Sebastian Vettel Net Worth 2026: Four-Time Champion’s Fortune After F1

Sebastian Vettel’s net worth is about $143 million, according to a widely reported estimate from GQ’s 2024 ranking of the richest F1 drivers. No rich list such as Forbes or the Sunday Times has published its own valuation of him, so the figure should be read as a rough guide rather than an audited number.

Sebastian Vettel: quick facts

Net worth

$143 Million

Source of wealth

F1 salaries

Profession

Retired Formula 1 driver, SailGP team co-owner

Nationality

German

Place of birth

Heppenheim, Hesse, Germany

Date of birth

July 3, 1987 (age 39)

Vettel won four Formula 1 world titles in a row with Red Bull from 2010 to 2013 and then spent six seasons at Ferrari, where Forbes put his yearly earnings above $40 million. He retired at the end of 2022 after exactly 300 Grand Prix entries.

Almost all of his money came from driver salaries and bonuses. Unlike many stars, he signed very few personal sponsorship deals. Since leaving F1 he has become a co-owner of the German SailGP team, trained as a farmer in Switzerland and spent much of his time on environmental projects.

Sebastian Vettel at a glance

• Net worth: about $143 million (GQ estimate, 2024)
• Born: July 3, 1987, in Heppenheim, Hesse, West Germany
• Profession: retired Formula 1 driver; SailGP team co-owner
• F1 teams: BMW Sauber, Toro Rosso, Red Bull Racing, Ferrari, Aston Martin
• Titles: four world championships (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)
• Career record: 53 wins, 57 pole positions, 122 podiums
• Biggest payday: his Ferrari years, when Forbes estimated he earned about $42.3 million in a single year
• Awards: Laureus World Sportsman of the Year (2014), Perfect World Foundation Award (2026)
• Spouse: Hanna Prater (married 2019); three children

Where Sebastian Vettel’s money comes from

Source	Details	Estimate
F1 salaries and bonuses	Red Bull (2009–2014), Ferrari (2015–2020), Aston Martin (2021–2022)	By far his largest source; reported pay of $40 million a year or more at Ferrari
Endorsements	Few personal deals; Forbes counted about $300,000 to $1 million a year	Small
SailGP stake	About 7.1% of the Germany SailGP Team	Team valued at a reported €50–70 million (2026)
Classic car collection	Includes Nigel Mansell’s 1992 title-winning Williams FW14B	Price not disclosed
Real estate	Family farmhouse in the canton of Thurgau, Switzerland	Reported value of about $7 million

F1 salary and earnings by season

Vettel’s pay rose sharply as he won titles, then peaked at Ferrari. The figures below are reported estimates, not official contract numbers. The Red Bull-era figures were first reported by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and later collected by Crash.net. The Forbes figures are total yearly earnings, including salary, bonuses and endorsements, before tax.

Season / list	Team	Reported pay	Source
2010	Red Bull	About €2 million	El Mundo, via Crash.net
2011	Red Bull	About €8 million	El Mundo, via Crash.net
2012	Red Bull	About €10 million	El Mundo, via Crash.net
2013	Red Bull	About €12 million	El Mundo, via Crash.net
2014	Red Bull	About €22 million	El Mundo, via Crash.net
2015	Ferrari	About €28 million	Reported, Crash.net
Forbes 2016 list	Ferrari	$41 million ($40M salary and winnings, $1M endorsements)	Forbes, June 2016
Forbes 2018 list	Ferrari	$42.3 million (about $300,000 from endorsements)	Forbes, June 2018
Forbes 2020 list	Ferrari	$36.3 million (about $300,000 from endorsements)	Forbes, May 2020
2021–2022	Aston Martin	About £12.2 million a year	Reported, Crash.net

Adding up these reported numbers points to well over $250 million in gross pay across his career. That is our own rough sum, not a published figure. Taxes, management fees and living costs explain much of the gap between that total and his estimated net worth.

Early life

Sebastian Vettel was born on July 3, 1987, in Heppenheim, a small town in the German state of Hesse. His parents are Norbert and Heike Vettel. He has two older sisters and a younger brother, Fabian, who also raced.

He started karting at age three and entered his first kart races at eight. His childhood hero was Michael Schumacher, who later became a friend and his teammate at the Race of Champions.

Vettel joined the Red Bull Junior Team in 1998, when he was 11. Red Bull’s backing paid for much of his junior career, which meant his family did not have to fund it alone. He finished school with the German Abitur at Heppenheim’s Starkenburg-Gymnasium.

Junior racing and F1 debut (2001–2008)

Vettel won the junior European karting title in 2001. In 2004 he dominated Formula BMW ADAC, winning 18 of 20 races. He then moved to Formula 3 Euro Series, finishing runner-up in 2006, and won races in the Formula Renault 3.5 series.

In 2006 he became a test driver for BMW Sauber. When Robert Kubica was injured at the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, Vettel made his F1 debut at the 2007 United States Grand Prix. He finished eighth and became, at the time, the youngest driver to score a point.

Red Bull moved him to its second team, Toro Rosso, in the middle of 2007. At a wet Italian Grand Prix in 2008, he took pole and won the race at 21. He became the youngest Grand Prix winner in history at the time, and it remains Toro Rosso’s only win under that name. German media started calling him “Baby Schumi.”

Red Bull and four world titles (2009–2014)

Vettel was promoted to Red Bull Racing in 2009 and finished second in the championship behind Jenson Button. A year later he won the title at the final race in Abu Dhabi, becoming the youngest world champion at 23.

He then dominated the sport:

• 2011: 11 wins, 15 poles and a then-record 392 points
• 2012: title won by three points over Fernando Alonso, making him the youngest triple champion
• 2013: 13 wins, including a record nine wins in a row

His pay rose with every title. Reported figures show his salary climbing from about €2 million in 2010 to about €22 million in 2014. The 2014 season, when the sport switched to hybrid engines, was his worst at Red Bull. He did not win a race, and at the end of the year he left for Ferrari.

His record as the youngest champion stood for 16 years. It was broken in 2026, when Kimi Antonelli clinched the title for Mercedes at age 20.

Ferrari years (2015–2020)

Vettel replaced Alonso at Ferrari in 2015, partnering Kimi Räikkönen. He won three races in his first season and finished third. This move brought the biggest paychecks of his life. Forbes estimated he earned $41 million on its 2016 list and $42.3 million on its 2018 list, ranking him among the 20 highest-paid athletes in the world.

On track he came closest to a fifth title in 2017 and 2018, finishing runner-up to Lewis Hamilton both years. He reached his 50th career win at the 2018 Canadian Grand Prix.

From 2019 his new teammate was Charles Leclerc, who quickly matched him. Vettel’s win in Singapore in 2019 was the last of his 53 victories. Forbes put his earnings at $36.3 million on its 2020 list. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season he finished 13th, and Ferrari chose not to renew his contract.

Aston Martin and retirement (2021–2022)

Vettel joined Aston Martin for 2021, taking the seat of Sergio Pérez alongside Lance Stroll. His reported salary there was about £12.2 million a year, well below his Ferrari pay but still among the top five on the grid in 2022.

He scored his final podium with second place in Azerbaijan in 2021. He also finished second in Hungary that year but was disqualified because his car did not have enough fuel left for a sample.

In July 2022 he announced his retirement. He scored a point in his 300th and final race, the 2022 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He finished his career fourth on the all-time lists for wins, poles and podiums.

Life after F1

Vettel has not taken a full-time job in motorsport since retiring. In late 2025 he was linked with a senior role at Red Bull, but he told Formula1.com in November 2025 that talks “never gained any traction.” He has said he is open to a role in the sport if the right opportunity appears.

He still races for fun. He competed in the Race of Champions in 2023 and 2025, an event he won in 2015 and where he and Schumacher won the Nations’ Cup for Germany six years in a row.

In 2026 he has appeared as a commentator on the sport’s new rules in interviews, saying the changes risked losing some of F1’s “DNA and heart.”

Business ventures and endorsements

Vettel’s main investment since retiring is SailGP, the high-speed sailing league. In 2023 he joined the investor group behind the new Germany SailGP Team, led by founder and majority owner Thomas Riedel. The licence cost a reported €20 million.

According to the German sailing magazine Yacht, Vettel owned about 7.1% of the team in February 2026, when new investors including Bolt Ventures joined. The team was then valued at about €50 million to €70 million, based on team and league estimates. That would make his stake worth a few million euros on paper, a figure that has not been reported directly.

Endorsements were never a big part of his income. Forbes counted only about $300,000 a year from sponsors during his later Ferrari seasons. His best-known commercial tie-in was with Infiniti, Red Bull’s car partner, which released a Sebastian Vettel edition of its FX SUV in 2012.

Car collection

Vettel is a serious collector of racing cars. In 2020 he bought the Williams FW14B that Nigel Mansell drove to the 1992 world title. The price was not disclosed. His collection is also understood to include at least one of his title-winning Red Bulls, and he is reported to have bought a Ferrari F40 once owned by opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.

He has used the cars to promote cleaner fuel. At the 2023 Goodwood Festival of Speed he drove the FW14B and Ayrton Senna’s 1993 McLaren MP4/8 on sustainable synthetic fuel.

Real estate

Vettel is very private about his homes. He has lived for many years with his family in a farmhouse in the canton of Thurgau, in northeastern Switzerland, close to the German border.

Property	Year	Reported price
Farmhouse estate, Thurgau, Switzerland	Not disclosed	Reported value of about $7 million (PlanetF1); purchase price not disclosed

Farming has become a real interest. During the 2020 lockdown he did an internship in organic farming. In 2024 Swiss media reported that he had enrolled in a part-time agricultural training course, which would qualify him to run his own farm.

Personal life

Vettel married his long-time partner Hanna Prater in 2019. They met at school in Heppenheim. The couple have three children, whom they keep out of the public eye.

He is known for avoiding social media and keeping a low profile away from the track. He speaks openly, however, on issues he cares about. He wore a rainbow T-shirt at the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix in support of LGBTQ rights and appeared on BBC’s Question Time in 2022.

Philanthropy

Most of Vettel’s public causes since 2021 have been environmental. Highlights include:

• Litter clean-up: he helped clear rubbish from the grandstands after the 2021 British Grand Prix.
• Bee hotels: he built a bee hotel with schoolchildren in Austria and installed another at Suzuka before the 2023 Japanese Grand Prix.
• Women in motorsport: he hosted an all-women karting event in Saudi Arabia in 2021.
• F1FOREST: launched at the 2025 São Paulo Grand Prix, this project asked all 20 drivers, paddock staff and fans to draw trees to raise awareness about protecting the Amazon rainforest.

In 2026 he received the Perfect World Foundation Award in Sweden for raising awareness of environmental and biodiversity issues. No donation figures for his charity work have been made public.

How Sebastian Vettel compares

Among the richest F1 drivers, Vettel sits below several rivals who raced longer or earned more from sponsors. Figures for retired drivers are estimates and vary widely between sources.

Driver	Titles	Estimated net worth	Main source of wealth
Lewis Hamilton	7	About $586 million	F1 salary, endorsements, fashion and business
Fernando Alonso	2	About $260 million	F1 salary, endorsements, businesses
Kimi Räikkönen	1	$185–255 million	F1 salary, team bonuses
Jenson Button	1	About $150 million	F1 salary, TV work
Sebastian Vettel	4	About $143 million	F1 salary

Sources: Sunday Times Rich List (Hamilton, May 2026); widely reported estimate (Alonso, 2026); GQ estimates (Räikkönen, Button and Vettel, 2024–2025).

For more profiles of racing and other sports stars, see our athletes section.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sebastian Vettel’s net worth?

Sebastian Vettel’s net worth is about $143 million, according to a widely reported GQ estimate from 2024. No major rich list has published its own figure for him.

How much did Sebastian Vettel earn at Ferrari?

Forbes estimated his total earnings at about $41 million on its 2016 list, $42.3 million on its 2018 list and $36.3 million on its 2020 list. Nearly all of that came from his Ferrari salary and bonuses.

How many world titles did Sebastian Vettel win?

He won four Formula 1 world championships in a row with Red Bull, from 2010 to 2013. He also won 53 races and took 57 pole positions.

What does Sebastian Vettel do now?

Since retiring in 2022 he has co-owned the Germany SailGP Team, raced at the Race of Champions, trained in agriculture in Switzerland and run environmental projects such as F1FOREST.

Where does Sebastian Vettel live?

He lives with his wife, Hanna, and their three children in a farmhouse in the canton of Thurgau in northeastern Switzerland.

Will Sebastian Vettel return to F1?

He has no plans to race in F1 again. He said in November 2025 that talks about a role at Red Bull never went anywhere, but he is open to a non-driving role if the right opportunity comes up.

Sources: GQ (2024), Forbes highest-paid athletes lists (2016, 2018, 2020), Crash.net, El Mundo, Formula1.com, Yacht (February 2026), PlanetF1, Motorsport.com, Wikipedia. All net worth figures are estimates.