IPL Best Economy Rates: All-Time Records

Muttiah Muralitharan bowled 254 overs of IPL cricket and conceded 6.68 runs an over. Sunil Narine bowled more than three times as many and conceded 6.79. Those are the only two figures under 6.8 in nineteen seasons, and both belong to spinners who took the ball away from the right-hander from a low, quick release.

Economy rate is the bowling number that has aged worst, and not because bowlers have got worse. The competition scored 7.44 runs an over in 2009 and 9.85 in 2026. A bowler conceding 7.5 an over in 2013 was expensive; the same figure in 2026 would be the best in the tournament by a distance. Any economy list is therefore also a list of when people played, and the table below should be read with that in mind.

The qualification here is 1,500 legal deliveries — 250 overs, roughly five seasons of a full four-over allocation. All figures come from the 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final.

Best IPL economy rate, min 250 overs

#	Bowler	Economy	Overs	Runs	Wickets	Dot-ball %
1	Muttiah Muralitharan	6.68	254.0	1,696	63	39.2
2	Sunil Narine	6.79	775.1	5,261	207	38.4
3	Dale Steyn	6.92	362.4	2,508	97	46.8
4	Harbhajan Singh	7.08	569.2	4,030	150	37.0
5	Lasith Malinga	7.14	471.1	3,366	170	40.5
6	Ravichandran Ashwin	7.20	785.0	5,652	187	34.1
7	Rashid Khan	7.28	588.2	4,282	179	35.5
8	Jasprit Bumrah	7.34	605.1	4,441	187	40.0
9	Pragyan Ojha	7.37	316.3	2,332	89	35.1
10	Amit Mishra	7.38	561.5	4,145	174	35.2
11	Rajat Bhatia	7.41	272.4	2,020	71	26.7
12	Axar Patel	7.43	596.3	4,431	139	32.6
13	Krunal Pandya	7.58	450.1	3,410	107	31.3
14	Siddharth Trivedi	7.59	251.0	1,904	65	32.7
15	Zaheer Khan	7.59	366.4	2,782	102	39.7
16	Morne Morkel	7.69	271.3	2,089	77	43.5
17	Ravindra Jadeja	7.71	709.0	5,465	180	31.5
18	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	7.71	766.4	5,913	226	41.2
19	Varun Chakravarthy	7.72	355.4	2,745	111	36.2
20	Praveen Kumar	7.73	420.4	3,251	90	42.6
21	Rahul Chahar	7.78	282.2	2,196	75	34.2
22	Irfan Pathan	7.78	340.3	2,649	80	40.9
23	Ashish Nehra	7.85	318.0	2,495	106	41.8
24	Jacques Kallis	7.90	290.2	2,293	65	35.3

The scoring rate that everything on this list is measured against

Season	Competition run rate
2009	7.44
2011	7.69
2013	7.65
2016	8.28
2018	8.62
2021	8.01
2022	8.50
2023	8.94
2024	9.52
2025	9.59
2026	9.85

Muralitharan's IPL career ran from 2008 to 2014, across which the competition-wide rate reached 8.26 only in the very first season. He conceded 6.68 against that backdrop — well over a run an over better than the average bowler of his time. Sunil Narine's career spans 2012 to 2026, straddling the whole inflation, and his 6.79 is measured against a competition average that rose from 7.80 to 9.85 while he was bowling. On a like-for-like basis Narine's figure is the more remarkable of the two, and it is the reason he has been retained by Kolkata Knight Riders through squad rebuilds that changed almost everything else.

Dot balls, the mechanism behind an economy rate

An economy rate is mostly a function of how often nothing happens. Dale Steyn's 46.8 per cent dot-ball rate is the highest of any bowler with 250 IPL overs, and it is more than eight points clear of Narine.

Bowler	Dot-ball %	Economy	Overs
Dale Steyn	46.8	6.92	362.4
Morne Morkel	43.5	7.69	271.3
Jofra Archer	42.9	8.22	263.0
Praveen Kumar	42.6	7.73	420.4
Deepak Chahar	42.1	8.30	344.4
RP Singh	41.9	7.90	295.5
Ashish Nehra	41.8	7.85	318.0
Mohammed Siraj	41.6	8.78	445.2
Bhuvneshwar Kumar	41.2	7.71	766.4
Trent Boult	40.8	8.49	463.2

Notice how many of the top dot-ball bowlers are new-ball seamers, and how few of them have the best economy rates. Bowling four overs in the powerplay produces plenty of dots and also plenty of boundaries; a spinner in the middle overs produces fewer dots and fewer fours. Rajat Bhatia is the extreme counter-case on the main table: an economy rate of 7.41 with a dot-ball rate of only 26.7 per cent, achieved by bowling slow medium-pace cutters that were almost impossible to hit for four and equally hard to leave alone.

Why no modern bowler is near the top

Only one of the top ten economy rates belongs to a bowler who arrived as late as 2017 — Rashid Khan — and none to anyone who debuted after that. The best qualified figures among bowlers whose careers are mostly post-2018 are Varun Chakravarthy at 7.72, Rahul Chahar at 7.78, Deepak Chahar at 8.30 and Trent Boult at 8.49. Against a run rate approaching ten, Chakravarthy's 7.72 is a better relative performance than Harbhajan Singh's 7.08 was in 2011 — but the table does not show that, and no economy table can.

The fair way to read this list is as two separate lists joined at the seam: pre-2018 bowlers competing on absolute numbers, and post-2018 bowlers competing on a different scale entirely. The best bowling average records and best strike rate records are less distorted by the same effect, because wickets have not inflated the way runs have.

Volume matters too

Ravichandran Ashwin has bowled 785 overs of IPL cricket, more than anyone, at 7.20. Bhuvneshwar Kumar has bowled 766.4 at 7.71 and taken 226 wickets doing it. Narine's 775.1 at 6.79 is the outstanding combination of the three.

Sustaining an economy rate across fifteen seasons requires re-inventing a bowler more than once — Narine's action was remodelled after being reported in 2014 and again in 2015, and his economy rate barely moved. Ashwin went from an orthodox off spinner to a bowler using four release points and a run-up he changed mid-over. Neither survived on the same skill they started with.

Dots have held; boundaries have not

The most useful single observation on this page has nothing to do with the ranking. The leading dot-ball total in an IPL season has barely moved in thirteen years — Dale Steyn led 2013 with 211, Deepak Chahar led 2019 with 186, Prasidh Krishna led 2022 with 193, and Kagiso Rabada led 2026 with 167 — while the competition's run rate climbed from 7.65 to 9.85 across the same span.

Bowlers, in other words, are still creating roughly as many balls from which nothing is scored. What has changed is what happens on the rest. The inflation is concentrated almost entirely in boundary hitting: the competition hit 8.9 sixes a match in 2009 and 19.3 in 2026. An economy rate is the sum of those two forces, and only one of them has moved.

That is why a modern bowler with an unremarkable economy figure can be doing better work than a predecessor with a better one, and why the honest comparison is always against the season's own baseline rather than the all-time table.

For the ball-by-ball dot counts behind this, see the most dot balls records and the most maiden overs records. Franchise histories are on the IPL hub and at Sunrisers Hyderabad; the wider domestic picture is in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

Economy rate here is runs conceded per six legal deliveries. Runs conceded include wides and no-balls but exclude byes, leg byes and penalty runs, which is the standard scoring convention and the reason a bowler's runs conceded do not always sum to the team total. Overs are shown in cricket notation, so 775.1 means 775 completed overs and one ball.

A dot ball is a delivery from which no run is scored, by the bat or otherwise; a wide therefore does not count as a dot. Dot-ball percentage is dots divided by legal deliveries bowled.

The 1,500-delivery qualification — 250 overs — is our own bar and is stated because economy tables without one are dominated by bowlers with a handful of matches. Economy figures here come out of Cricsheet's ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), which covers every IPL match played since 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026.

Competition run rates are total runs, extras included, divided by total overs bowled in that season. Statements about which eras appear on the list refer to this qualified table, not to all bowlers: several with fewer than 250 overs have better raw figures across shorter careers, which is exactly what the qualification exists to filter. Career spans were read from team-sheet appearances in the same archive.