IPL Most Wicketkeeper Dismissals: All-Time Records

MS Dhoni has claimed 201 dismissals standing behind the stumps in the Indian Premier League — 154 catches and 47 stumpings across 271 innings kept. Dinesh Karthik is second on 174, Wriddhiman Saha third on 113 and Rishabh Pant fourth on 111. Only those four have passed a hundred, and only Dhoni has passed two hundred.

The gap between first and second is 27 dismissals; the gap between second and third is 61. That is the shape of a record built on longevity as much as on hands. Dhoni kept in 271 IPL innings and Karthik in 235, and no other keeper has managed 150. Rishabh Pant's 111 from 129 innings is the highest rate of anyone near the top of the list — 0.86 dismissals per innings against Dhoni's 0.74 — and if he keeps for another five seasons at that rate the order at the top will change.

This is the one record on the Indian Premier League archive that cannot be computed from ball-by-ball data alone, because scorecards do not mark who was wearing the gloves. The dismissal totals below are taken from published IPL keeping records; the stumping column is independently computed, and the two agree. The method section explains exactly how.

Most IPL dismissals as a wicketkeeper

Innings are innings kept, not matches played. A keeper who appeared as a specialist batter in some seasons — Karthik, Robin Uthappa, KL Rahul and Sanju Samson all did — has fewer keeping innings than appearances.

#	Keeper	Innings kept	Dismissals	Catches	Stumpings
1	MS Dhoni	271	201	154	47
2	Dinesh Karthik	235	174	137	37
3	Wriddhiman Saha	149	113	87	26
4	Rishabh Pant	129	111	87	24
5	Robin Uthappa	114	90	58	32
6	Quinton de Kock	102	87	70	17
7	Sanju Samson	127	86	67	19
8	Parthiv Patel	122	81	65	16
9	Naman Ojha	111	75	65	10
10	KL Rahul	95	69	61	8
11	Adam Gilchrist	80	67	51	16

The table stops at eleven names. Below Gilchrist the published keeping totals stop agreeing with each other, largely because several current players split their seasons between keeping and not keeping, and a shorter accurate list is worth more than a longer one with two rows in dispute.

Dismissals per innings kept

#	Keeper	Per innings	Dismissals	Innings kept
1	Rishabh Pant	0.86	111	129
2	Quinton de Kock	0.85	87	102
3	Adam Gilchrist	0.84	67	80
4	Robin Uthappa	0.79	90	114
5	Wriddhiman Saha	0.76	113	149
6	MS Dhoni	0.74	201	271
6	Dinesh Karthik	0.74	174	235
8	KL Rahul	0.73	69	95
9	Sanju Samson	0.68	86	127
9	Naman Ojha	0.68	75	111
11	Parthiv Patel	0.66	81	122

Rate differences here have less to do with keeping quality than with the attacks each man stood behind. Rishabh Pant kept to Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje and Axar Patel through Delhi Capitals sides that took wickets in clusters. Parthiv Patel spent much of his career keeping to attacks that did not, and his 0.66 is the lowest on the list without any suggestion that he dropped more.

The proportion taken standing up

A stumping is the one dismissal only a keeper can produce on his own, and the share of a keeper's dismissals that are stumpings says a good deal about the bowlers he stood to.

Keeper	Stumpings	Dismissals	Stumping share
Robin Uthappa	32	90	35.6%
Adam Gilchrist	16	67	23.9%
MS Dhoni	47	201	23.4%
Wriddhiman Saha	26	113	23.0%
Sanju Samson	19	86	22.1%
Rishabh Pant	24	111	21.6%
Dinesh Karthik	37	174	21.3%
Parthiv Patel	16	81	19.8%
Quinton de Kock	17	87	19.5%
Naman Ojha	10	75	13.3%
KL Rahul	8	69	11.6%

Robin Uthappa's 35.6 per cent is a long way clear and is explained by where he kept: standing up to Sunil Narine and Piyush Chawla for Kolkata through the seasons when both were bowling ten or eleven overs a game between them. A keeper who spends a third of every innings a yard from the stumps to a spinner turning it both ways will get chances no keeper standing back to seamers ever sees.

Dhoni's 201 in context

Dhoni kept in 271 of the 277 IPL matches he appeared in, from the first season in 2008 to his last in 2025. Nobody else has kept in more than 235. On top of the 201 dismissals he claimed with the gloves, he was credited with 53 run-outs, the most of any player in the competition, and those are not counted in the keeping total even though a large share of them came from him collecting and breaking the stumps himself.

The claim occasionally made for him — that he is the competition's best keeper — is not something this table can settle. What it can say is that no one has done the job for as long, that his stumping share of 23.4 per cent is above the median for the group, and that Chennai Super Kings never once in eighteen seasons had cause to look for an alternative.

The part-time keepers

Four of the eleven names above kept in noticeably fewer innings than they played: Karthik in 235 of 257, Samson in 127 of 190, Rahul in 95 of 160 and Uthappa in 114 of 205. In each case the club had another keeper for part of the period and used the batter as a specialist.

Setting each man's total IPL catches against his catches as keeper separates the two jobs precisely. The total column is counted from the ball-by-ball archive; the keeper column comes from the published keeping record.

Keeper	All catches	As keeper	In the outfield
MS Dhoni	158	154	4
Dinesh Karthik	145	137	8
Wriddhiman Saha	93	87	6
Robin Uthappa	92	58	34
Rishabh Pant	90	87	3
Sanju Samson	90	67	23
KL Rahul	83	61	22
Quinton de Kock	75	70	5
Parthiv Patel	69	65	4
Naman Ojha	65	65	0
Adam Gilchrist	51	51	0

Naman Ojha and Adam Gilchrist never took a catch in the IPL outside their own keeping duties. At the other extreme, more than a third of Uthappa's catches and a quarter of Sanju Samson's came with somebody else keeping.

That distinction is why a combined catching list ranks these players differently from a keeping list. The all-time catching records count every catch a fielder takes, which is correct for a fielding table and wrong for a keeping one.

Observations

• Four keepers have passed a hundred dismissals and two of them are still playing. Rishabh Pant needs 63 more to pass Karthik and 91 to pass Dhoni, which at his current rate is roughly four full seasons and eight full seasons respectively.
• Adam Gilchrist claimed 67 dismissals in 80 innings across six seasons that all ended before 2014, and his 0.84 per innings is the third-highest rate on the page. He is the only keeper in the group whose entire IPL career predates the modern scoring era.
• Quinton de Kock kept in 102 innings for five different franchises and took 87 dismissals doing it, the best return of any overseas keeper apart from Gilchrist.
• Wriddhiman Saha and Naman Ojha are the two names on the list who were never established India first-choice keepers, and between them they claimed 188 IPL dismissals in 260 innings — more than Karthik managed and at a marginally better rate.
• Nine of the eleven are Indian or were qualified as domestic players for part of their career. The IPL's four-overseas rule makes a keeper an expensive slot to fill from abroad, and the record reflects that structural fact more than any comparative judgement about glovework.

Sources and method

Dismissal, catch and innings-kept totals in the tables above come from published IPL wicketkeeping records, current to the end of the 2026 season on 31 May 2026. They are used rather than computed because the ball-by-ball archive records the fielder credited with each catch but not which member of the eleven was keeping, so a catch taken behind the stumps and a catch taken at cover are indistinguishable in the raw data.

The stumping column is the exception. A stumping can only be effected by the keeper, so those were counted directly from the archive and cross-checked against the published stumping list: the leading figures agree exactly. Subtracting the computed stumpings from the published dismissals gives the catch column, and every result of that subtraction matched the published catch totals where those were available — which is the check that makes the rest of the table trustworthy.

Two consequences follow. First, a stumping share is a computed number and a catch total is a published one, so the two columns rest on slightly different footing even though they reconcile. Second, the list is short by design: it runs to eleven names because that is as far as the published compilations agree, and rows beyond it were left off rather than reconciled by guesswork.

Run-outs are excluded from every dismissal total on this page, in line with how keeping records are kept, and appear only where the text mentions them explicitly. Super overs are excluded. Where a figure could move within a season it is given as a plain total rather than a rate, and no projection on this page should be read as a forecast.