About this site

Why it exists

Search for any driver's salary and you will find a confident number in the first result. Follow it back and it usually has no source attached, no date, and no indication of whether anyone ever confirmed it. Follow it further and you often find the same figure on a dozen sites, each quoting the last, none quoting an original.

The figures are not necessarily wrong. Several of them come from genuinely good reporting by journalists with long-standing relationships in the paddock. The problem is that by the time a number has been copied four times it carries none of that context — you cannot tell the well-sourced estimate from the one somebody rounded up, because both are printed the same way.

This site takes the opposite approach. Every figure names the publication it came from, carries the date it was checked, and is labelled by how well it is actually known. Where nothing has been published, the cell stays empty rather than being filled with a guess.

The one rule

A number cannot be published here without a source and a date. This is not a policy that depends on anyone remembering it — it is enforced in the site's content schema, and a figure that arrives without either one fails the build rather than reaching a reader.

The same check rejects a row marked undisclosed that somehow has a figure attached to it. A figure counts as reported only when it appears in a filing, a court document or an on-record statement; otherwise it is estimated, and says so.

What it covers

Driver retainers are the reason most people arrive, but they are a small part of what Formula One pays out. Start with the salary table, find any driver from the Drivers menu at the top of every page, or set two of them side by side in the comparison under the table.

What it will not do

• Invent a figure to complete a table. A grid with three unknown salaries is published with three dashes in it.
• Add up unknowns. Every total says how many people it covers and how many it does not. A "total grid payroll" that treats an undisclosed salary as zero is a number with no meaning.
• Present an estimate as a fact. The confidence label is attached to the figure itself, not buried in a disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
• Quietly change a number. Corrections change the checked date with them.

Who writes it

Formula One Salaries is written and maintained by its own editorial team — held to the same rule as everything else on the site: every figure traces to a named publication and a checked date, nothing is filled in with a guess, and a correction is dated rather than made quietly.

Independence

Formula One Salaries is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Formula One Licensing BV, Formula One Management, the FIA, or any team. “Formula One” and “F1” are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here descriptively.

The site carries display advertising. Advertisers have no involvement in what is published, no sight of it before it goes up, and no influence over a figure or a confidence label. No ad slot sits above the first figure on any page.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, out of date, or a better source exists, it should be changed — and the change should be visible. Every table carries the date its figures were last checked, and that date moves when a figure does.