goes sideways.
Look at Jon Rahm’s 2023 arc as a test case. He finished first after the Wyndham Championship, fourth after the BMW, then had a poor week at East Lake. Under the old format, that slump crushed his payout to about $670,000 from the FedEx bonus. Under the new math, that same path would be worth roughly $12.2 million. The message is clear: consistency counts, and one cold putter on Sunday night in Atlanta will not take an entire year’s earnings with it.
The 2025 finale also delivered its first new-era champion: Tommy Fleetwood. He won the Tour Championship and banked $10 million from that stage alone. The broader pool around him paid deep, too, and the season runner-up across the new structure now earns about $12.5 million—more than the winners received as recently as 2018.
Why did the Tour do this? Three reasons kept coming up with players and officials. One, fairness. If you lead most of the year, you should not see your bonus evaporate in four bad rounds. Two, clarity. Fans were never fully sold on net starting scores; a true even-par start feels more like golf. Three, competition. The Tour is still in a talent arms race. More guaranteed money tied to season-long results helps keep stars engaged from January to August.
There is also a business logic to this split. Breaking the pool into checkpoints encourages participation through the late regular season, then again into the playoffs. It reduces the incentive to coast once a player has secured a spot at East Lake. And it turns the BMW Championship into a meaningful gate—more than a steppingstone, less than a final exam, but lucrative for those who show up sharp.
Here is a simple way to think about it if you are a player mapping out a season: you have three pay windows, each with its own risk-reward tradeoffs.
- Regular season to Wyndham: rack up points and chase the top 10. The difference between first and second is now massive—$10 million versus less.
- BMW Championship: lock in the top 30 and aim for the lead. It is a smaller pool but a real cash bump before Atlanta.
- Tour Championship: play for the final $57 million share and the $10 million winner’s slice without the baggage of a net score.
There are tradeoffs. Players who used to bank on a white‑hot week at East Lake to jump the field now face a lower ceiling if their regular season was mediocre. But the flip side is healthier: the best players over 10 months no longer feel punished by a single bad bounce on the final weekend.
Context helps here. Even the majors, with their rising purses, do not touch these numbers. The FedEx finale is not just the richest week; it is the richest structure in golf, stacked across multiple stops. A year ago, $10 million could win the whole thing. Now, $10 million is the winner’s share from one stage of the final event.
What about fans? The new system should be easier to follow. No more trying to remember who started at minus-10 or whether a birdie by one chaser is “really” a birdie in net terms. The leaderboard you see at East Lake is the leaderboard that decides that $57.08 million slice. The other two pay windows are posted before the finale even begins.
For sponsors and the Tour, the story is reach and retention. A richer, steadier bonus structure keeps stars in the mix across the calendar while offering TV a cleaner product at the end. For players, it is a rare safety net at the summit of a cutthroat sport. If you have the best year, you get paid like it—no asterisks.
The arc from 2007 to now tells the story in four beats:
- 2007–2018: $35 million pool, $10 million to the winner, format stable.
- 2019: $60 million pool, $15 million to the winner, staggered start introduced.
- 2022: $75 million pool, $18 million to the winner, pressure rising from rival tours.
- 2024–2025: $100 million pool, $25 million to the champion in 2024; then a three-stage payout in 2025 with $10 million to the Tour Championship winner and bigger guarantees for season leaders.
The money says the quiet part out loud. The Tour is paying to keep its best. The players wanted a system that rewards the long haul. And fans wanted a finale that looks and feels like real golf. In 2025, they all got a piece of that $100 million answer.