What is a good strike rate in cricket?

The benchmarks

Each figure is a career strike rate. “Median” is the middle batter: half are faster, half slower. The top quarter and the top tenth start at the figures shown.

In runs per six balls: the median T20I batter scores 8.0, the median ODI batter 4.9. That is 62% faster for the same balls.

Is my strike rate good?

The share of batters in our data who strike at each mark or faster.

Read it like this: 30% of T20I batters strike at 140 or faster, so 140 puts you in roughly the top 30%. In ODIs, 9% manage 100 or more.

By position

Median strike rate by each batter’s main role in the game. Specialist bowlers rarely face 500 balls, so they are not shown.

In T20Is the fastest group is all-rounders (142.4), in ODIs all-rounders (86.7) and in the IPL wicketkeepers (140.4). In ODIs the slowest group is openers (78.6): openers face the new ball and are expected to bat deep into the innings, so a lower strike rate is part of the job.

By nation

Median strike rate of each nation’s batters in our data (ten nations; Afghanistan is not in the data).

The fastest ODI batting nation by median is England (87.8) and the slowest Zimbabwe (68.0). In T20Is it is Australia (142.5) against Bangladesh (120.8). Each nation has only 12 to 20 qualifying T20I batters, so treat small gaps there with care.

ODI batting has sped up

Grouped by the decade a batter made his ODI debut, the median strike rate rises from 75.1 for batters who started in the 1990s (71 batters) to 89.8 for those who started in the 2020s (48).

These are whole careers, grouped by when they started, so a batter who debuted in 2008 and is still playing counts in the 2000s. Some older batters’ strike rates rest only on their matches since about 2003, when the ball-by-ball records begin (see “How we counted”).

In the IPL, “good” keeps moving

The IPL has got faster season block by season block. The league figure is every run and ball faced in our IPL data for those seasons; the other columns are batters who faced at least 500 balls in that block (all franchises added together).

So a batter striking at 140 was inside the top quarter in 2008–12, and is in the slowest quarter in 2023–now. That is why the Beat My 11 IPL game cards show each player at one franchise in one block of seasons: a 2010 strike rate and a 2024 one are not the same achievement. You can see it player by player on IPL careers, stint by stint.

Strike rate is only half the story

A batter who scores quickly but gets out cheaply can cost a side more than one who scores a little slower and bats long. Splitting each format’s batters at the median strike rate and the median average:

In T20Is, 51 of the 161 batters are above the middle on both counts and 58 are above it on only one. A fast scorer who gets out often and a steady batter who lasts can both be valuable; the rarest and most valuable do both. The fastest qualifying batters in each format, with their averages:

How we counted

• Who is counted: batters with at least 500 balls behind their career strike rate, so that a few quick innings cannot skew the picture.
• Which strike rate: for 291 ODI and 112 T20I batters it is the official full-career figure; their balls are worked out from official runs and strike rate. For the rest it is measured on the ball-by-ball matches Cricsheet holds, which for ODIs start around 2003. IPL figures are all from ball-by-ball data and cover every season.
• Who is in the data: players from the ten nations in the game (Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe), and 744 IPL players. Afghanistan’s matches are not in Cricsheet’s data, so Afghan players are missing.
• IPL careers add up every franchise a player turned out for.
• Test cricket is left out because our Test records have no balls faced.
• Percentiles are worked out by linear interpolation, the same way a spreadsheet’s PERCENTILE function does it.