IPL Most Maiden Overs: All-Time Records

Six legal deliveries, no runs. It is the least glamorous achievement in Twenty20 cricket and by some distance the rarest: across 1,243 IPL matches and roughly 300,000 deliveries there have been 288 maiden overs, which works out at one every four and a bit matches.

Praveen Kumar has twelve of them, three more than anyone else, from 420.4 overs of IPL bowling. Trent Boult and Bhuvneshwar Kumar have nine, and the difference between them tells the whole story of this record: Boult has bowled 463 overs, Bhuvneshwar 766. Praveen's rate of 2.85 maidens per hundred overs is the highest of any bowler with 200 overs in the competition and is unlikely to be beaten, because nobody now bowls the kind of over that produces one.

All counts below come from the 1,243 Indian Premier League matches played between April 2008 and the 2026 final.

Most maiden overs in the IPL

#	Bowler	Maidens	Overs bowled	Economy	Wickets
1	Praveen Kumar	12	420.4	7.73	90
2	Trent Boult	9	463.2	8.49	145
2	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	9	766.4	7.71	226
4	Irfan Pathan	8	340.3	7.78	80
5	Deepak Chahar	7	344.4	8.30	96
5	Dhawal Kulkarni	7	297.5	8.31	86
5	Dale Steyn	7	362.4	6.92	97
8	Jasprit Bumrah	6	605.1	7.34	187
8	Lasith Malinga	6	471.1	7.14	170
8	Sandeep Sharma	6	526.3	8.16	151
11	Umesh Yadav	5	508.2	8.49	144
11	Ishant Sharma	5	403.1	8.38	96
13	Yuzvendra Chahal	4	672.5	8.05	233
13	Jofra Archer	4	263.0	8.22	84
13	Amit Mishra	4	561.5	7.38	174
13	Ravichandran Ashwin	4	785.0	7.20	187
13	Sreesanth	4	146.4	8.14	40
13	Zaheer Khan	4	366.4	7.59	102
13	Ishwar Pandey	4	77.0	7.68	18
20	Jaydev Unadkat	3	391.5	8.94	114

Ishwar Pandey is the outlier that proves the record is mostly about opportunity. He bowled 77 overs of IPL cricket in total, spread across a handful of seasons, and four of them were maidens. Sreesanth managed four from 146.4. Neither had anything like a full career; both bowled the new ball in the early-to-middle 2010s, which is when and where maidens were still available.

Rate, which is the fairer measure

Restricted to bowlers with at least 200 overs in the competition.

#	Bowler	Maidens per 100 overs	Maidens	Overs
1	Praveen Kumar	2.85	12	420.4
2	Dhawal Kulkarni	2.35	7	297.5
3	Irfan Pathan	2.35	8	340.3
4	Deepak Chahar	2.03	7	344.4
5	Trent Boult	1.94	9	463.2
6	Dale Steyn	1.93	7	362.4
7	Jofra Archer	1.52	4	263.0
8	Siddarth Kaul	1.49	3	201.3
9	Munaf Patel	1.33	3	225.5
10	Lasith Malinga	1.27	6	471.1
11	Ishant Sharma	1.24	5	403.1
12	Bhuvneshwar Kumar	1.17	9	766.4
13	Sandeep Sharma	1.14	6	526.3
14	Zaheer Khan	1.09	4	366.4

Not a single spinner appears in this top fourteen. That is not a coincidence and it is not a criticism: an off spinner bowling to a spread field in the twelfth over will concede two or three singles almost regardless of quality, whereas a swing bowler with the new ball and a slip cordon can beat the bat six times running. Every maiden-over record belongs to the first six overs of an innings.

The maiden over is disappearing

Season	Maidens bowled	Competition run rate
2008	12	8.26
2010	8	8.09
2011	30	7.69
2013	32	7.65
2016	16	8.28
2019	17	8.38
2020	18	8.26
2022	24	8.50
2023	12	8.94
2024	5	9.52
2025	7	9.59
2026	8	9.85

Thirty-two maidens in 76 matches in 2013. Five in 71 matches in 2024. That is the sharpest collapse of any bowling statistic in the competition's history, and it happened in about a decade.

The proximate cause is the powerplay. In 2013 the competition scored 6.93 an over in overs one to six and 50.7 per cent of powerplay deliveries were dots. In 2026 it scored 10.10 and 41.4 per cent were dots. Six consecutive dots is an exponential function of the dot rate: drop the per-ball probability from just over a half to just over four in ten and the chance of six in a row falls by around seventy per cent. The maths does most of the work.

The rest is intent. A batting side that treats the first six overs as its main scoring phase will not leave an over alone, and the Impact Player rule from 2023 made that approach cheaper by putting a genuine hitter at seven.

Praveen Kumar's twelve

Five of Praveen Kumar's twelve came in the 2011 season alone, which was itself the second-heaviest maiden season on record with 30. He bowled at around 125 kilometres an hour, moved the ball both ways off the seam, and bowled a fuller length than any of his contemporaries. Against batters trying to hit through the line in the first four overs, that combination produced a lot of beaten bats and a lot of overs worth nothing.

It is worth noting what the same skill set is worth now. Praveen's career economy rate of 7.73 would have been among the best in the competition in 2013 and would be exceptional in 2026 — but his 42.6 per cent dot rate, the fourth-highest among bowlers with 250 overs, is the number that generated the maidens rather than the economy rate itself. The most dot balls records set out the relationship in full.

The great restrictive spinners have almost none

Sunil Narine has bowled 775 overs, the second-most in IPL history, with the best economy rate in the competition — and three maidens. Rashid Khan has three from 588. Ravindra Jadeja has exactly one in 709 overs, and Piyush Chawla one in 641.

That is the strongest possible statement of what this record measures. Jadeja's economy rate of 7.71 is better than Praveen Kumar's, Trent Boult's, Deepak Chahar's and Irfan Pathan's, and it comes from fifteen seasons of left-arm spin bowled almost entirely between overs seven and fifteen. He simply never had the type of over that produces a maiden, because a spinner to a spread field concedes singles, and a single ruins everything.

For the phase where maidens are actually available, see the powerplay wicket records; for the wider economy picture the best economy rate records. Franchise histories are on the IPL hub, and the domestic context in the guide to cricket in India.

Sources and method

A maiden over is defined here as an over of at least six legal deliveries from which no run of any kind accrued to the batting side — so an over containing a wide, a no-ball, a bye or a leg bye is not a maiden even if nothing came off the bat. That is the standard scoring definition. Overs shortened by the end of an innings cannot be maidens under this definition because they contain fewer than six legal balls.

All counts are computed from the ball-by-ball archive published by Cricsheet (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering every IPL match from 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026, and are complete rather than a selection. Where an over was shared between bowlers because of an injury substitution, the maiden is credited to the bowler who delivered the final ball; this affects a negligible number of overs.

Overs bowled are shown in cricket notation, so 420.4 means 420 completed overs and four balls. The maidens-per-hundred-overs figures divide maidens by overs bowled and multiply by a hundred; the 200-over qualification on that table is our own bar and is stated because rate tables without one reward very short careers. Competition run rates and phase dot percentages are computed across all innings in the season concerned, extras included.