The International 2026: official prize pool reaches $3,272,121 — here's what each place earns, from 1st to 16th

The prize pool for The International 2026 stands at 3,272,121 dollars. This figure is not an aggregator estimate: it comes straight from GetLeagueData, a public Valve application programming interface, queried on league 19719 — the tournament's identifier — on Saturday, August 22, 2026 at 5:02 AM UTC, i.e. 7:02 AM Paris time.

The same response contains the official prize distribution table, one that our previous guides had not published. It covers sixteen places. The champion takes 42.5%, or $1,390,651 based on the total recorded this morning. The runner-up takes 13%, or $425,376. A single series therefore separates two teams by nearly a million dollars.

A warning right away, because it governs how everything that follows should be read: this figure is constantly moving. A second check, carried out twenty-seven minutes after the first, at 5:29 AM UTC, already showed $3,272,409, or $288 more. In-game sales that feed the prize pool won't stop before September 2. No amount published about this tournament makes sense without the date and time it was recorded.

Where does this figure come from, and why does it keep climbing on its own?

The prize pool of a The International tournament is made up of two blocks. The first is the base amount set by Valve: the base_prize_pool field is worth $1,600,000, a figure we had already reported on August 12 and which has not changed since. The second block is the players' contribution.

This contribution follows a simple rule, also readable in the API response: each item flagged as a contributor carries a revenue_pct field set to 30. In other words, 30% of the revenue from those items falls into the tournament's prize pool. Every purchase made while you're reading these lines adds a few dollars to the total.

The math therefore stands as follows on August 22: a total of $3,272,121, minus $1,600,000 in Valve's base funding, leaves $1,672,121 contributed by in-game sales. The players' share now represents 51.1% of the prize pool: it now outweighs the publisher's contribution.

The sales_stop_timestamp field is 1788332400. Converted, that gives Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at 7:00 AM UTC, i.e. 9:00 AM Paris time. Contributing sales therefore remain open for ten days after the grand final. This is why the figures announced in mid-August, including our own, described a tournament that hadn't finished filling its own prize pool: they were accurate as of their date, but they no longer are today.

The official table: what each place earns

Valve publishes the shares as a table of sixteen integers, expressed in hundredths of a percent: 4250 for first place reads as 42.5%. The percentages are fixed and known in advance; only the amounts vary, since they're applied to a moving total. Here is the full conversion, calculated from the 5:02 AM UTC reading on August 22.

Three useful takeaways from this table. First: the sum of the sixteen shares comes to exactly 100%, so the entire prize pool is redistributed among the sixteen places. Second: the eight teams ranked 9^th through 16^th share 11.5% of the total, or $376,294 among all of them combined — less than a third of what the champion alone receives. Third: these amounts are not final and will mechanically increase between now and September 2.

$965,275: the price of the grand final

The gap between first and second place amounts to 29.5 percentage points. Applied to the August 22 total, that represents $965,275 riding on a single series, the best-of-five grand final. It is by far the largest gap in the table: no other step exceeds $131,000.

Another step deserves attention, a much smaller one this time. Between 3^rd and 4^th place, there are 3 percentage points, or $98,164. We had devoted an analysis to this edition's format and to the real value of the top 3: the prize distribution table confirms it in dollar terms, but it says nothing about the fatigue accumulated by teams that went through the elimination rounds.

At the bottom of the table, sixteenth place earns $16,361. Split between five players, a coach, and an organization that paid for the trip to Shanghai, the sum barely covers more than expenses. That's a fact worth keeping in mind when reading debates about the economic model of the Dota scene: the top of the table is comfortable, the rest is not.

One year later: the same table, a total up 13.5%

The same endpoint, queried on league 18324, returns the data for The International 2025: identical base funding of $1,600,000, a final total of $2,881,791, and — a detail that matters — exactly the same distribution table, figure for figure. Valve has therefore not touched the split between the two editions.

Year-over-year growth stands at +13.5%. It rests entirely on the players' share: $1,281,791 in contributing sales in 2025 versus $1,672,121 as of August 22, 2026, roughly 30% higher, even though sales for this edition are not yet closed.

In concrete terms, applying this table to the 2025 total means that Team Falcons, crowned champion last year in Hamburg, received 42.5% of $2,881,791, or $1,224,761. Whichever team lifts the Aegis of Champions tomorrow will earn more than that.

The contrast with the Battle Pass era, backed by Valve's own figures

The value of this interface is that it also answers for past editions. By querying the corresponding league identifiers, we get the following history, drawn from the same source rather than a community compilation.

The 2020 edition is absent from this record: the list of leagues returned by Valve jumps from The International 2019 straight to a yearless The International 10, then to The International 2021. The table makes for a stark read: the 2021 edition brought in more than twelve times the current total. The break occurs between 2022 and 2023, when funding for the prize pool stopped relying on a tiered paid pass. Since then, totals have stayed within a narrow range, between $2.7 and $3.4 million.

One point this ranking makes visible: at $3,272,121, the 2026 edition already surpasses 2024 and 2025, but remains $108,334 below 2023. Sales open until September 2 could close that gap. We're not offering any prediction on this: the pace of end-of-tournament purchases is not published data.

Check the figure yourself, in thirty seconds

The process is reproducible and requires neither an account nor an API key. The address to open in a browser is https://www.dota2.com/webapi/IDOTA2League/GetLeagueData/v001/?league_id=19719. In the response, three fields are all you need:

• total_prize_pool: the prize pool in dollars, at the moment of the request;
• base_prize_pool: the base funding set by Valve, unchanging;
• prize_split_pct_x100: the sixteen shares, to be divided by 100 to get percentages.

Two caveats, though. This endpoint is not documented by Valve: nothing guarantees its stability over time, nor that the field names will remain the same. And the response is large — it carries the tournament's entire bracket tree — so it's better to filter it rather than read it raw.

Three dates to note

• Today, Saturday, August 22: main event series continue at the SPD Bank Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai. Each series moves teams from one line of the prize table to another.
• Tomorrow, Sunday, August 23: the grand final will be played as a best-of-five. It will settle the $965,275 gap between first and second place. The day's schedule starts at 10 AM China time, i.e. 4 AM in Paris.
• Wednesday, September 2, 9 AM Paris time: contributing sales close. It's at that moment, not when the trophy is handed out, that the total will stop moving.

This last date deserves emphasis, as it creates a counterintuitive situation: the final prize pool amount will not be known on the night of the championship. Valve has not publicly specified which reading is authoritative for paying out the teams. We will update this guide with the final total once it's settled after September 2.

Until then, the only serious way to cite a figure for this edition is to attach a timestamp to it. Ours: $3,272,121 on August 22, 2026 at 5:02 AM UTC. It is already out of date.