Scottie Scheffler has hardly taken a wrong turn all golf season, apart from a now-infamous arrest before May’s PGA Championship.
With his Tour Championship win Sunday in Atlanta, the world’s No. 1 golfer put an emphatic cap on an already lucrative season, bringing his season earnings to $62.2 million.
Just under half that—$29.2 million—came from official tournament earnings, including seven total wins.
Scheffler’s seven PGA Tour wins are the most in a season since Tiger Woods won eight in 2006, but his on-course earnings are unmatched. His official tournament earnings beat the record of $21 million set by Scheffler just last year.
By also winning the FedEx Cup, a season-long points competition ending in playoffs, Scheffler earned a $25 million bonus to go along with an $8 million bonus for finishing in the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 during the year.
Counting the FedEx Cup bonus, Scheffler has now claimed nearly $71.8 in career earnings, vaulting him into fifth place all-time behind Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy, and Dustin Johnson. (The Tour also publishes a Career Money Leader list that currently excludes LIV Golf participants Mickelson and Johnson.)
But those totals don’t include FedEx Cup bonuses.
The FedEx Cup, introduced in 2007, gave the PGA season an individual champion and playoff system. And in recent years, it has substantially increased payouts. In 2018, the bonus pool was $35 million split amongst multiple players. This year it was a record $100 million, with 25% earmarked for the winner alone.
That increase has helped the PGA Tour compete with upstart LIV, which picked off many of the Tour’s best players in 2022 by offering then-unparalleled prize money. But LIV’s top earners on the course come nowhere close to Scheffler. Through 12 of 14 tournaments this year (the LIV season is shorter than the PGA’s), Jon Rahm is leading with just under $16 million in prize money and is in line for an $18 million bonus if he can secure the championship.
