IPL Most Fours: All-Time Records

Virat Kohli has hit 844 fours in the Indian Premier League. Shikhar Dhawan, who played his last season in 2024, is second on 768. Nobody else has reached 700, and the 76-run gap between them is wider than the entire career four count of most players who have batted a hundred innings in the tournament.

The four is the shot the competition has quietly stopped prioritising. In 2013 an IPL innings produced a four every 8.6 legal deliveries and a six every 26.2. By 2026 fours arrived every 7.2 balls — a modest improvement — while sixes arrived every 11.7, better than twice as often as thirteen years earlier. Across those seasons the total number of fours rose by 14 per cent; the total number of sixes rose by 111 per cent. Boundary hitting has grown enormously and almost none of that growth went into the four.

That makes this list a different sort of document from the six-hitting one. It rewards long careers and orthodox top-order batting rather than specialist power, and the men near the top of it are largely the men who have faced the most deliveries. Every figure below is counted from ball-by-ball records of all 1,243 matches played between 18 April 2008 and 31 May 2026.

Career fours

#	Player	Inns	Fours	Sixes	Balls faced	Balls per four	Runs	SR	Span
1	Virat Kohli	275	844	316	6,926	8.2	9,336	134.80	2008-2026
2	Shikhar Dhawan	221	768	152	5,324	6.9	6,769	127.14	2008-2024
3	David Warner	184	663	236	4,697	7.1	6,565	139.77	2009-2024
4	Rohit Sharma	275	661	323	5,514	8.3	7,329	132.92	2008-2026
5	Ajinkya Rahane	197	539	141	4,273	7.9	5,367	125.60	2008-2026
6	KL Rahul	149	508	239	4,179	8.2	5,815	139.15	2013-2026
7	Suresh Raina	200	506	203	4,043	8.0	5,528	136.73	2008-2021
8	Gautam Gambhir	151	492	59	3,404	6.9	4,217	123.88	2008-2018
9	Suryakumar Yadav	164	482	178	3,083	6.4	4,581	148.59	2012-2026
10	Robin Uthappa	197	481	182	3,799	7.9	4,952	130.35	2008-2022
11	Dinesh Karthik	233	466	161	3,577	7.7	4,842	135.36	2008-2024
12	Jos Buttler	136	458	211	3,103	6.8	4,646	149.73	2016-2026
13	Shubman Gill	130	446	152	3,236	7.3	4,598	142.09	2018-2026
14	Faf du Plessis	147	439	174	3,515	8.0	4,773	135.79	2012-2025
15	Sanju Samson	185	432	243	3,671	8.5	5,181	141.13	2013-2026
16	AB de Villiers	170	413	251	3,403	8.2	5,162	151.69	2008-2021
17	Chris Gayle	141	404	357	3,333	8.2	4,965	148.96	2009-2021
18	Shane Watson	141	376	190	2,809	7.5	3,874	137.91	2008-2020
19	MS Dhoni	241	375	264	3,957	10.6	5,439	137.45	2008-2025
20	Parthiv Patel	136	365	49	2,358	6.5	2,848	120.78	2008-2019
21	Ambati Rayudu	185	359	173	3,409	9.5	4,348	127.54	2010-2023
22	Shreyas Iyer	144	353	182	3,093	8.8	4,229	136.73	2015-2026
23	Rishabh Pant	136	349	181	2,633	7.5	3,865	146.79	2016-2026
24	Manish Pandey	163	348	117	3,293	9.5	4,012	121.83	2008-2026
24	Ishan Kishan	127	348	166	2,508	7.2	3,600	143.54	2016-2026
26	Quinton de Kock	118	334	143	2,550	7.6	3,441	134.94	2013-2026
26	Virender Sehwag	104	334	106	1,755	5.3	2,728	155.44	2008-2015
28	Yashasvi Jaiswal	82	310	110	1,697	5.5	2,593	152.80	2020-2026
29	Wriddhiman Saha	143	296	87	2,300	7.8	2,934	127.57	2008-2024
30	Sachin Tendulkar	78	295	29	1,948	6.6	2,334	119.82	2008-2013

Gambhir is the most striking name on the table. He is eighth with 492 fours and has 59 sixes, the lowest six count of anyone in the top twenty by a margin of about ninety. Of his 4,217 IPL runs, 46.7 per cent arrived in fours, a share nobody else in the top ten approaches.

Dhoni sits at the other end of the same axis. He is nineteenth with 375 fours, and his balls-per-four figure of 10.6 is comfortably the worst on the table — better than two overs of deliveries between fours, sustained across eighteen seasons. He hit 264 sixes in the same span.

The rate table, with a 250-four qualification

#	Player	Fours	Balls	Balls per four	Inns	Runs	SR
1	Virender Sehwag	334	1,755	5.3	104	2,728	155.44
2	Yashasvi Jaiswal	310	1,697	5.5	82	2,593	152.80
3	Suryakumar Yadav	482	3,083	6.4	164	4,581	148.59
4	Parthiv Patel	365	2,358	6.5	136	2,848	120.78
4	Sai Sudharsan	258	1,686	6.5	57	2,515	149.17
6	Sachin Tendulkar	295	1,948	6.6	78	2,334	119.82
7	Jos Buttler	458	3,103	6.8	136	4,646	149.73
8	Gautam Gambhir	492	3,404	6.9	151	4,217	123.88
8	Shikhar Dhawan	768	5,324	6.9	221	6,769	127.14
10	Shaun Marsh	266	1,866	7.0	69	2,477	132.74
10	Rahul Dravid	268	1,882	7.0	82	2,174	115.52
12	David Warner	663	4,697	7.1	184	6,565	139.77
13	Ishan Kishan	348	2,508	7.2	127	3,600	143.54
14	Shubman Gill	446	3,236	7.3	130	4,598	142.09
15	Brendon McCullum	293	2,186	7.5	109	2,880	131.75
15	Rishabh Pant	349	2,633	7.5	136	3,865	146.79
15	Shane Watson	376	2,809	7.5	141	3,874	137.91

The 250-four bar is ours. It is set there because below it the table fills with players who batted thirty innings and will not hold their position, and it is stated here rather than buried in the method note.

Sehwag's 5.3 is the record and it is clear of the field: a four once every fifth or sixth ball he faced across 104 innings, at a strike rate of 155 in seasons when the competition average was nearer 125. Yashasvi Jaiswal at 5.5 is the only player within a ball of him, and he has done it fifteen years later against far better analysed death and powerplay bowling.

Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar both appear inside the top eleven, which is the least intuitive thing on the page. Neither had a Twenty20 reputation; both had exceptional timing and played almost entirely against the flatter, less-scouted attacks of 2008 to 2013. A four does not require power, and their presence is the plainest evidence of it.

Most fours in a single innings

Fours	Player	Score	Balls	Sixes	Team	Opponent	Venue	Date
19	Paul Valthaty	120*	63	2	Kings XI Punjab	Chennai Super Kings	Chandigarh	13 Apr 2011
19	AB de Villiers	133*	59	4	Royal Challengers Bangalore	Mumbai Indians	Mumbai	10 May 2015
16	Michael Lumb	83	43	2	Rajasthan Royals	Kings XI Punjab	Jaipur	7 Apr 2010
16	Ajinkya Rahane	98	66	1	Rajasthan Royals	Kings XI Punjab	Jaipur	6 Apr 2012
16	Devon Conway	92*	52	1	Chennai Super Kings	Punjab Kings	Chennai	30 Apr 2023
16	Yashasvi Jaiswal	124	62	8	Rajasthan Royals	Mumbai Indians	Mumbai	30 Apr 2023
16	KL Rahul	152*	67	9	Delhi Capitals	Punjab Kings	Delhi	25 Apr 2026
15	Murali Vijay	113	58	4	Chennai Super Kings	Delhi Daredevils	Chennai	25 May 2012
15	Glenn Maxwell	95	43	2	Kings XI Punjab	Chennai Super Kings	Abu Dhabi	18 Apr 2014
15	Quinton de Kock	108	51	3	Delhi Daredevils	Royal Challengers Bangalore	Bangalore	17 Apr 2016
15	Shreyas Iyer	96	57	2	Delhi Daredevils	Gujarat Lions	Kanpur	10 May 2017
15	Rishabh Pant	128*	63	7	Delhi Daredevils	Sunrisers Hyderabad	Delhi	10 May 2018
15	Sanju Samson	115*	56	4	Chennai Super Kings	Delhi Capitals	Chennai	11 Apr 2026
15	Shubman Gill	104	53	3	Gujarat Titans	Rajasthan Royals	New Chandigarh	29 May 2026

Valthaty's 120 not out is the strangest entry in any IPL record table. He had scored 11 runs in his IPL career to that point, was pushed up to open at short notice, and hit nineteen fours against a Chennai attack that had won the title five months earlier. He batted 22 innings in the competition in total and never passed 75 again.

De Villiers matched the nineteen four years later in an innings of a completely different character — 133 not out from 59 balls at Wankhede, in a game Royal Challengers lost by eighteen runs. Two players hold the record and neither did it in a winning cause.

Two of the fourteen entries fall on the same day, 30 April 2023, in different cities. Rahane's sixteen in 2012 came off 66 balls with a single six, the most orthodox innings on the list and one Rajasthan still lost.

The season fours record

Season	Player	Team	Inns	Fours	Sixes	Runs	Balls	SR
2025	Sai Sudharsan	Gujarat Titans	15	88	21	759	486	156.17
2016	David Warner	Sunrisers Hyderabad	17	88	31	848	560	151.43
2010	Sachin Tendulkar	Mumbai Indians	15	86	3	618	466	132.62
2023	Shubman Gill	Gujarat Titans	17	85	33	890	564	157.80
2022	Jos Buttler	Rajasthan Royals	17	83	45	863	579	149.05
2016	Virat Kohli	Royal Challengers Bangalore	16	83	38	973	640	152.03
2023	Yashasvi Jaiswal	Rajasthan Royals	14	82	26	625	382	163.61
2013	Mike Hussey	Chennai Super Kings	17	81	17	733	566	129.51
2023	Devon Conway	Chennai Super Kings	15	77	18	672	481	139.71
2026	Sai Sudharsan	Gujarat Titans	17	75	30	722	457	157.99
2026	Shubman Gill	Gujarat Titans	16	74	33	732	449	163.03
2014	Robin Uthappa	Kolkata Knight Riders	16	74	18	660	479	137.79

Tendulkar's 86 in 2010 came with three sixes for the entire season. Warner's 88 in 2016 came with 31. Two nearly identical rows describing wholly different cricket, and the six column is the only place the difference shows.

Sai Sudharsan holds two of the top ten entries, both made for Gujarat Titans, whose opening pair with Gill supplied four of the twelve rows here between 2023 and 2026. No other franchise supplied more than two.

Fours as a share of a batter's runs

Player	Fours	Sixes	Runs	Runs in fours	Runs in sixes
Parthiv Patel	365	49	2,848	51.3%	10.3%
Virender Sehwag	334	106	2,728	49.0%	23.3%
Yashasvi Jaiswal	310	110	2,593	47.8%	25.5%
Gautam Gambhir	492	59	4,217	46.7%	8.4%
Shikhar Dhawan	768	152	6,769	45.4%	13.5%
Suryakumar Yadav	482	178	4,581	42.1%	23.3%
David Warner	663	236	6,565	40.4%	21.6%
Ajinkya Rahane	539	141	5,367	40.2%	15.8%
Andre Russell	186	223	2,651	28.1%	50.5%
MS Dhoni	375	264	5,439	27.6%	29.1%
Nicholas Pooran	168	186	2,527	26.6%	44.2%
Kieron Pollard	218	223	3,412	25.6%	39.2%

The qualification here is 2,500 career runs, and the table shows the two extremes rather than a continuous ranking. Russell is the only IPL batter to take more than half his runs in sixes. Gambhir took 8.4 per cent of his that way and still made 4,217.

The split is not simply a matter of power. Gambhir and Dhawan opened, faced the new ball with two fielders out, and were built for the powerplay four. Pollard and Pooran arrived at the fifteenth over and were paid to clear the rope. Suryakumar Yadav sits awkwardly across both — 42 per cent in fours and 23 per cent in sixes, from a middle-order position, a profile almost nobody else in the competition has.

What the competition did to the four

Season	Matches	Fours	Sixes	Balls per four	Balls per six
2008	58	1,703	622	7.7	21.0
2009	57	1,316	506	10.0	26.0
2012	74	1,911	731	9.0	23.6
2013	76	2,051	674	8.6	26.2
2016	60	1,632	638	8.4	21.4
2019	60	1,652	784	8.4	17.7
2022	74	2,017	1,062	8.5	16.2
2023	74	2,174	1,124	7.9	15.3
2024	71	2,174	1,260	7.5	13.0
2025	74	2,257	1,300	7.3	12.8
2026	74	2,332	1,426	7.2	11.7

The four is not declining in absolute terms — 2,332 in 2026 is the highest the tournament has produced. What has changed is its share of the boundary count. In 2013 fours outnumbered sixes three to one. In 2026 the ratio is 1.6 to one, and it has fallen in every season since 2021.

The 2009 season, played in South Africa on larger and slower grounds, is still the low point for both shots: a four every ten deliveries, a six every 26. It is the only season in which the fours-per-match figure fell below 24.

Four things worth noticing

The list rewards attendance more than the six list does. Kohli and Rohit are first and fourth on the strength of 275 innings apiece. On the six-hitting list a specialist can force his way to the top on rate alone; nobody has done the equivalent with fours, because the four is not a shot a batter can specialise in.

Openers own the rate table and the season record. Fourteen of the seventeen rate qualifiers opened or batted at three. Eleven of the twelve season entries were made by openers. The powerplay, with only two fielders permitted outside the circle, is where the four lives.

Wicketkeepers are unusually well represented and unusually split. Parthiv Patel, Wriddhiman Saha, de Kock, Kishan, Pant, Karthik and Samson all sit in the career top thirty, and they run from Patel's 51.3 per cent four share to Samson's 8.5 balls per four. The position selects for timing at the top of the order and for hitting at the bottom.

Gill and Sudharsan are writing the modern version of the record. Between them they hold four of the top twelve season figures, all since 2023, and Gill's 446 career fours from 130 innings is a pace nobody in the top ten matched. The rest of the boundary picture is on the IPL most sixes page; aggregate scoring is on the IPL most runs page and the Orange Cap winners page; the innings totals all this boundary-hitting produces are on the IPL highest team totals page.

For franchise context, Royal Challengers Bengaluru supplied both Kohli's 844 and de Villiers's record innings, while Sunrisers Hyderabad hold Warner's season figure. The tournament's structure and history sit on the Indian Premier League hub, individual careers on profiles such as Shubman Gill, and the domestic system behind Sudharsan and Jaiswal on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Boundary counts on this page are derived from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), which holds every delivery of all 1,243 Indian Premier League matches from 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026. Nothing here is taken from a published leaderboard; each table is counted from the deliveries themselves.

A four is a delivery from which four runs were scored off the bat and the ball reached the boundary. All-run fours — twenty-one in the whole archive, which the source flags separately — are excluded, as published scorecards exclude them. Super-over deliveries are excluded from every table, because super-over runs do not count towards batting records.

Balls faced exclude wides and include no-balls. Balls per four is a batter's own balls faced divided by his own fours, so it measures his frequency and not his team's. The tournament rows near the foot of the page use a different denominator: total legal deliveries bowled in a season, wides and no-balls excluded, divided by total fours hit, which answers how often a four appeared in the competition rather than how often any one player produced one.

The 250-four bar on the rate table and the 2,500-run bar on the share table are our own thresholds, chosen to keep short careers from distorting a ratio, and both are printed with their tables. The share table shows the highest and lowest four-percentages among qualified batters rather than a full ranking. Season labels are the calendar year of the tournament; 2009 was played in South Africa and parts of 2014 and 2020 in the United Arab Emirates, which the venue columns reflect. Career spans are first and last season of appearance. Every figure is current to the end of the 2026 season and will move with the next one.