Nominal vs present value
Local display: $3.4m · Rebased to 2024 USD via US CPI-U
How the total breaks down
IPL auction fee. The highest price ever paid at an IPL auction, set in a bidding war with his former franchise, Delhi Capitals.
BCCI contract & endorsements. A central contract and a growing sponsor portfolio built around his comeback from a serious 2022 car accident.
Impact 87
- Became the single most expensive player in IPL auction history
- Turned a serious car-accident comeback into the league's biggest bidding war
- Confirmed keeper-batsmen, not just bowlers, could top the league's price charts
Pant's ₹27 crore fee, won by Lucknow Super Giants over his long-time franchise Delhi Capitals, broke a record set only minutes earlier by Shreyas Iyer in the same 2025 mega-auction — a session that saw the league's price ceiling rewritten twice in one afternoon. It confirmed that a wicketkeeper-batsman recovering from a life-threatening accident could still command more than any bowler or all-rounder in the sport's history.
Fourteen months after a car accident that nearly ended his career, Pant became the most expensive player in IPL history when Lucknow Super Giants paid ₹27 crore (about $3.21 million) to sign him away from Delhi Capitals at the 2025 mega-auction, edging out a record Shreyas Iyer had set only minutes before. The fee, for a single season, exceeded what most international captains earn across several years of central contracts — the clearest sign yet of how far the IPL's auction economy had outpaced the rest of the sport.