The Amazing Race vs The Challenge: which one pays more, and which one gets you hurt?

The Amazing Race has run on CBS since 2001. Teams of two race around the world, the last team to each Pit Stop usually goes home, and the winning team takes $1 million. Season 39 is airing now. The Challenge started on MTV in 1998 as a spinoff for Real World and Road Rules alumni, and it now pulls in players from other reality shows. They compete in physical daily missions and head-to-head eliminations for a shared prize pool. Season 42, The Challenge: Cutthroat, moved the show to Paramount+ and ended this fall with a $550,000 payout.

What The Amazing Race pays

The grand prize has been $1 million since the first season. Split between two partners, that's $500,000 each before taxes, and in the last two seasons it went to one team out of 13.

Everyone else gets very little. Abbattista, who finished sixth on season 21 with his friend James LoMenzo, explained the arrangement to The A.V. Club:

"It's certainly not 'paid,' but you get some kind of money for the order that you come in," Abbattista said.

That money doesn't cover the time off work: "It cost me quite a bit of money to go on the show, just because I wasn't working." Even the prizes for winning a leg come with a catch. Trips count as income, and as Abbattista put it, "So if the trip is worth $10,000, guess what? You owe Uncle Sam $3,500."

What The Challenge pays

The Challenge pays people to show up. Rookies get about $1,000 a week, according to Us Weekly, and the money grows with experience and with how long you last. Wes Bergmann, a longtime player, said on X that the average player on season 40 made $100,000 after bonus weeks:

"For this season, this is about the average after the bonus weeks kick in," Bergmann wrote.

Veterans expect that. Tori Deal said it plainly on the Official Challenge Podcast: "You're gonna pay me."

Then there's the prize money. Jordan Wiseley has won about $1.5 million across his career, the most of any player. Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio is close behind at about $1.3 million, and Chris "CT" Tamburello has passed $1.1 million.

The Cutthroat final showed how the split works. Team Orange — Deal, Bananas, CT, Michele Fitzgerald and Will Gagnon — won $550,000. Deal had sole authority over how to divide it. She charged a "Captain's Fee" of $1 per teammate, which left her with $110,004 and each of the others with $109,999. The Tab estimates each winner will take home about $70,000 after taxes.

Don't miss: How much does Phil Keoghan get paid? One Amazing Race episode pays him more than most Americans earn in a year

So which one pays more?

For one team, The Amazing Race pays better: $500,000 a person beats a five-way Challenge split. For everyone else, it isn't close. Divide the $1 million across all 26 racers and the average comes to about $38,000, while nearly all of it goes to two people. On The Challenge, an average season 40 player made $100,000, win or lose.

The Amazing Race is a lottery ticket. The Challenge is a job.

What The Amazing Race does to your body

The race isn't built to hurt people, but three and a half weeks of running through airports adds up.

• Marshall Hudes, season 5 — his knee tendonitis got so bad in Egypt that he and his brother Lance became the first team to quit the race over an injury. "Marshall couldn't walk," Lance said on The Early Show.
• Dave O'Leary, season 22 — he tore his Achilles tendon running to the Pit Stop on leg 2. He and his son Connor won legs 3 and 4 anyway, then withdrew at the start of leg 5 in Hanoi on his doctor's advice.
• Claire Champlin, season 17 — a watermelon stuck in a slingshot and hit her in the face at point-blank range. She kept racing all the way to the final leg.
• Nick and Mike Fiorito, season 37 — they got sick from the heat after hauling wood during a haystack task in Colombia. "We had to actually stop [the challenge] and get medical attention for a few minutes," Mike said.

Abbattista also paid for his race physically: "I had to wear these big magnetic bone-growth stimulators on my knees for three months."

What The Challenge does to your body

On The Challenge, getting hurt is close to the format. Eliminations are head-to-head and physical, and the finals run for days.

Olivia Kaiser found that out in the season 38 Ride or Dies final. First she sliced her finger open on a carabiner. Then a ball from a slingshot hit her in the face. She spent two nights in the hospital with a broken nose and two black eyes.

"I've never felt pain like that," Kaiser said.

Some of the damage doesn't heal. Sarah Greyson won The Challenge: The Gauntlet in 2003, and a challenge that left her hanging upside down came with what she called "some fun permanent nerve damage from the knees down."

The Cutthroat final had its own scare. CT got sick during the hiking stretch, and medics pulled him from the race until he passed an evaluation. "The medics concluded that my vitals were not redlining," he wrote on Instagram, adding that if he'd been out, "The whole team would have forfeited." Deal replied with an apology for how she handled it: "The only thing I was thinking about was winning."

For the record: CT finished the final, and he paid Deal her $1.

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