IPL Most Death-Overs Wickets: All-Time Records

Bhuvneshwar Kumar has 118 wickets in overs sixteen to twenty of the Indian Premier League. Dwayne Bravo is on 115, Lasith Malinga 108 and Jasprit Bumrah 102. Those four are the only bowlers past a hundred in the phase, and the gap between them and the rest of the list is largely a function of how long each was trusted with the job rather than how well they did it.

Malinga is the one whose figures stop you. He took his 108 wickets at 13.6 runs each, conceding 7.86 an over in a phase that has since drifted past ten. Nobody with more than fifty death-overs wickets has an average within four runs of his. He also struck every 10.3 balls, which for a bowler operating almost exclusively in the last five overs is close to a wicket every two overs across a decade.

The figures below cover overs sixteen to twenty of every innings in the 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final. The batting record for the same five overs is on the death-overs run records, and the two earlier phases are handled on the powerplay wicket records and the middle-overs wicket records.

Most IPL wickets in overs 16 to 20

Qualification: 20 wickets in the phase. All rates are for the phase only.

#	Bowler	Wickets	Balls	Economy	Average	Balls per wicket
1	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	118	1,605	9.30	21.1	13.6
2	Dwayne Bravo	115	1,385	9.36	18.8	12.0
3	Lasith Malinga	108	1,117	7.86	13.6	10.3
4	Jasprit Bumrah	102	1,423	8.19	19.0	14.0
5	Sunil Narine	84	1,105	7.25	15.9	13.2
6	Harshal Patel	81	856	10.06	17.7	10.6
7	Kagiso Rabada	69	684	9.82	16.2	9.9
8	Mohammed Shami	68	728	10.82	19.3	10.7
9	Yuzvendra Chahal	66	673	9.49	16.1	10.2
10	Mohit Sharma	63	807	10.27	21.9	12.8
10	Sandeep Sharma	63	789	10.56	22.0	12.5
12	Chris Morris	58	646	8.67	16.1	11.1
13	Trent Boult	57	746	10.60	23.1	13.1
14	Jaydev Unadkat	56	665	10.95	21.7	11.9
15	Shardul Thakur	55	749	10.73	24.3	13.6
16	Ashish Nehra	54	527	8.86	14.4	9.8
17	Arshdeep Singh	53	676	9.91	21.1	12.8
18	Umesh Yadav	52	732	10.53	24.7	14.1
19	Andre Russell	51	586	10.75	20.6	11.5
20	Dale Steyn	50	634	8.30	17.5	12.7
21	Thangarasu Natarajan	47	631	10.16	22.7	13.4
21	Mohammed Siraj	47	740	10.44	27.4	15.7
21	Vinay Kumar	47	657	10.56	24.6	14.0
24	RP Singh	45	527	9.24	18.0	11.7
25	Avesh Khan	44	652	9.70	24.0	14.8
26	Rashid Khan	43	630	8.75	21.4	14.7
27	Amit Mishra	42	521	9.48	19.6	12.4
27	Shane Watson	42	577	9.88	22.6	13.7
27	Prasidh Krishna	42	560	10.64	23.6	13.3
30	Piyush Chawla	39	444	8.66	16.4	11.4
31	Zaheer Khan	37	607	9.05	24.8	16.4
31	Mitchell Starc	37	357	9.06	14.6	9.6

The cheapest bowling in the last five overs

Restricted to bowlers with 500 deliveries in the phase, roughly 83 overs. Thirty-six bowlers clear that bar; a higher threshold empties the table, because very few bowlers are handed this phase for long enough to accumulate volume.

#	Bowler	Economy	Wickets	Balls	Balls per wicket
1	Sunil Narine	7.25	84	1,105	13.2
2	Lasith Malinga	7.86	108	1,117	10.3
3	Jasprit Bumrah	8.19	102	1,423	14.0
4	Ravichandran Ashwin	8.24	36	601	16.7
5	Dale Steyn	8.30	50	634	12.7
6	Chris Morris	8.67	58	646	11.1
7	Rashid Khan	8.75	43	630	14.7
8	Ravindra Jadeja	8.77	30	528	17.6
9	Ashish Nehra	8.86	54	527	9.8
10	Zaheer Khan	9.05	37	607	16.4
11	Mustafizur Rahman	9.12	35	576	16.5
12	RP Singh	9.24	45	527	11.7
13	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	9.30	118	1,605	13.6
14	Dwayne Bravo	9.36	115	1,385	12.0
15	Amit Mishra	9.48	42	521	12.4
16	Yuzvendra Chahal	9.49	66	673	10.2
17	Avesh Khan	9.70	44	652	14.8
18	Kagiso Rabada	9.82	69	684	9.9

Four spinners sit in that eighteen. Sunil Narine heads it outright at 7.25 across 1,105 deliveries, which is the lowest death-overs economy anyone has managed on real volume in the competition's history. Narine bowling the nineteenth over was a Kolkata Knight Riders habit for the best part of a decade and it worked because a batter cannot pre-plan against a bowler whose stock ball turns either way at the pace of a medium-pacer.

Fastest strike rates at the death

Same 500-delivery threshold, ranked by balls per wicket.

#	Bowler	Balls per wicket	Wickets	Economy
1	Ashish Nehra	9.8	54	8.86
2	Kagiso Rabada	9.9	69	9.82
3	Yuzvendra Chahal	10.2	66	9.49
4	Lasith Malinga	10.3	108	7.86
5	Harshal Patel	10.6	81	10.06
6	Mohammed Shami	10.7	68	10.82
7	Chris Morris	11.1	58	8.67
8	Andre Russell	11.5	51	10.75
9	RP Singh	11.7	45	9.24
10	Jaydev Unadkat	11.9	56	10.95
11	Dwayne Bravo	12.0	115	9.36
12	Amit Mishra	12.4	42	9.48
13	Sandeep Sharma	12.5	63	10.56
14	Dale Steyn	12.7	50	8.30
15	Arshdeep Singh	12.8	53	9.91
15	Mohit Sharma	12.8	63	10.27
17	Trent Boult	13.1	57	10.60
18	Sunil Narine	13.2	84	7.25

A death-overs strike rate under eleven means a wicket every two overs, and in this phase most of those wickets are batters caught in the deep rather than beaten. That is why the strike rate table and the economy table barely overlap: Kagiso Rabada and Mohammed Shami take wickets fast because they are bowling to batters who have decided to hit, and both concede close to ten an over while doing it.

What the phase costs now

The last five overs have always been the most expensive part of an innings. What has changed is the size of the gap.

Season	Death-overs economy	Balls per wicket
2008	9.72	13.3
2009	8.89	14.3
2012	9.35	13.1
2015	10.14	13.4
2019	9.98	12.4
2022	10.31	13.4
2023	10.29	13.4
2024	11.03	13.8
2025	10.83	12.7
2026	10.67	14.2

Roughly a run an over has been added since the early seasons, and the wicket rate has stayed remarkably flat — between twelve and fourteen balls per dismissal in every season on record. The phase absorbs additional scoring without producing additional wickets, which is the clearest statistical argument for why a specialist here is valued the way he is.

Bhuvneshwar and Malinga: volume against control

Bhuvneshwar Kumar is the only bowler to lead both the powerplay and the death-overs wicket lists, which is close to unheard of and speaks to how many overs Sunrisers Hyderabad asked him to bowl in both. He got there with 1,605 phase deliveries, 488 more than Malinga. Set the two side by side on rates alone and it is not close: Malinga's 7.86 and 13.6 against Bhuvneshwar's 9.30 and 21.1.

The honest reading is that they were doing different jobs. Malinga bowled his overs almost entirely between 2009 and 2019 for one club, with a slower ball and a yorker that no batter of that era read cleanly. Bhuvneshwar bowled his across a longer span and through the sharpest rise in scoring the competition has seen, and for several of those seasons he was the only bowler in his side who could be given the nineteenth over at all.

Observations from the data

• Mitchell Starc's 37 wickets came from 357 deliveries, a strike rate of 9.6 that would top the table if he cleared the 500-ball threshold. He does not, so he is listed in the main table and left out of the rate tables rather than allowed to distort them.
• Nine of the first twenty names are Indian seamers who never established themselves as first-choice internationals. The death overs in this competition have been an Indian domestic specialism as much as an overseas one, and Arshdeep Singh, Jaydev Unadkat, Mohit Sharma and Thangarasu Natarajan between them account for 219 phase wickets.
• Harshal Patel took 81 wickets at a strike rate of 10.6 and paid 10.06 an over for them. That pairing — top-six strike rate, bottom-third economy — is the modern death bowler's bargain, and it is exactly the trade that won him a Purple Cap.
• Only two bowlers on the list concede under eight an over: Narine and Malinga. Both bowled the bulk of their overs before 2020. No bowler who began after that season is close, which suggests the difference is the era rather than the individuals.
• Ravichandran Ashwin's 8.24 across 601 death deliveries is the fourth-cheapest on the page and rarely gets mentioned, because off spin at the end of an innings reads as a compromise rather than a plan. His figures say otherwise.

Sources and method

Every number was derived from the public ball-by-ball record of completed IPL matches, restricted to deliveries in overs sixteen to twenty. Where an innings was shortened by weather, the overs that were actually bowled are what count, so a fifteen-over game contributes no death-overs data at all under this definition — that is a deliberate choice, since a phase defined by proximity to the end of a twenty-over innings does not transfer cleanly to a reduced game.

Only dismissals credited to the bowler are counted: bowled, caught, leg before wicket, stumped, hit wicket and caught and bowled. Run-outs, retirements and obstruction are excluded. Runs conceded include byes off no-balls and wides but exclude byes and leg byes, matching scorecard convention for bowling analysis.

The two qualification thresholds are stated above each rate table and were set to keep the pool honest rather than to produce a preferred answer; at 750 deliveries only eight bowlers qualify at the death, which is too few to be a ranking. Figures are current to the end of the 2026 season, whose final was played on 31 May. Headline totals were checked against published IPL bowling records; phase-level splits are computed here because the league does not publish them.