Most Runs in WPL History: Leading Batters and Records
The Women’s Premier League is still young — four completed seasons — yet its run-scoring charts already tell a story worthy of the league’s biggest brother. In just a handful of campaigns, the tournament has produced a record-breaking single season, a three-way duel among the greatest batters in women’s cricket, and the first Indian to claim the Orange Cap. Because the competition is so new, every hundred runs carries unusual weight: there are no decades of accumulation here, only four intense windows of opportunity, and the players who seized them now own numbers that will be cited for years.
What makes the WPL’s leading run-scorers especially fascinating is the variety of styles at the top. A former Australian captain rebuilt her legacy in Delhi, an all-rounder turned herself into Mumbai’s most dependable engine, and a young Indian opener batted at a strike rate no one else in the league’s history has matched. Here is how the standings look and what the numbers reveal.
How the race for the top took shape
The inaugural season in 2023 set the template. Meg Lanning, leading Delhi Capitals, topped the charts with 345 runs and took the first-ever Orange Cap, while her team reached the final only to fall short. Mumbai Indians, powered by Harmanpreet Kaur and Nat Sciver-Brunt, lifted the trophy instead, and the two clubs quickly established themselves as the league’s powerhouses — meeting each other in three of the first four finals.
2024 belonged to Ellyse Perry, whose 347 runs carried Royal Challengers Bengaluru to their first title, and 2025 produced the most explosive batting the league has seen: Sciver-Brunt’s 523 runs, a single-season record, delivered Mumbai’s second championship. By the end of the 2026 season, Smriti Mandhana had rewritten her own narrative, winning the Orange Cap with 377 runs and becoming the first Indian player to do so. Four seasons, four different winners — a pattern that already echoes the IPL’s tradition of crowning a new hero almost every year.
The leading run scorers in WPL history
Three seasons of data are enough to separate the league’s run machines from the rest. Only a handful of batters have crossed 500 runs, and the top of the list is crowded with world champions from Australia, England and India competing for the same small pool of innings.
| Rank | Player | Team | Matches | Runs | Average | Strike rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nat Sciver-Brunt | Mumbai Indians | 29 | 1,027 | 46.68 | 141.85 |
| 2 | Ellyse Perry | Royal Challengers Bengaluru | 25 | 972 | 64.80 | 132.96 |
| 3 | Meg Lanning | Delhi Capitals | 27 | 952 | 39.66 | 127.10 |
| 4 | Shafali Verma | Delhi Capitals | 27 | 865 | 36.04 | 162.59 |
| 5 | Harmanpreet Kaur | Mumbai Indians | 27 | 851 | 40.52 | 143.50 |
| 6 | Hayley Matthews | Mumbai Indians | 29 | 758 | 27.07 | 121.47 |
| 7 | Smriti Mandhana | Royal Challengers Bengaluru | 26 | 646 | 24.84 | 128.68 |
| 8 | Richa Ghosh | Royal Challengers Bengaluru | 26 | 625 | 34.72 | 150.96 |
| 9 | Grace Harris | UP Warriorz | 22 | 581 | 32.27 | 140.33 |
| 10 | Ashleigh Gardner | Gujarat Giants | 25 | 567 | 24.65 | 141.75 |
Each of these numbers says something distinct about its owner. Sciver-Brunt became the first player in WPL history to pass 1,000 runs, doing it as a genuine all-rounder who also took wickets by the dozen. Perry’s average of 64.80 is the highest among anyone with more than 500 runs — a figure that turns every dismissal into an event. Shafali Verma’s strike rate of 162.59 is the most explosive in the top ten by a wide margin, built on a six-hitting habit that no bowler has fully solved. And Lanning’s 952 came with the quietest style on the list: placement, timing and a captain’s habit of batting long enough for the scoreboard to do the shouting.
The ingredients of a WPL run machine
Short tournaments punish inconsistency brutally. A batter can lose the Orange Cap race with two quiet games, and totals move in jumps rather than increments. Looking across the four seasons, the leading scorers share a set of traits that explain why these particular names rose to the top.
- Availability above all — every name in the top ten played at least 22 matches in three seasons; a single missed campaign drops a player off the charts entirely.
- Powerplay authority — most of the league’s runs at the top come from openers and number threes who dominate the fielding restrictions, which is why Lanning, Shafali and Mandhana dominate the boundaries columns.
- A second skill that buys security — Sciver-Brunt, Perry, Matthews and Gardner are all wicket-taking all-rounders, and franchises keep picking them even when the bat goes quiet.
- Finishing instincts — Richa Ghosh’s 150-plus strike rate from the middle order shows that death-overs batting is its own route up the charts, not just a supporting act.
- Big-score conversion — the leaders do not merely start well; they turn fifties into eighty and ninety-plus knocks, which is what separates a 550-run career from an 800-run one.
None of these qualities is optional. The league’s schedule is short enough that one form dip reshapes the standings, which is exactly why the chart has already changed shape multiple times.
The record seasons that define the league
Because the WPL is young, its single-season records double as its historical landmarks. Each of the four Orange Cap-winning campaigns has pushed the ceiling higher, and the progression tells you how quickly the standard of women’s T20 batting has climbed.
- 345 — Meg Lanning, 2023 — the inaugural benchmark, set with an average near fifty in nine matches while captaining Delhi to the first final.
- 347 — Ellyse Perry, 2024 — a mere two runs more than Lanning’s mark, yet enough to crown RCB’s title-winning season and end Delhi’s Orange Cap reign.
- 523 — Nat Sciver-Brunt, 2025 — the current single-season record, a leap of more than 170 runs over anything before it, delivered while Mumbai won the title.
- 377 — Smriti Mandhana, 2026 — the first Indian to win the Orange Cap, finally converting years of promise into the award that had eluded the league’s homegrown stars.
The jump from the mid-300s to 523 in a single edition is the clearest sign of the league’s evolution. Better pitches, deeper batting line-ups and growing confidence have pushed winning totals upward at a pace the early seasons could not have predicted — and there is little reason to believe the ceiling has been reached.
Records and milestones scattered through four seasons
Beyond the headline totals, the WPL’s brief history is already rich with numbers that fans quote from memory. They frame the run charts and give the standings their texture.
- The highest individual score is 99 — Sophie Devine’s 99 off 36 balls for RCB remains the closest anyone has come to the league’s first century, matched later by Georgia Voll’s 99 for UP Warriorz.
- A 95 not out from the captain — Harmanpreet Kaur’s unbeaten 95 against Gujarat Giants powered the highest successful run chase in WPL history.
- Lanning’s 92 in defeat — her career-best knock, a near-century that ended in the nineties, still stands among the finest innings of the league’s early years.
- The closest Indian challenge — Shafali Verma’s third place in 2024, with 309 runs, was the best finish by a homegrown batter before Mandhana’s breakthrough.
- Delhi’s near-miss legacy — Lanning’s Capitals reached three finals and lost all three, yet produced two Orange Cap winners and the league’s most consistent opening pair.
These footnotes matter because they show how thin the margins are. Two runs decided the 2024 Orange Cap; four runs currently separate the top of the all-time chart from its nearest rival; and a single 99 instead of a hundred has defined the league’s record books for four seasons running.
The chasers and what comes next
The race behind the leaders is tightening. Mandhana’s 2026 surge brought her within touching distance of the summit, and at her age the list of realistic 1,500-run careers is hers to write. Shafali Verma, still in her twenties, owns the strike rate to climb rapidly whenever Delhi gives her a full season of openings. Among the all-rounders, Hayley Matthews and Ashleigh Gardner have the volume behind them to keep moving upward, while newer names from each auction keep resetting expectations of what a season can produce.
One certainty frames everything else: the WPL’s run records are still soft. Totals that look formidable today were set in a league barely out of its infancy, and every future season offers ten matches in which the entire hierarchy can be rewritten. That is the unusual charm of this particular list — it is not a monument to a finished history, but a snapshot of one still being written.
