How Much Does A Pro Tennis Coach Make? (With Examples)

In today’s tennis world, a coach is critical for every professional tennis player’s success. A tennis coach trains with the players, travel with them to competitions, and is overall, the most important person for a player to succeed on the tennis court.

What the players on the ATP & WTA Tour earn are available pretty much everywhere on the internet. There is no secret that players not only earn money from tournament prize money but also that top players earn most of their money from endorsement deals. But, what about their coaches? Do they earn as much as the player? That’s what we will go through in this post.

How much does a pro tennis coach make? The salary for a professional tennis coach differs a lot depending on what player they coach. But, the average salary for the top-ranked player’s coaches starts in the $40k-$200k/Year range and gradually increases depending on how their player performs.

Table of Contents show

How Tennis Coaches Earn Money

It’s super easy to see exactly how much the players on the ATP & WTA Tour earn every year, but how much the coaches earn and how they get paid are they very secretive about. But, here is usually how the professional tennis coaches get paid.

How tennis coaches earn money depends a lot on the individual contract. Depending on the level of the player and coach, the salary and contract will differ a lot. How much a tennis coach earns depends on many different factors, but these are the 5 main factors that affect a tennis coach’s salary.

Base salary
Winning procentage
Special performance bonuses
Ranking bonuses
Tournament prize money (usually 5-15%)

Most ATP tennis coaches’ base salaries start in the $40k-$200k range. But, the player’s coaches’ salaries depend a lot on how much their player earns from the tournament and in some cases sponsors.

Most ATP coaches have a base salary in the $40k-$200k range, but it increases depending on how much their players have earned in prize money and other income sources. You can read our article about how tennis players earn money here.

There is no detailed information about how much coaches earn from their player’s income, but from what I have heard from ATP players, 10% of all the tournament prize money winnings is a very average number. But, remember that most top-ranked players have many different coaches, so most coaches will have to share that 10% bonus.

Here are some examples of how much the top 5 players coaches earned from prize money bonuses during the 2019 season. Remember that these are all estimates based on the 10% average prize money bonus I mentioned above.

Player	Prize Money 2019	Coaches Bonus
Novak Djokovic	$9,5M	$950K
Rafael Nadal	$11.9M	$1.19M
Roger Federer	$6.3M	$630K
Daniil Medvedev	$5.5M	$550K
Dominic Thiem	$4.3M	$430K

So, as you can see in the table, Rafael Nadal’s coach earns over a million dollars just from his prize money winnings. This is just from what the players have earned through tournament prize money.

Most top-ranked players earn most of their money through endorsement deals, but that is usually not something that their coach gets a piece of.

All Coaches Have Different Contracts

For every professional tennis coach, there is a unique contract involved. Unlike many other sports, there is no such thing as a club contract.

All tennis players have signed a contract with their coach themselves and they can tweak it however they want. Some players may have a contract with their coach that gives them 50% of all their winnings and at the same time, another player may have a 2% bonus cut of all their winnings.

When a player cracks into the top 100, 50, or 10, their coaches normally receive a bonus. That is not only because they have performed well during the time they have coached them, but also because the players receive a check of money from the ATP and sponsors for their ranking.

All the players that are ranked inside the top 8 at the end of the year rankings, get to participate in the ATP World Tour Finals. In that tournament, all players are guaranteed $175,000, even if they lose all matches.

However, the winner of the ATP Finals receives another $2,225,000 and the coach of that player can expect to get a few percentages of that. But, once again, how much the coach gets from that can vary from 1% to 99%, but most players tend to go for the 5-15% range.

There is no right or wrong here, it’s up to the player how much he wants to share with his coach. But, I would say that the 5%-15% range is a pretty fair number.

Conclusion

A professional tennis coach’s salary depends on so many different variables and there is in most cases no such thing as a fixed salary in the tennis industry. It all depends on the individual contract, which varies greatly depending on the level of the player and coach.

The top-ranked player’s coaches on the ATP & WTA Tour get paid through a combination of a base salary, winnings, and special performance bonuses.

Most tennis coaches get their bonuses from the player’s performance in different tournaments and their end-of-the-year rankings. If you are thinking about a career as a professional tennis coach, expect to earn more money through bonuses then from the base salary.