IPL Most Four-Wicket Hauls: All-Time Records

A side whose bowler takes four or more wickets in an IPL innings wins the match 79 per cent of the time. Across nineteen seasons there have been 253 innings containing such a spell; the fielding side won 199 of them and lost 53, with one match abandoned. No other single-innings bowling achievement comes close to that as a predictor of a result, which is the case for treating the four-wicket haul, not the five, as the meaningful marker in this format.

Yuzvendra Chahal has taken exactly four wickets eight times and five once, for a total of nine. Sunil Narine has eight, Kagiso Rabada and Lasith Malinga six each on the exact-four count. Since no bowler in the competition's history has more than two five-wicket hauls, this is where the durable bowling records actually live.

Everything below is computed from the 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final. The five-wicket bracket is handled separately on the most five-wicket hauls records.

Most four-wicket hauls in an IPL innings

Counting innings in which a bowler took exactly four wickets.

#	Bowler	Four-wicket hauls	Innings bowled	Career wickets
1	Yuzvendra Chahal	8	184	233
2	Sunil Narine	7	200	207
3	Kagiso Rabada	6	101	148
3	Lasith Malinga	6	122	170
5	Chris Morris	4	81	95
5	Kuldeep Yadav	4	107	112
5	Amit Mishra	4	162	174
5	Harshal Patel	4	121	151
9	Umesh Yadav	3	147	144
9	Mohammed Siraj	3	125	128
9	Andrew Tye	3	30	42
9	Prasidh Krishna	3	78	90
9	Imran Tahir	3	59	82
9	Jasprit Bumrah	3	158	187
9	Josh Hazlewood	3	52	72
9	Rashid Khan	3	153	179
9	Shardul Thakur	3	109	119
9	Mohit Sharma	3	119	134
9	Mitchell Starc	3	56	76
9	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	3	206	226
9	Lakshmipathy Balaji	3	73	76
9	Ravindra Jadeja	3	237	180

Andrew Tye's three from thirty innings is the extraordinary line. He played two IPL seasons of consequence, 2017 with Gujarat Lions and 2018 with Kings XI Punjab, took 42 wickets, and ran through an innings once every ten appearances. He also won the Purple Cap in 2018 with 24 wickets, then all but disappeared from the competition.

Frequency, not volume

Volume rewards a long career. The rate at which a bowler produces a four-wicket haul is the better measure, and the bar below is 60 innings bowled — about four seasons of regular selection.

#	Bowler	4+ hauls per 50 innings	Hauls	Innings
1	Kagiso Rabada	2.97	6	101
2	Lasith Malinga	2.87	7	122
3	Lakshmipathy Balaji	2.74	4	73
4	Chris Morris	2.47	4	81
5	Yuzvendra Chahal	2.45	9	184
6	Munaf Patel	2.38	3	63
7	Harshal Patel	2.07	5	121
8	Sunil Narine	2.00	8	200
9	Prasidh Krishna	1.92	3	78
10	Kuldeep Yadav	1.87	4	107
11	Mohit Sharma	1.68	4	119
12	Jasprit Bumrah	1.58	5	158
13	Arshdeep Singh	1.58	3	95
14	Amit Mishra	1.54	5	162

Rabada tops the rate list as well as sitting third on the volume list, which is the strongest single argument that he is the most consistently destructive bowler the competition has had. Malinga is a fraction behind. Chahal's 2.45 across 184 innings — nearly four times Rabada's workload — is the more remarkable sustained figure.

Lakshmipathy Balaji at third is the historical curiosity. He took 76 IPL wickets in 73 innings between 2008 and 2014, including a 5 for 24 in the competition's first season, and ran through an innings four times.

Four-wicket hauls by season

Season	Hauls	Season	Hauls
2008	8	2018	8
2009	11	2019	9
2010	6	2020	7
2011	9	2021	10
2012	15	2022	21
2013	7	2023	19
2014	12	2024	10
2015	14	2025	16
2016	13	2026	17
2017	7	—	—

The 2022 season produced 21, the most of any, and 2023 nineteen. Both were seventy-four-match seasons, so part of the rise is simply more cricket — but 2012 and 2013 were also 74 and 76-match seasons and produced fifteen and seven. The genuine driver is that batting has become more aggressive: a side chasing 210 loses wickets in clusters, and clusters are what four-wicket hauls are made of.

That connects to the wider inflation. The competition scored 7.80 an over in 2012 and 9.85 in 2026, and the middle overs now yield a wicket every 21.5 balls against every 24.6 in 2012. More risk, more collapses, more four-fors.

Why the four-wicket haul is the decisive one

Nineteen seasons and 253 such innings give a large enough sample to say something firm. Of those 253, the bowling side won 199. That 79 per cent is far higher than the win rate associated with any individual batting milestone in the competition, including a hundred.

The reason is arithmetic rather than mystique. Four wickets from one bowler in a Twenty20 innings almost always means the batting side lost four of its top six, and the batting side that loses four of its top six inside twenty overs does not usually reach a competitive total. It also means those wickets came from four overs, which leaves sixteen for the other bowlers with fewer set batters to bowl at.

The spinners and the seamers

The top eight on the volume list splits four apiece. Chahal, Narine, Kuldeep Yadav and Amit Mishra are spinners; Rabada, Malinga, Chris Morris and Harshal Patel are seamers. That is a fair reflection of the format at Indian venues, where a side typically bowls eight to ten overs of spin and ten to twelve of pace.

The mechanism differs. The spinners collect their hauls in the middle overs, where batters must take risks against turn to keep a rate going — Chahal has 149 middle-overs wickets, more than anyone, as the middle-overs wicket records show. The seamers collect theirs at either end: Rabada has 51 powerplay wickets and 69 at the death, Malinga 108 at the death alone.

For the single best returns rather than the counts, see the best bowling figures records; for the efficiency behind them, the best bowling strike rate records. Franchise histories are on the IPL hub, and the domestic setting in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

The main table counts innings in which a bowler took exactly four wickets, which is the convention used by most scoring databases: the five-or-more bracket is reported separately rather than folded in. The rate table and the win-rate analysis use four or more wickets, and both bases are labelled where they appear.

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 to any bowler, which is why a bowler's haul count can differ from a tally that includes every dismissal while he was bowling.

Every haul below was counted from Cricsheet's published ball-by-ball data (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), which runs from the competition's first match on 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026. Innings bowled counts any innings in which a bowler delivered at least one ball. The 60-innings qualification on the rate table, and the per-50-innings scaling, are our own choices and are stated because rate tables without a bar reward short careers.

The win-rate figure counts innings in which any bowler took four or more; matches with more than one such spell are counted once. One match in the set was abandoned without a result and is excluded from the percentage.