How IPL Scoring Exploded: 14 Seasons of Ball-by-Ball Data Analysed

In 2013, an IPL team that posted 200 had done something remarkable. It happened four times in the entire season. In 2026, it happened sixty five times.

That single comparison captures how much T20 batting has changed in a little over a decade, but it also raises an obvious question: how much of this is real, and how much is just the way we remember cricket? Memory is unreliable. Data is not. So we went to our own database, which holds every delivery bowled in the IPL from 2013 to 2026, and worked out exactly what has happened to scoring across fourteen seasons.

The answer is that the change is real, it is larger than most fans assume, and the steepest part of it happened very recently.

The headline: nearly 40 runs per innings

Across the 1,857 completed innings in our data, the average team total has moved dramatically.

In 2013, the average IPL innings produced 148.3 runs at a run rate of 7.68 per over. In 2026, the average innings produced 187.8 runs at 9.89 per over.

That is a gain of 39.5 runs per innings, an increase of about 27 percent. Put another way, the average team in 2026 scored more runs than the above-average team of 2013. A total that would have been competitive in most 2013 matches would now lose comfortably on a normal night.

The run rate change is even more revealing. Adding 2.21 runs per over to the league average is enormous across 20 overs. In 2013, a team scoring at nine an over was accelerating hard. In 2026, nine an over is slightly below par.

Three distinct eras

The rise is not a smooth line, and the bumps are where the story gets interesting.

Era one, 2013 to 2017: the slow climb. Scoring jumped once, from 148 to about 158, then essentially flattened for four seasons. Between 2014 and 2017 the league average moved by less than two runs. This was the era of the good total being 160, of spinners squeezing the middle overs, and of chases that were genuinely difficult.

Era two, 2018 to 2022: the plateau with a dip. 2018 pushed the average up to 165.8, the highest to that point. Then came a curious three-season slide: 163.5, then 161.3, then 155.2 in 2021. That 2021 figure is the lowest of any season after 2013. Seasons played partly or wholly in the UAE, on used surfaces with heavy dew and tired pitches, pulled scoring back to where it had been in 2015. It is a useful reminder that conditions can overwhelm even a strong batting trend.

Era three, 2023 to 2026: the explosion. From 164.8 in 2022, the average climbed to 175.1, then 182.9, then 183.4, then 187.8. That is roughly 23 extra runs per innings in four seasons, more than the entire gain of the previous nine.

What changed in 2023?

The single largest year-on-year jump in our data is 2022 to 2023: plus 10.3 runs per innings. That season is also when the IPL introduced the Impact Player rule, which lets a team bring in a substitute during the match.

We want to be careful here, because this is exactly the point where cricket analysis usually oversells itself. Our data can show you the size and timing of the change. It cannot prove a cause. Several things were happening at once: bigger bats and better hitting technique across the board, a generation of batters raised on T20 rather than adapting to it, flatter pitches at several venues, and squads that increasingly picked specialist power hitters.

What the Impact Player rule plausibly changes is the cost of failure. A team batting first can send in an extra hitter knowing a bowler can be introduced later, which reduces the penalty for losing wickets early. Lower downside risk tends to produce more aggressive batting. The timing in our data is consistent with that, and the effect has not faded: scoring has risen in every season since.

The 200 score: from freak to routine

Averages hide the tail, and the tail is where the entertainment lives. Here is how often a team passed 200 in a season, from our data.

2013: 4 times. 2014: 9. 2015: 7. 2016: 6. 2017: 10. 2018: 15. 2019: 11. 2020: 13. 2021: 9. 2022: 18. 2023: 37. 2024: 41. 2025: 51. 2026: 65.

Sixty five innings of 200 or more in a single season, against four in 2013. Even allowing for a longer season with more matches, the rate has changed beyond recognition. In 2013 a 200 total led the sports bulletin. In 2026 it is a normal Tuesday.

The 180 mark tells the same story from a different angle: 21 innings of 180 or more in 2013, against 88 in 2026. What used to be a winning total is now merely a par one.

The individual peaks have moved too, though less dramatically than you might expect. The highest team total in our 2013 data is 263. In 2024 it is 287, and in 2025 it is 286. The ceiling has risen by roughly 25 runs, while the average has risen by nearly 40. That is the real signal: the top of the game has not changed as much as the middle of it. Ordinary teams on ordinary nights are the ones scoring far more than they used to.

What this means if you follow the game closely

First, any mental benchmark you formed before 2023 is now wrong. If your instinct at the innings break is that 170 is defendable, that instinct was trained on a different sport. In 2026 terms, 170 is below average.

Second, chasing has become less frightening. When the league average approaches 190, a target of 190 is not exceptional, and teams no longer treat it as such. The psychological weight of a big total has fallen.

Third, bowling economy rates need re-reading. A bowler going at 8.5 an over in 2015 was expensive. In 2026, 8.5 is better than the league average of 9.89. Judging a modern bowler against old economy standards will consistently undervalue them.

This is also why our own prediction models are trained on the full history rather than tuned to a single season. A model that learned what a good score looks like in 2016 would systematically underestimate 2026. Era matters, and the only honest way to handle it is to keep feeding the model what actually happened.

A note on our data, and what it does not cover

We believe in showing our working, including its limits.

Our ball-by-ball IPL database begins in 2013, so the analysis above covers fourteen seasons from 2013 to 2026 and does not include the first five IPL seasons from 2008 to 2012. That matters for the slow-climb section, because scoring in the earliest seasons was lower still, which would make the overall rise even steeper than the figures here suggest. We would rather tell you the range we can verify than quote numbers we cannot stand behind.

We also excluded heavily rain-shortened innings from the averages, because a six-over slog distorts a per-innings average badly. Full and near-full innings only, applied consistently to every season.

The bottom line

Fourteen seasons of ball-by-ball data show that IPL scoring has risen from 148 to 188 runs per innings, that the run rate has climbed by more than two an over, and that the 200 total has gone from a four-times-a-season event to a sixty-five-times-a-season one. The change accelerated sharply from 2023 onwards and has not slowed.

The next time you hear that batting has taken over T20 cricket, you can put a number on it. Not a feeling, a measurement: nearly forty runs an innings, in thirteen years.