IPL Most Ducks: All-Time Records

Two men sit at the top of this list with nineteen ducks each, and they could hardly be less alike. Glenn Maxwell collected his in 135 innings across seven franchises, batting almost always at four or five with a licence to hit from the first ball he faced. Rohit Sharma took 276 innings to get there, most of them as an opener and captain of the most successful side the competition has produced. The same number on the scoreboard, arrived at by completely opposite routes.

That is the whole point of a duck list in Twenty20 cricket. In a format where a batter may have eleven balls to change a match, being dismissed for nothing is not evidence of failure so much as evidence of exposure — either you faced a lot of new balls, or you were paid to take a risk on the first one. The players near the top are, with a few exceptions, either long-serving openers or specialists whose job description begins with "attack".

Everything below is counted from ball-by-ball records of all 1,243 Indian Premier League matches from the opening game in April 2008 to the 2026 final. A duck is an innings in which a batter was dismissed without scoring, which includes the handful of occasions when a non-striker was run out before facing a delivery.

The all-time IPL duck list

#	Player	Ducks	Golden ducks	Innings	Career runs	Duck rate
1	Glenn Maxwell	19	10	135	2,819	14.1%
1	Rohit Sharma	19	6	276	7,329	6.9%
3	Sunil Narine	18	10	126	1,820	14.3%
3	Dinesh Karthik	18	7	234	4,842	7.7%
5	Rashid Khan	16	12	74	635	21.6%
5	Piyush Chawla	16	8	92	624	17.4%
7	Mandeep Singh	15	7	98	1,706	15.3%
7	Ajinkya Rahane	15	4	197	5,367	7.6%
7	Ambati Rayudu	15	7	187	4,348	8.0%
10	Manish Pandey	14	4	164	4,012	8.5%
11	Parthiv Patel	13	6	137	2,848	9.5%
11	Harbhajan Singh	13	8	90	833	14.4%
13	Virat Kohli	12	8	275	9,336	4.4%
13	Shikhar Dhawan	12	5	221	6,769	5.4%
13	Suryakumar Yadav	12	6	164	4,581	7.3%
13	Sanju Samson	12	4	186	5,181	6.5%
13	Gautam Gambhir	12	7	152	4,217	7.9%
13	Ravichandran Ashwin	12	7	98	833	12.2%

Maxwell moved clear of Rohit during the 2025 season and Rohit drew level again the following year. The pairing is likely to be temporary: Rohit was still batting in 2026, while Maxwell's list of franchises had run to seven by the time he stopped appearing.

Golden ducks: the first-ball problem

A golden duck — out to the first ball faced, or dismissed without facing one — is a different failure from being bowled after grinding out a few dots. It is the price of walking in during a collapse, or of trying to hit a set field immediately.

Player	Golden ducks	All ducks	Innings
Rashid Khan	12	16	74
Sunil Narine	10	18	126
Glenn Maxwell	10	19	135
Virat Kohli	8	12	275
Harbhajan Singh	8	13	90
Ishan Kishan	8	11	127
Piyush Chawla	8	16	92
Dinesh Karthik	7	18	234
Ambati Rayudu	7	15	187
Ravichandran Ashwin	7	12	98
Gautam Gambhir	7	12	152
Mandeep Singh	7	15	98

Rashid Khan's twelve is the standout. He has batted 74 times, usually at seven or eight with three or four overs left, and three-quarters of his ducks came without a run being scored off him. A career strike rate a shade above 156 tells you he was not there to survive.

Two nineteens, two different jobs

Rohit's nineteen are spread across nineteen seasons. In only one of them — 2018, with three — did he fail to score more than twice. He opened for Mumbai Indians for the better part of a decade, which means nineteen seasons of facing the first over of an innings with a hard ball and two men bowling at his stumps. A 6.9% duck rate over 276 innings is, in that context, unremarkable.

Maxwell's are compressed. Four came in 2024 alone. Three each in 2016 and 2017, when he was captaining Punjab Kings and being asked to bat at three or four and change the tempo on arrival. Ten of his nineteen were golden. His duck rate of 14.1% is more than double Rohit's, and it sits alongside a career strike rate just over 155. Those two figures are the same decision viewed from either end.

Duck rate, and the honest way to read the list

Raw duck totals reward longevity. Rate exposes method. Below is the highest duck rate among players with at least 60 IPL innings, a threshold chosen because anything lower turns one bad fortnight into a record.

Player	Ducks / innings	Duck rate	Career strike rate
Rashid Khan	16 / 74	21.6%	156.4
Piyush Chawla	16 / 92	17.4%	110.8
Mandeep Singh	15 / 98	15.3%	122.9
Harbhajan Singh	13 / 90	14.4%	137.9
Sunil Narine	18 / 126	14.3%	165.3
Glenn Maxwell	19 / 135	14.1%	155.1
Ravichandran Ashwin	12 / 98	12.2%	118.2
Mitchell Marsh	7 / 62	11.3%	148.5
Stuart Binny	7 / 68	10.3%	128.8
Parthiv Patel	13 / 137	9.5%	120.8
Manoj Tiwary	8 / 85	9.4%	117.0
Jacques Kallis	9 / 96	9.4%	109.2

Mandeep Singh is the interesting name. He was not a bowler and not a designated hitter; he was a top-order batter who kept being moved around the order at Punjab and Kolkata, and a 15.3% duck rate at a strike rate of 123 or so is the profile of a player asked to do two contradictory things in the same season.

The other end of the same table

The batters who almost never get out for nothing are not the ones most people would guess.

Player	Ducks / innings	Duck rate	Career runs
MS Dhoni	6 / 242	2.5%	5,439
Kieron Pollard	5 / 171	2.9%	3,412
KL Rahul	5 / 150	3.3%	5,815
Hardik Pandya	6 / 150	4.0%	2,955
Suresh Raina	8 / 200	4.0%	5,528
Robin Uthappa	8 / 197	4.1%	4,952
Ravindra Jadeja	9 / 209	4.3%	3,526
Virat Kohli	12 / 275	4.4%	9,336

MS Dhoni batted 242 times, very often arriving in the sixteenth over or later with the field spread and a required rate above ten, and was dismissed for nothing six times in eighteen seasons. Kieron Pollard sits just behind him on an even more exposed brief. Both were partly protected by walking in after the new ball had gone soft, but both also had unusually settled trigger movements against pace, which is the sort of thing a duck list quietly measures.

Bowlers on the list, and why they belong there

Four of the top eighteen — Rashid Khan, Piyush Chawla, Harbhajan Singh and Ravichandran Ashwin — are frontline bowlers. Between them they have 57 ducks from 354 innings. That is not a batting failure; it is a consequence of batting at eight with two overs left, where the expected outcome of any given ball is either four runs or a wicket. Chawla is the extreme case: 624 career runs, sixteen ducks, and a strike rate of under 111 that suggests he was often trying to survive rather than swing.

The same logic runs through the tail of every franchise. For the counterweight — which batters actually turned their innings into results — the IPL records for most runs in wins are the place to look.

When the ducks came

Season splits for the top five, which show how differently these careers were shaped.

Player	Heaviest season	Ducks that season	Seasons with three or more
Glenn Maxwell	2024	4	2016, 2017, 2024
Rohit Sharma	2018	3	2018
Sunil Narine	2021, 2022, 2023	3 each	three
Dinesh Karthik	2023	4	2020, 2023
Rashid Khan	2019, 2021, 2022	3 each	three

Narine's cluster from 2021 to 2023 is the clearest example of a role change showing up in a record book. He had been a bowler who batted; from 2021 Kolkata Knight Riders sent him in to open and hit over the top inside the first six overs, and the ducks followed the promotion. So did a great many quick fifties.

Three things the list actually shows

The first is that duck totals track innings played more closely than they track technique. Six of the top twelve are among the twenty most-capped batters in the competition's history.

The second is that the golden-duck column is the more revealing one. It separates players dismissed while trying to attack from players dismissed while trying to settle, and the gap between Rashid Khan's twelve and Ajinkya Rahane's four says more about their briefs than either total does alone.

The third is that the heaviest scorers in IPL history sit almost entirely in the lower half of the duck-rate table. Virat Kohli has 9,336 runs and twelve ducks. That combination is not luck; it is the return on refusing first-ball risk, and it comes with a slower start than most of his contemporaries. Whether that trade is worth making depends on where a side needs its runs, a question the IPL powerplay run records and the death-overs run records approach from opposite ends of an innings.

The tournament's own history — the format changes, the auction cycles, the arrival of the Impact Player rule — is covered on the IPL hub and within the wider story of cricket in India.

Sources and method

Every figure on this page is computed from the public ball-by-ball match archive published by Cricsheet (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering all 1,243 IPL matches played between 18 April 2008 and the final on 31 May 2026. Counts are current to that date and will move as soon as the next season begins.

A duck is defined here as an innings in which a batter was dismissed for nought. That definition includes non-strikers run out without facing a ball, which is why a small number of totals on this page run one or two higher than lists compiled from batting scorecards that require at least one ball faced — Sunil Narine and Rashid Khan are the two clearest cases. A golden duck means dismissed on the first ball faced, or dismissed without facing one.

Duck rate is ducks divided by innings, where an innings counts any appearance at the crease, not-outs included. The 60-innings threshold on the rate table is our own choice and is stated openly, because a rate table without a qualification bar is noise. Career strike rates are runs off the bat per 100 balls faced, wides excluded. Franchise names are given as they stood at the time of the match, so Punjab Kings and Kings XI Punjab refer to the same club in different eras. Headline totals were cross-checked against published IPL duck leaderboards; where they differ, the definition set out above is the reason.