IPL Best Bowling Averages: All-Time Records

Lasith Malinga took 170 IPL wickets at 19.80 each. No other bowler with fifty or more wickets in the competition has an average under 20, and the second-placed figure — Imran Tahir's 20.77, from 82 wickets — sits almost a full run behind. Over nineteen seasons and more than 1,200 matches, that is a remarkably durable gap.

A bowling average in Twenty20 is an awkward statistic. It rewards taking wickets cheaply, but in a format where a bowler has four overs and the batting side is trying to score rather than survive, wickets often arrive because a batter took a risk rather than because the bowler beat him. That is why economy rate and strike rate are usually quoted first. It is also why the qualification bar matters more here than on almost any other list: at 25 wickets the table fills with bowlers who had one good season.

The threshold used below is 50 wickets, roughly three full seasons of frontline bowling. A second table applies a 100-wicket bar. All figures come from every innings of the 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final.

Best IPL bowling average, min 50 wickets

#	Bowler	Average	Wickets	Balls	Runs	Economy	Strike rate
1	Lasith Malinga	19.80	170	2,827	3,366	7.14	16.6
2	Imran Tahir	20.77	82	1,316	1,703	7.76	16.0
3	Kagiso Rabada	22.69	148	2,290	3,358	8.80	15.5
4	Munaf Patel	22.95	74	1,355	1,698	7.52	18.3
5	Mitchell Starc	23.03	76	1,191	1,750	8.82	15.7
6	Yuzvendra Chahal	23.25	233	4,037	5,417	8.05	17.3
7	Andre Russell	23.28	123	1,806	2,863	9.51	14.7
8	Josh Hazlewood	23.47	72	1,176	1,690	8.62	16.3
9	Ashish Nehra	23.54	106	1,908	2,495	7.85	18.0
10	Jasprit Bumrah	23.75	187	3,631	4,441	7.34	19.4
11	Amit Mishra	23.82	174	3,371	4,145	7.38	19.4
12	Dwayne Bravo	23.83	183	3,120	4,360	8.38	17.0
13	Rashid Khan	23.92	179	3,530	4,282	7.28	19.7
14	Chris Morris	24.16	95	1,720	2,295	8.01	18.1
15	Noor Ahmad	24.51	61	1,098	1,495	8.17	18.0
16	Harshal Patel	24.68	151	2,506	3,727	8.92	16.6
17	Varun Chakravarthy	24.73	111	2,134	2,745	7.72	19.2
18	Jason Holder	25.01	70	1,225	1,751	8.58	17.5
19	Shane Warne	25.39	57	1,194	1,447	7.27	20.9
20	Mitchell McClenaghan	25.39	71	1,274	1,803	8.49	17.9
21	Sunil Narine	25.42	207	4,651	5,261	6.79	22.5
22	Jofra Archer	25.73	84	1,578	2,161	8.22	18.8

Raise the bar to 100 wickets

#	Bowler	Average	Wickets	Economy	Strike rate
1	Lasith Malinga	19.80	170	7.14	16.6
2	Kagiso Rabada	22.69	148	8.80	15.5
3	Yuzvendra Chahal	23.25	233	8.05	17.3
4	Andre Russell	23.28	123	9.51	14.7
5	Ashish Nehra	23.54	106	7.85	18.0
6	Jasprit Bumrah	23.75	187	7.34	19.4
7	Amit Mishra	23.82	174	7.38	19.4
8	Dwayne Bravo	23.83	183	8.38	17.0
9	Rashid Khan	23.92	179	7.28	19.7
10	Harshal Patel	24.68	151	8.92	16.6
11	Varun Chakravarthy	24.73	111	7.72	19.2
12	Sunil Narine	25.42	207	6.79	22.5
13	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	26.16	226	7.71	20.4
14	Mohit Sharma	26.22	134	8.77	17.9
15	Piyush Chawla	26.60	192	7.96	20.1

Malinga's lead survives the higher bar, and the reason is that he is the only bowler to appear in the top ten of both the qualified economy list and the qualified strike-rate list. Both feed an average: he conceded 7.14 an over and took a wicket every 16.6 balls. Everyone else near the top of this table is excellent at one of those and merely good at the other.

What Malinga actually did

The slinging low-arm action is the famous part, and it did make him hard to pick up. But the numbers point somewhere more specific: 108 of Malinga's 170 wickets came in overs sixteen to twenty. He conceded 7.86 an over at the death in an era when the competition-wide rate in that phase ran between 9.1 and 10.3, and he took a death-overs wicket every 10.3 balls at a cost of 13.6 runs each — the best strike rate of the four bowlers who have taken a hundred or more wickets in the phase.

That is not a bowler with a good average because he bowled easy overs. It is a bowler with a good average because he specialised in the hardest phase and was better at it than anyone else has been. The full picture is on the death-overs wicket records.

The spinners' route to the same number

Amit Mishra, Rashid Khan, Varun Chakravarthy and Piyush Chawla all average between 23.8 and 26.6, and all of them got there by a different mechanism: bowling in the middle overs, where the field is spread and the ball is old, and forcing batters to take risks against turn.

Bowler	Average	Economy	Middle-overs wickets
Amit Mishra	23.82	7.38	126
Rashid Khan	23.92	7.28	121
Varun Chakravarthy	24.73	7.72	77
Yuzvendra Chahal	23.25	8.05	149
Piyush Chawla	26.60	7.96	132
Ravindra Jadeja	30.36	7.71	144

The interesting comparison in that group is Chahal against Jadeja. Both are heavily used middle-overs spinners at Indian venues, both have taken more than 140 wickets in the phase, and their averages differ by seven runs. Chahal attacks the stumps and concedes more; Jadeja restricts and takes fewer. Whether the seven-run gap makes Chahal the better bowler depends entirely on what a side needs from over eight to over fourteen, which is not a question an average answers.

Where the list breaks down

Three cautions.

First, Andre Russell averages 23.28 with an economy rate of 9.51 — the most expensive figure in the top twenty-two by more than half a run. He is on this list because he takes wickets at a rate nobody matches, not because he is hard to score off. An average alone cannot distinguish him from Jasprit Bumrah, whose economy is 7.34.

Second, era matters. Munaf Patel, Ashish Nehra and Shane Warne all bowled the bulk of their IPL cricket before 2015, when the competition's run rate was under 8.4 an over in every season. Malinga's career spanned 2009 to 2019, mostly on the low side of the inflation. Bowlers whose careers sit entirely after 2022 — when scoring rates passed 9.5 — face a different task, which is why Noor Ahmad at 24.51 and Mitchell Starc at 23.03 are arguably the most impressive modern entries.

Third, Sunil Narine's 25.42 looks ordinary and is not. He has the best economy rate in IPL history at 6.79 across 4,651 deliveries, and a bowler that hard to score off attracts fewer risk shots and therefore fewer wickets. That trade-off is exactly what the best economy rate records and the best bowling strike rate records exist to separate.

The bowlers just outside

Below the top twenty-two the averages rise slowly rather than sharply: Dale Steyn 25.86 from 97 wickets, Jaydev Unadkat and Trent Boult in the high twenties, Ravichandran Ashwin 30.22 from 187 wickets in 217 innings. Ashwin's figure is the clearest illustration of the format's demands on a control bowler — an economy rate of 7.20 across 785 overs, more overs than anyone else has bowled in the IPL, and an average five runs worse than the leaders.

For the leading wicket-takers rather than the most efficient ones, and for the franchise context in which these careers were built, see the IPL hub and the Sunrisers Hyderabad and Mumbai Indians pages. The domestic setting is covered in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

All figures are computed from the ball-by-ball archive published by Cricsheet (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering every IPL match from 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026. Wickets are credited to the bowler for bowled, caught, caught and bowled, lbw, stumped and hit wicket. Run-outs, retirements and obstructing the field are not credited, which is standard practice and is why some totals differ slightly from lists that count all dismissals.

Runs conceded include wides and no-balls but exclude byes, leg byes and penalty runs. Balls counted are legal deliveries only. Average is runs conceded divided by wickets taken; economy is runs conceded per six legal deliveries; strike rate is legal balls per wicket.

The 50-wicket and 100-wicket qualification thresholds are our own and are stated because an unqualified average table is dominated by very small samples. Both bars are applied to career IPL wickets, not to a single season. Phase figures quoted in the prose use overs one to six, seven to fifteen and sixteen to twenty. Franchise names are those in use at the time of each match.