The fastest centuries in cricket, format by format

The fastest century in Test cricket is Brendon McCullum’s, off 54 balls against Australia at Christchurch in 2016. In ODIs it is AB de Villiers, 31 balls against West Indies in 2015. In T20Is it is Sahil Chauhan, 27 balls for Estonia against Cyprus in 2024. All figures as at 16 September 2026.

Cricket has two different answers to the question "what is the fastest century ever scored", and both of them are correct. One counts deliveries. The other counts minutes at the crease. They put different names at the top of the list, and the distance between them is most of what makes these records worth reading.

Every figure below is taken from ESPNcricinfo's records tables and checked on 16 September 2026.

How is a fastest century actually measured?

The modern lists count balls faced from the start of an innings to the moment the batter reaches 100. That last clause does more work than it appears to.

So an innings in which someone moves from 100 to 200 in 40 balls never enters the table, however violent it was. The clearest example sits in ESPNcricinfo's own note on the Test list: Nathan Astle's second hundred, inside his 222 against England at Christchurch in 2001/02, took 39 balls. Counted on its own it would be comfortably the fastest hundred in Test history. It is not on the list, because the list starts at zero.

The older measure is time. Before ball-by-ball records were kept consistently, scorers noted how long a batter was at the crease, and those minutes are still tabulated separately. For innings played before the 1970s the minutes column is often the only record that exists.

Who has scored the fastest century in Test cricket?

Brendon McCullum, in his final Test, off 54 balls against Australia at Hagley Oval in Christchurch in February 2016. It has stood for a decade.

Two things stand out. The first is how tight the top is: four hundreds inside 57 balls across 30 years, and nothing has gone under 54 since. The second is Perth, which appears three times in nine rows, across 1975/76, 2009/10, 2011/12 and again in 2025/26 when Travis Head reached three figures in 69 balls against England.

Does the Test record change if you count minutes instead?

It does, and it goes back more than a century.

Jack Gregory's hundred in Johannesburg took 67 balls and 70 minutes. McCullum's took 54 balls and 78. The difference is over-rates, not intent: Gregory was batting in an era when sides got through far more overs in an hour, so fewer deliveries were needed to fill the same clock. Viv Richards took 56 balls and 81 minutes for the innings that held the balls-faced record for 30 years.

Neither measure is the honest one on its own. Balls faced tells you how few chances a bowler gave up. Minutes tell you how long the fielding side had to stand there and watch.

What is the fastest hundred in ODI cricket?

AB de Villiers, 31 balls, against West Indies at the Wanderers in Johannesburg on 18 January 2015. He finished on 149.

The de Villiers innings also holds the other half of the record. His fifty in that innings came off 16 balls, which remains the fastest in ODI cricket, equalled by Matthew Forde for West Indies against Ireland in Dublin in May 2025. Reaching 50 in 16 and 100 in 31 means the second fifty took 15 deliveries.

Shahid Afridi's 37-ball hundred in Nairobi in 1996 is the one that has aged most strangely. It was scored in his first international innings with a bat in hand, and it held the world record for 17 years. Three decades later it is still third.

Why is the T20I list full of names you may not recognise?

Because T20I status covers a very wide range of teams, and the fastest hundreds tend to be scored against the weakest attacks.

Sahil Chauhan's 27-ball hundred for Estonia against Cyprus is the record, and it is a real T20I. It is also not the same event as a hundred against a Test attack, and the table makes that plain once you read the opponent column rather than the balls column.

Read down the list and one row is doing something different. Finn Allen's 33 against South Africa at Eden Gardens on 4 March 2026 is the fastest T20I hundred scored against a full member: every quicker innings, and the two other 33-ball hundreds, came against Cyprus, Bulgaria, Nepal or Gambia. Allen finished 100 not out from 33 balls with eight sixes and ten fours, and New Zealand chased 170 in 12.5 overs to reach the T20 World Cup final.

What are the fastest centuries in women's internationals?

Deandra Dottin's 38-ball hundred for West Indies against South Africa at St Kitts in 2010 is still the fastest in women's T20Is, 16 years on. The chase has got closer recently: Laura Wolvaardt (South Africa v India, Johannesburg) and Ayesha Zafar (Pakistan v Zimbabwe, Karachi) both reached three figures in 47 balls in 2026, matching Tammy Beaumont's 2018 mark.

Meg Lanning's 45-ball hundred against New Zealand at North Sydney Oval has led the women's ODI list since 2012/13. Smriti Mandhana's 50-ball century against Australia at the Kotla in September 2025 is the closest anyone has come, and Beth Mooney's 57-ball hundred at the same ground in the same series is joint third with Karen Rolton's from 2000/01. Two of the six fastest women's ODI hundreds were scored in one Delhi series.

A caveat worth stating plainly: ESPNcricinfo's women's ODI records index does not carry a fastest-hundreds page, so those figures come from the Association of Cricket Statisticians' tables, cross-checked against ESPNcricinfo's match report on the Mandhana innings. The women's T20I and men's figures are all from ESPNcricinfo's own record tables.

Which of these came at a World Cup?

Two of the quickest innings in the lists above were played in ICC events, and the 2026 T20 World Cup rewrote its own table.

• Men's 50-over World Cup: Glenn Maxwell, 40 balls, Australia v Netherlands, Delhi, 25 October 2023.
• Men's T20 World Cup: Finn Allen, 33 balls, New Zealand v South Africa, Kolkata, 4 March 2026.
• Also at the 2026 T20 World Cup: Jacob Bethell reached 100 in 45 balls against India on 5 March, and Harry Brook in 50 against Pakistan on 24 February. Three of the five fastest hundreds in the tournament's history were scored in that one edition.

Chris Gayle's 47-ball hundred against England in 2016 held the T20 World Cup record for a decade and is now third.

How do you catch the next one?

Nobody schedules a 30-ball hundred, which is the point of them. What you can do is be watching when the conditions are right: a flat surface, a short boundary, a side chasing at more than ten an over. Cricket Pulse Live carries ball-by-ball live scores for internationals and the major domestic leagues, the full fixture list so you know which games are on overnight, and the current ICC rankings if you want to know how good the attack being taken apart actually is.

These lists are dated for a reason. Records at the top of them have survived a decade each, but the tables below the top five turn over constantly, and the T20I list in particular moves every few months. Everything here is correct as at 16 September 2026.

Statistics in this article were checked as at 16 September 2026.

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