India T20I best batting average: All-Time Records

Virat Kohli averaged 48.69 in T20 internationals for India, from 4,188 runs in 117 innings. No other Indian who has scored a thousand T20I runs is within four of that figure, and only one — Tilak Varma, on 44.45 — is within eight. Kohli retired from the format after the World Cup final at Bridgetown in June 2024 and the number has not moved since.

An average is a ratio, so this page needs a cut-off. Sixteen India batters have reached 1,000 T20I runs, and that is the threshold used here. Below it the list fills with players who batted a handful of times: a batter who made 40 not out in his only innings averages 40, which is arithmetically true and tells you nothing.

The other complication is specific to Twenty20. Batting averages divide runs by dismissals, and a middle-order finisher in a twenty-over game is very often not out when the innings ends. MS Dhoni was not out 42 times in 85 T20I innings — very nearly half — which is why he appears fourth on a list of batting averages while having scored 1,617 runs at 19.0 per innings.

India's best T20I batting averages (minimum 1,000 runs)

#	Player	Span	Mat	Inns	NO	Runs	HS	Ave	SR	100s	50s
1	Virat Kohli	2010-2024	125	117	31	4,188	122*	48.69	137.04	1	38
2	Tilak Varma	2023-2026	59	56	19	1,645	120*	44.45	145.18	2	9
3	KL Rahul	2016-2022	72	68	8	2,265	110*	37.75	139.12	2	22
4	MS Dhoni	2006-2019	98	85	42	1,617	56	37.60	126.13	0	2
5	Suryakumar Yadav	2021-2026	113	107	17	3,272	117	36.35	162.94	4	25
6	Shreyas Iyer	2017-2026	61	57	13	1,415	80*	32.15	138.04	0	10
7	Rohit Sharma	2007-2024	159	151	19	4,231	121*	32.05	140.89	5	32
8	Abhishek Sharma	2024-2026	56	55	2	1,629	135	30.73	187.24	2	11
9	Ishan Kishan	2021-2026	55	55	1	1,608	103	29.77	146.31	1	12
10	Shivam Dube	2019-2026	73	56	18	1,127	66	29.65	152.09	0	6
11	Suresh Raina	2006-2018	78	66	11	1,605	101	29.18	134.87	1	5
12	Hardik Pandya	2016-2026	138	109	28	2,288	71*	28.24	145.91	0	9
13	Yuvraj Singh	2007-2017	58	51	9	1,177	77*	28.02	136.38	0	8
14	Shikhar Dhawan	2011-2021	68	66	3	1,759	92	27.92	126.36	0	11
15	Sanju Samson	2015-2026	66	58	5	1,432	111	27.01	155.99	3	6
16	Rishabh Pant	2017-2024	76	66	14	1,209	65*	23.25	127.26	0	3

The whole qualified field is shown. Sixteen names is the complete list of Indians past a thousand runs in the format, so this is not a top ten with a tail cut off.

Runs per innings, which reorders the page

Dividing runs by innings rather than by dismissals removes the not-out effect and produces a different ranking.

Player	Runs	Inns	Runs per innings	Average
Virat Kohli	4,188	117	35.8	48.69
KL Rahul	2,265	68	33.3	37.75
Suryakumar Yadav	3,272	107	30.6	36.35
Abhishek Sharma	1,629	55	29.6	30.73
Tilak Varma	1,645	56	29.4	44.45
Ishan Kishan	1,608	55	29.2	29.77
Rohit Sharma	4,231	151	28.0	32.05
Shivam Dube	1,127	56	20.1	29.65
MS Dhoni	1,617	85	19.0	37.60

Kohli stays first on either measure. Everything below moves. MS Dhoni falls from fourth to last of the nine, and Tilak Varma from second to fifth — his nineteen not-outs in 56 innings are the second-largest proportion in the qualified group after Dhoni's. Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan, with two and one not-outs between them across 110 innings, rise: they open, they get out, and their averages are close to their scoring.

Neither column is wrong. The average answers "how many runs before he is dismissed", which is the right question for a finisher whose job is to still be there at the end. Runs per innings answers "how much does he contribute when he bats", which is the right question for a top-order batter.

Home and away

Player	Home runs	Home ave	Away/neutral runs	Away ave
Virat Kohli	1,577	50.87	2,611	47.47
KL Rahul	1,018	37.70	1,247	37.78
Suryakumar Yadav	1,530	35.58	1,742	37.06
MS Dhoni	670	44.66	947	33.82
Rohit Sharma	1,532	29.46	2,699	33.73
Shikhar Dhawan	706	28.24	1,053	27.71
Sanju Samson	673	29.26	759	25.30

The splits are unusually flat, which is itself the finding. Virat Kohli, KL Rahul, Suryakumar Yadav and Shikhar Dhawan all sit within 3.5 of their own overall figure in both halves. Dhoni's 10.84 gap is the widest on the page and rests on 670 home runs, a small sample by the standards of the rest of the table.

That flatness contrasts sharply with the equivalent Test splits, where home and away averages for the same batters routinely differ by ten or fifteen. A twenty-over innings is short enough that pitch and conditions matter less than the phase of the innings a batter walks into.

Tilak Varma's 44.45

Tilak Varma reached 1,645 runs at 44.45 from 56 innings, and two of his hundreds came in consecutive innings — 107 not out at Centurion on 13 November 2024 and 120 not out at the Wanderers two days later. Nineteen not-outs from 56 innings is the mechanism behind the average, and he has batted mostly at three and four with licence to finish.

Whether the figure survives another fifty innings is the open question on this page. Kohli's 48.69 was assembled over fourteen years and 117 innings; Tilak's rests on less than half that, and the qualified list is full of players whose averages fell as their careers lengthened.

Averages against strike rates

The two columns are close to uncorrelated in this group. Abhishek Sharma strikes at 187.24 and averages 30.73; Dhoni struck at 126.13 and averaged 37.60. Suryakumar Yadav manages 162.94 and 36.35 together, which is the best combination of the two on the page, and Sanju Samson 155.99 with 27.01.

At the other end, Rishabh Pant is last on average at 23.25 with a strike rate of 127.26, the third-lowest in the group — the only qualified batter who is in the bottom four on both measures. The rate side of the argument is set out in the ranking of India's best T20I batting strike rates, and the volume side in the list of most T20I fifties for India.

Five observations

The first is Kohli's 38 fifties against a single hundred. He passed fifty 39 times in 117 innings and converted once, at Dubai against Afghanistan in September 2022. Rohit Sharma, averaging 16.64 less, scored five hundreds.

The second is that four of the sixteen have retired from the format and three more have not played since 2022, so half the field is fixed. The movement will come from Tilak, Abhishek, Suryakumar Yadav, Kishan, Dube, Samson and Hardik Pandya.

The third is that no bowler comes close to the threshold. The highest T20I average by an Indian selected primarily to bowl belongs well outside this list, because the qualification is set on runs and no Indian bowler has a thousand.

The fourth is that Dhoni's two fifties in 85 innings, alongside an average of 37.60, is the single strangest line on the page. He scored 1,617 runs almost entirely in twenties and thirties at the end of innings, and the record has no modern parallel.

The fifth is that the spread from top to bottom is 25.44 runs, which is enormous for a list of international batters. Twenty-over cricket rewards different jobs so differently that a single average column cannot rank them. The wider story is in the guide to India's T20 international history, the country's game in the cricket in India hub, and every career in the player directory.

Sources and method

Runs, innings, not-outs, averages, strike rates, hundreds and fifties come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru career query for India in men's T20 internationals, ordered by batting average with a minimum of 1,000 career runs applied in the query itself. That threshold is stated on the page because the ordering is meaningless without it, and the full qualified field is reproduced rather than a truncated top ten.

The home and away table is the same query run with the venue filter set to home, then to away and neutral combined; the two halves sum to each batter's career total. The runs-per-innings column is computed here from the runs and innings columns and is not a published statistic. Dates and venues for the individual innings named in the prose come from the innings-level query and from the scorecards for those matches. Figures were read in August 2026 and cover men's T20Is completed to that date; spans ending in 2026 belong to batters who may add to their totals.