What Is the Green Jersey? How the Tour de France Points Classification Is Won

Curated by Gary Edgington · Racing 101

The yellow jersey goes to the fastest rider over three weeks; the green jersey goes to the most relentless. Known in France as the maillot vert, it is the prize for the Tour de France’s points classification — a season-long-feeling contest, squeezed into 23 days, that rewards a rider for scoring at the finish line and at the sprint points dotted along the route, day after day after day. First awarded in 1953 and worn today under the sponsorship of Skoda, it is usually, though not always, the sprinters’ jersey. Here is how it actually works, and what a rider has to do to still be wearing it when the race reaches Paris.

A prize for showing up every day

Unlike the yellow jersey, which is decided purely on accumulated time, the green jersey is decided on points, and points are on offer almost everywhere. Every road stage hands them out at the finish line to the first fifteen riders across, and every road stage also features an intermediate sprint — a designated line partway through the day where the first fifteen riders again collect points. Add it all up over three weeks and the green jersey rewards a very particular quality: not a single explosive effort, but the discipline to be near the front, contesting for something, on almost every stage of the race.

How the points actually work

The crucial detail is that not all stages are worth the same. The points are weighted by how hard the finish is likely to be for a sprinter, which is why the fast men chase certain days and ignore others. On a flat stage — the sprinters’ bread and butter — the winner currently banks a hefty 70 points, with the total scaling down through second (50) and third (40) to just a couple of points for fifteenth. A hillier, medium-mountain stage offers less, topping out around 50 for the winner, and a summit finish in the high mountains less again, as little as 20 to 30, because those are days the pure sprinters are simply trying to survive. Time trials sit near the bottom of the scale. On top of all that, each road stage’s single intermediate sprint awards a fixed 20 points to the first rider across, sliding down to one point for fifteenth — a reliable, terrain-independent way to bank points that the smartest contenders never ignore.

Why 2026 tilted the balance back to the sprinters

Those flat-stage numbers are higher than they used to be, and deliberately so. For 2026 the UCI reshaped the scale to give — in the phrase that framed the change — “broader shoulders” to the green jersey, raising the flat-stage winner’s haul from 50 points to 70. The reasoning was that the classification had drifted away from the specialists it was designed to celebrate: versatile all-rounders and even general-classification riders had begun hoovering up points on terrain where a pure sprinter could not follow, and the sport wanted the jersey to mean what it always had. By fattening the reward for winning a bunch sprint, the rule tilts the maths back toward the fastest finishers — without ever quite closing the door on the versatile riders who score everywhere.

Usually a sprinter — but not always

Because the biggest points sit on the flattest days, the green jersey is most often won by a sprinter, and a sprinter with a well-drilled lead-out train has a real structural advantage — the selfless work our explainer on the domestique describes is what delivers a fast man to the line in the first place. But raw speed alone does not guarantee the jersey. Time and again it is claimed not by the single quickest rider but by the most complete one: a versatile finisher who can win the flat days, hang on over the rolling ones to grab points a pure sprinter cannot reach, and mop up at the intermediate sprints in between. Consistency across varied terrain beats a narrow, blistering top speed, which is why the green jersey so often ends up on the shoulders of a rider who is very fast and unusually durable.

The catch: you have to reach Paris

Here is the part that turns the points classification into a genuine three-week test rather than a first-week sprint contest. To win the green jersey you have to finish the Tour — and finishing the Tour means getting over every mountain inside that day’s time limit, the cut-off beyond which a rider is eliminated from the race entirely. For a heavy-legged sprinter, the high passes of the second and third weeks are an exercise in pure survival, ground out in the day’s last group simply to make the time cut and live to sprint again. Crash out, fall sick, or miss a single cut-off, and every point already scored counts for nothing. The green jersey is decided on the final stage into Paris — in 2026 the run from Thoiry to the capital — and because that stage still awards points, the classification can, in the closest years, change hands on the very last afternoon.

Why it matters

All of which makes the green jersey one of the richest sub-plots of any Tour, and often the liveliest contest on the road when the yellow jersey looks settled. It rewards a blend of speed, tactical intelligence, teamwork and sheer stubbornness that no other classification quite captures. If you want to see the theory turned into a live scrap, our companion piece on the 2026 green jersey fight breaks down who is winning it, who is not, and who really ought to be — and our broader primer on how the Tour de France works puts all four jerseys in context. Watch the points totals rather than the clock, and a whole second race opens up inside the Tour.

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