What Is the FedEx Cup? (Format & Payout Explained)
The FedEx Cup is the PGA Tour's season-long points race, capped off by a three-event playoff every August that decides one champion out of a field that started the year over 40 tournaments deep. Introduced in 2007, it was the Tour's answer to a problem golf had never really solved: the sport crowns four major winners every year, but it never had a single season-long title the way most other sports do. Players earn points from January through August, the standings trim the field three separate times, and whoever plays best over the final 72 holes at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta walks away with the Cup and a check that's now the single largest winner's share on the entire Tour. It is not one tournament. It's a running scoreboard with an elimination bracket welded onto the back half of it.
Key Takeaways
- FedEx Cup points accumulate across the regular season — 500 points for winning a standard event, 700 for a Signature Event, 750 for a major or The Players Championship — and every made cut adds something to the total.
- The playoff field narrows three times: top 70 for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, top 50 for the BMW Championship, top 30 for the Tour Championship.
- Starting with the 2025 season, the PGA Tour eliminated the staggered "Starting Strokes" format at the Tour Championship. All 30 finalists now begin at even par, and the lowest 72-hole score wins the tournament and the Cup outright.
- In 2025, the FedEx Cup champion earned a minimum of $13.6 million, combining bonus-pool money with the $10 million Tour Championship winner's share.
- For 2026, the Tour restructured the money again — the $40 million Tour Championship purse is now classified as official prize money, separate from the FedExCup bonus pool, with the winner still taking home $10 million.
How Do You Earn FedEx Cup Points During the Regular Season?
Every FedEx Cup point traces back to a single PGA Tour start. Win a standard-field event and you get 500 points; win one of the eight Signature Events and it jumps to 700; win a major championship or The Players Championship and it's 750. That tiered structure matters more than it looks — it means a win at, say, the Sentry or the Genesis Invitational carries more weight toward the season race than a win at a regular full-field event, which is by design. The Tour wants its best players showing up to its biggest events, and stacking the points that way is the incentive. You don't have to win to earn points, either; anyone who makes the cut picks something up on a sliding scale down through the finishing order, which is why a player can post four straight top-10s with zero wins and still sit near the top of the standings heading into August.
How Do the Three Playoff Events Work?
The playoffs are a shrinking field, full stop. The FedEx St. Jude Championship — historically at TPC Southwind in Memphis — opens with the top 70 players in points. Survive that and the field cuts to the top 50 for the BMW Championship, which rotates among courses (Caves Valley Golf Club outside Baltimore hosted in 2025). Survive that, and the top 30 advance to the Tour Championship at East Lake, the one fixed site on the entire playoff calendar. Historically, winning either of the first two playoff events paid 2,000 FedExCup points, a huge multiplier over a regular-season win, meant to make each week genuinely load-bearing rather than a formality. That changed for 2026: the Tour trimmed playoff-event winner points down to 750, matching majors and The Players, explicitly to reward consistency across the full season rather than letting one hot week in August swing everything.
Why Did the PGA Tour Ditch the Starting-Strokes Format?
This is the part most casual fans get wrong, because for six seasons it genuinely was the format. From 2019 through 2024, the Tour Championship wasn't a straight stroke-play event — the points leader after the BMW Championship began the week at 10-under par before hitting a shot, the No. 2 seed started at 8-under, No. 3 at 7-under, and so on down a sliding scale until players seeded 26th through 30th started at even par. Whoever posted the lowest score once you added the head start won both the tournament and the Cup. I always thought it was a clever idea on paper and a confusing one on television — a leaderboard where the actual stroke count and the FedEx Cup lead didn't match unless you'd memorized the staggered-start table. Beginning in 2025, the Tour scrapped it entirely. All 30 finalists now start the Tour Championship at even par and play a genuine 72-hole stroke-play event; low score wins, no math required. Tommy Fleetwood won the 2025 edition under the new format, a year after Scottie Scheffler had claimed the title (and a then-record $25 million) under the old strokes system in 2024.
How Much Money Does the FedEx Cup Champion Actually Win?
The dollar figures move around from season to season, but the shape of it stayed consistent through 2025. The top 10 in points after the regular season split a $20 million bonus pool, with $10 million going to the regular-season leader alone. After the BMW Championship, roughly another $23 million got distributed across the remaining 30 players. The rest of the nearly $100 million bonus pool — over $57 million — paid out after the Tour Championship, with $10 million of that going to the winner. Add it up and the 2025 FedEx Cup champion cleared a minimum of $13.6 million once tournament purses and bonus money were combined. For 2026, the Tour reclassified the $40 million Tour Championship purse as official prize money rather than bonus money, kept the winner's share at $10 million, and shrank the pool of players who split the overall FedExCup bonus money from the top 150 down to the top 125 — with the difference redirected toward developmental Pathway players instead. Either way you slice it, the FedEx Cup champion is cashing one of the biggest single checks in golf, bigger than what any winner has ever taken home from the Masters or any other major.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Yes, as of the 2025 format change. Since starting strokes were eliminated, whoever posts the lowest 72-hole score at the Tour Championship is both the tournament winner and the FedEx Cup champion in the same moment.
- There's no fixed point total — qualification is by rank, not a point threshold. The top 70 players in the season-long standings advance to the first playoff event, regardless of how many points that took in a given year.
- Rory McIlroy has won it three times, more than any other player in the event's history.
- 2007. It was the first season-long playoff system in men's professional golf and has carried FedEx's sponsorship every year since.
- No. Player of the Year is a separate, player-voted award that weighs major championships and full-season body of work, so it doesn't always go to the same golfer who wins the FedEx Cup.