India T20I most sixes: All-Time Records

Rohit Sharma hit 205 sixes in T20 internationals for India, and was the first cricketer of any nationality to reach two hundred in the format. He retired after the 2024 World Cup final with a mark that nobody has since passed.

Suryakumar Yadav is second on 179, having become only the second Indian to a hundred and fifty in October 2025, and he is the one active player close enough to threaten the record. Virat Kohli finished on 124, Hardik Pandya has 101, Abhishek Sharma reached a hundred in July 2026 and KL Rahul stopped at 99.

Six India batters have cleared a hundred T20I sixes. That is the whole list, and the table below is complete rather than truncated — the seventh name is Yuvraj Singh on 74, a long way back.

India's leading T20I six-hitters

#	Batter	Span	Inns	Balls	6s	Balls per six	Runs in 6s	SR
1	Rohit Sharma	2007-2024	151	3,003	205	14.6	29.1%	140.89
2	Suryakumar Yadav	2021-2026	107	2,008	179	11.2	32.8%	162.94
3	Virat Kohli	2010-2024	117	3,056	124	24.6	17.8%	137.04
4	Hardik Pandya	2016-2026	109	1,568	101	15.5	26.5%	145.91
5	Abhishek Sharma	2024-2026	55	870	100	8.7	36.8%	187.24
6	KL Rahul	2016-2022	68	1,628	99	16.4	26.2%	139.12

Where in the innings each of them hits

The count and the rate both describe a whole career. Splitting the same balls by phase of the innings shows six different jobs, and it separates two players the rate column had put side by side.

Batter	Powerplay 6s	Balls per six	Middle 6s	Balls per six	Death 6s	Balls per six
Rohit Sharma	97	16.6	79	13.7	18	9.8
Suryakumar Yadav	39	12.8	92	13.1	44	6.2
Virat Kohli	18	48.4	46	33.3	51	10.1
Hardik Pandya	6	10.2	30	24.0	86	8.7
Abhishek Sharma	69	9.1	31	7.2	4	4.8
KL Rahul	43	19.8	43	14.3	9	8.3

Kohli's row is the one that changes the reading of this page. Across the first six overs he cleared the rope once every 48.4 balls, which is by a wide margin the slowest rate here and slower than most Indian batters in any phase. From the sixteenth over on he did it once every 10.1, which is quicker than Rohit managed at the death and inside a factor of two of Abhishek. His career figure of one every 24.6 is the average of two entirely different batters, and averaging them produces a number that describes neither.

Hardik Pandya's distribution is the sharpest of the six. Seventy per cent of his sixes have come in the last five overs, from 750 balls that produced a strike rate of 174.4. He has faced 61 powerplay deliveries in his whole India T20I career.

Abhishek Sharma's is the mirror image: 66% of his sixes in the powerplay, four in total at the death, and a middle-overs rate of one every 7.2 balls that is the fastest figure anywhere in this table. He has faced nineteen death-overs balls for India.

Two ways to be the leading six-hitter

Rohit Sharma and Suryakumar Yadav are the only two Indians past 150, and their phase splits show they got there differently. Half of Rohit's sixes came in the powerplay against a fifth of Suryakumar's; a quarter of Suryakumar's came at the death against under a tenth of Rohit's.

Rohit's best phase by rate was the death, but he faced only 176 balls there in a seventeen-year career. Suryakumar has faced 274 and taken 44 sixes from them, one every 6.2 deliveries.

That is why the reading rate favours Suryakumar even where the count does not. He is the only batter here whose rate improves in every successive phase, and the only one on this page who has done the bulk of his work between overs seven and fifteen — the phase most India batters treat as a holding pattern.

Which attacks were hit hardest

The archive gives each batter's sixes by opponent, and the leading side is different for almost every one of them. Rohit's most productive opponent is West Indies with 39; Suryakumar's is New Zealand with 29; Kohli's is Australia with 26; Pandya's and Abhishek's are both England, with 27 and 28.

Abhishek's number is the most striking of the five because he has played England far fewer times than Rohit played West Indies. Twenty-eight sixes against one opposition inside two years, including thirteen in the 135 at the Wankhede in February 2025, is a concentration nothing else on this page comes near.

The team-level trend behind all six careers is steeper still. India hit 3.9 sixes per T20I in 2016, 7.2 in 2022 and 9.8 across the matches played into 2026. The rate has more than doubled inside a decade, and the six-hitting careers that started after 2022 sit on a different baseline from the ones that started before it.

The rate column reorders everything

Sort by balls per six and the list inverts. Abhishek Sharma goes first at one every 8.7 deliveries, Suryakumar Yadav second at 11.2, and Rohit Sharma drops from first to third at 14.6. Virat Kohli, third on the count, is last on the rate at 24.6.

The reason is straightforward: Rohit and Kohli faced roughly 3,000 balls each for India in the format, and Abhishek has faced 870. A count list rewards a long career; a rate list describes a method. Both are printed here because a reader arriving at this page might want either.

Abhishek's 36.8% is the highest share of a career total taken in sixes by any India batter with a meaningful sample. More than a third of his 1,629 T20I runs have arrived six at a time, which is what a strike rate of 187.24 is built from — the full aggregate picture is on India's most T20I runs.

Rohit's 205 and how long they took

Seventeen years and 151 innings produced 205 sixes, one every 14.6 balls. Rohit played his first T20I in 2007, in the tournament India won in Johannesburg, and his last in Barbados in 2024.

His five T20I hundreds are more than any other Indian has made, and the highest of them — 121 not out against Afghanistan at Bengaluru in January 2024 — contained eight sixes. The full set is on India's highest T20I individual scores.

The record is unusual among six-hitting marks in that it was set by a batter who was not primarily a six-hitter. Rohit's career strike rate of 140.89 is the second lowest of the six on this page, and 29.1% of his runs came in sixes against Suryakumar's 32.8% and Abhishek's 36.8%. He accumulated 205 because he opened for India in the shortest format for the better part of a decade.

Kohli's 124 and the shape of his innings

Virat Kohli hit 124 sixes from 3,056 balls, the most deliveries any Indian has faced in T20 internationals. Only 17.8% of his 4,188 runs came in sixes, which is eleven percentage points below the next-lowest figure on the page.

He batted at three, frequently through a chase, and his method was to keep the strike moving and take the boundary when the field allowed rather than to manufacture it. That produced 38 fifties, an average of 48.69 and one hundred, a combination no other India T20I batter has come near.

It also means a sixes list understates him more than it understates anyone else here. KL Rahul, sixth on 99 from half as many balls, hit sixes at a rate half as long again as Kohli's, and finished with 1,923 fewer runs.

Pandya, Rahul and the middle order

Hardik Pandya's 101 came from 1,568 balls across 109 innings — 14.4 deliveries an innings, the fewest of anyone on this page. He has batted at six and seven for almost his entire T20I career, in a role that offers a handful of balls and no reason to preserve a wicket.

His 26.5% share is close to Rahul's 26.2% despite entirely different jobs: Rahul opened, faced 1,628 balls in 68 innings and made two hundreds. Two batters at opposite ends of an order arriving at the same boundary dependence is a coincidence, but it illustrates that the share column measures a method rather than a position.

Rahul's 99 is the most conspicuous stopping point on the page. He last played a T20I for India in 2022 and finished one short of a hundred, from a career that included 22 fifties at a strike rate of 139.12.

Reading the same six names by rate

Rank by rate	Batter	Balls per six	6s	Balls
1	Abhishek Sharma	8.7	100	870
2	Suryakumar Yadav	11.2	179	2,008
3	Rohit Sharma	14.6	205	3,003
4	Hardik Pandya	15.5	101	1,568
5	KL Rahul	16.4	99	1,628
6	Virat Kohli	24.6	124	3,056

The order is almost exactly reversed at both ends. First becomes third, third becomes sixth, and fifth becomes first. Only Hardik Pandya and KL Rahul hold roughly their positions, and they are the two batters whose counts and ball totals are closest to each other.

Between Abhishek at 8.7 and Kohli at 24.6 there is a factor of nearly three. Two batters in the same national side, playing the same format within a decade of each other, clearing the rope at rates that far apart is a description of how much T20 batting roles diverge — not of how much the players differ in ability.

The gap between second and third, 11.2 against 14.6, is the one that will decide whether the record changes hands. Suryakumar needs 27 more sixes to pass Rohit and takes them roughly three balls sooner per six, so the arithmetic favours him if he keeps playing.

What a six is worth in this format

The runs-in-sixes share is the most useful column here. Abhishek Sharma takes 36.8% of his runs six at a time, which means a bowler facing him is defending a boundary on more than a third of his scoring, and the field settings that follow open up singles elsewhere.

Rohit's 29.1% across seventeen years is the most durable version of that. He was not the fastest scorer in any India side he played in after 2021, and he still finished with the most sixes anyone has hit in the format, because he kept opening and kept clearing the rope at the same rate for a decade and a half.

Four observations

Two of the six are still adding to their totals. Suryakumar Yadav is 26 behind Rohit and captaining the side; Abhishek Sharma reached his hundredth six in 785 balls, the fastest by any batter from a full-member nation.

Nobody who played T20Is for India before 2016 is on this list except Rohit and Kohli. India played 34 T20 internationals in the format's first five years and now plays close to that many in a single season, so the accumulation rate for six counts has changed as much as the batting has.

The gap between sixth and seventh is 25 sixes. Yuvraj Singh, who hit six sixes in an over at the 2007 World Cup and 74 in his T20I career, is not on a table that stops at a hundred — a reminder that the innings a format is remembered for and the career records it produces are different things.

Suryakumar's 32.8% and strike rate of 162.94 are both the highest of anyone on the page with more than 2,000 balls faced. He is the only Indian to combine that volume with that rate, and the case is set out further on India's most T20I centuries. Career records for all six are in the player directory, the format's development in India is covered in the T20 international history guide, and the country's cricket as a whole in the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Two kinds of figure sit on this page and they come from different places.

The career counts in the leaderboard — 205, 179, 124, 101, 100 and 99 — are the published India T20I totals, each confirmed against a separate report of that player reaching the relevant milestone. Innings, balls faced, runs and strike rates come from ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru career query for men's T20Is with the team filter set to India. Balls per six and the runs-in-sixes share are computed here from those three inputs; neither is published. The share is sixes multiplied by six, divided by career runs, and it deliberately ignores fours so that it answers only the question the page is about.

The phase tables, the opponent splits and the year-by-year team rate were computed from ball-by-ball data in the Cricsheet archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), from a copy covering 276 India men's T20 internationals played between 1 December 2006 and 26 July 2026.

That copy is missing India's fixtures against Afghanistan entirely, so its career six counts run below the published ones — 194 for Rohit against a published 205, 175 for Suryakumar, 115 for Kohli, 122 for Pandya, 104 for Abhishek and 95 for Rahul. The phase and opponent tables therefore describe only the sixes the archive holds, and the two sets of numbers are deliberately not mixed: no phase figure is subtracted from a published career total, and every balls-per-six rate in the phase table is computed from archive balls and archive sixes together, so it is internally consistent even where the total is short. Rohit's 121 not out against Afghanistan at Bengaluru, mentioned above, is one of the innings the archive does not cover.

Conventions applied to the computed sections: the powerplay is overs one to six, the middle overs seven to fifteen and the death overs sixteen to twenty; a ball faced excludes wides but counts no-balls; a six is credited only where the batter is scored six off the bat, so overthrows and all-run sixes are not counted; and the year rows count India men's T20Is by the first listed date of the match.

Two leaderboard rows carry a timing caveat. Suryakumar Yadav's count was current in March 2026 and Abhishek Sharma's at the milestone he passed in July 2026; both were still playing at the end of August 2026 and both figures may since have risen. Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul have completed their T20I careers, so their counts are final.

The table stops at six names because a hundred sixes is the natural break in this distribution, not because verification failed below it. The seventh-placed figure is 74 and the gap to it is larger than the gap between second and sixth. All other figures were read in the final week of August 2026.