U.S. Open payout 2016: Winning share is $1.8 million of purse

OAKMONT, Pa. – Whoever wins the U.S. Open on Sunday evening will be $1.8 million richer for it.

The USGA’s total purse for the event is $10 million, with 18 percent of that going to the first-place finisher. The second-place finisher will also get a seven-figure reward, and then the payouts drop into the hundreds of thousands. Finishers No. 3 through 23 will earn between $100,000 and $700,000.

Every professional in the 156-man field gets a payout. The 79 who missed the cut will each get $4,000, and the lowest payout for someone above the cutline is $22,321. Amateurs, of course, collect no cash, which means Arizona State’s Jon Rahm will be the only player left in the field not to get paid on Sunday evening.

The purse figures are slightly different than those for last year’s national championship at Chambers Bay in Washington state, when 69 players who made the cut were due payouts. That number is just 66 this year, which leads to slightly different totals. But the basic contours of the purse payouts are the same. The stakes for single-place movements are highest at the top of the leaderboard, with tens of thousands of dollars separating every spot in the top 10. Then they get smaller, with fewer than $300 separating the payouts to the 65th- and 66th-place finishers. Everyone who doesn’t make the cut makes the same thing, whether you’re 67th in the field or 156th.

Tournament purses have become something of an arms race in professional golf, with various golf governing organizations offering ever larger payouts in an effort to up their reputation and status in the golf world. The Players Championship last month offered the sport’s single biggest purse and payout to the winner. That’s promoted as the “fifth major,” and an easy way to do that is to constantly boast about the biggest purse in the game.The PGA Championship and The Players jointly announced two years ago that they were making the move to $10 million, and that forced all the other majors’ hands. Now that the Players has taken it up a little bit to $10.25M this year, we’ll see how everyone else reacts. So far, the Masters and U.S. Open have not bumped theirs up this year.

The U.S. Open, of course, is big enough regardless of the purse. Almost everyone on the leaderboard, save for longshot Andrew Landry, is pretty well set for life thanks to cash stacked on the PGA Tour. So a major championship win on the resume is the larger goal, not a big payday.

Oakmont Country Club is one of the hardest tests in golf, and it’s given fits to much of this year’s field. Just six players out of the original 156 entered Sunday’s final round in red figures, having grappled for three days with the course’s array of deep bunkers, thick rough and fast greens. Whoever nets the $1.8 million at the end of the day will have done plenty to deserve it.

Here’s the full purse structure for the championship: