Paris made a profit, and France paid billions
In June 2025 the committee that organised the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics closed its books with a surplus of €75.7 million. Six months earlier it had announced €26.8 million. The figure rose as the last contracts with suppliers were settled. By the standards of the Games, that is a good result.
Three months later France's national audit court, the Cour des comptes, published a very different figure. It found that about €6.65 billion of public money had been spent on the same Games. Against it, the court could identify only about €293.6 million coming back to the public sector in tax and commercial receipts. Tony Estanguet, who led the organising committee, said he strongly contested the figure.
Both numbers can be right, because they come from two different sets of accounts. The gap between them is the answer to the question.
- Cour des comptes, Les Jeux olympiques et paralympiques de Paris 2024 (rapport, septembre 2025)
- COJOP Paris 2024 : la Cour des comptes salue une organisation globalement maîtrisée
- franceinfo : Jeux de Paris 2024, 6,6 milliards de dépenses publiques mais une absence de dérapage budgétaire selon la Cour des comptes
- Banque des Territoires : pour la Cour des comptes, Paris 2024 a eu un impact économique limité
What the organisers' budget covers, and what it leaves out
An organising committee pays to run the event itself : staff, operations, ceremonies, temporary installations. In Paris it took in €4,494.2 million and spent €4,418.5 million. Most of that revenue was private. By December 2024 the committee counted about €1.333 billion from tickets, €1.238 billion from sponsors it signed in France, and €1.228 billion passed on by the IOC from its own TV and sponsorship deals. Public subsidies to the committee came to €224.1 million, and the surplus was reached with that money included.
The second ledger belongs to the public sector. The Cour des comptes counted €3.02 billion of public spending on running the Games, €1.44 billion of it for security, plus €3.63 billion for infrastructure such as venues, the athletes' village and transport. When it reported, it had identified no budgetary revenue on the infrastructure side.
The auditors attribute about €3.88 billion of that spending to the French state and its agencies, and about €2.36 billion to local authorities and their agencies taken together, with public enterprises also involved. Local authorities here means several bodies, not the City of Paris alone, and the report does not show how much the city's own government paid.
Not all of this is money gone. The auditors separate the cost of the event from infrastructure that adds to the country's assets, while saying its longer-term economic returns remain uncertain.
So when people say the Games paid for themselves, that is true of the committee's books, which include public subsidies, and not of the public accounts as a whole.
- Cour des comptes, Les Jeux olympiques et paralympiques de Paris 2024 (rapport, septembre 2025)
- Cour des comptes, communiqué de presse sur le bilan des JOP 2024
- COJOP Paris 2024 : la Cour des comptes salue une organisation globalement maîtrisée
- SuperSport : Paris Olympics organising committee budget totals 4.5 billion
- franceinfo : Jeux de Paris 2024, dépenses publiques selon la Cour des comptes
- Banque des Territoires : pour la Cour des comptes, Paris 2024 a eu un impact économique limité
The IOC sells the Games before anyone hosts them
The International Olympic Committee, the private body based in Switzerland that owns the Games, earns most of its money in two ways. It sells TV rights to broadcasters around the world, and it sells global sponsorship to a small group of companies through what it calls the TOP Programme. From 2021 to 2024 these commercial deals brought in $7.7 billion, which the IOC calls a record.
The deals are signed years, sometimes more than a decade, ahead. By early 2025 the IOC said it had already secured $7.5 billion for 2025-2028, $6.9 billion for 2029-2032 and $4 billion for 2033-2036, a period that includes Games with no host yet. Another IOC publication puts the 2025-2028 figure at $7.4 billion. Either way, the money is agreed long before any host's stadium goes up or its budget is tested.
A badly run Games would still hurt the IOC eventually, because the next deals would be harder to sell. But most of the income tied to any one Games is agreed before the host spends its first euro.
How much the IOC passes on depends on who is counting
The IOC says it distributes more than 90 percent of its revenue across the Olympic Movement, the equivalent, in its words, of $4.7 million a day, and uses the rest to run itself. Part of that goes to each Games' organising committee. Paris received about €1.228 billion, roughly a quarter of its budget. The rest goes to international sports federations, national Olympic committees and programmes for athletes.
Outside counts come out lower. The Sports Examiner, a US newsletter that covers Olympic business, went through the IOC's 2024 annual report and calculated that 73.9 percent of revenue was paid out in 2021-2024, or 64.9 percent if media rights from the Tokyo 2020 Games are left out. By its count, much of the remainder went to running costs and to reserves of about $4.9 billion. The result depends on which years and which revenue are counted, so the 90 percent is the IOC's own formulation rather than a settled figure.
Money also flows back the other way. Under the arrangements reported for Paris, 20 percent of the organisers' surplus goes to the IOC and 20 percent to France's national Olympic committee, with the rest meant for sport in France.
Who signs for the shortfall
Before it picks a host, the IOC asks for guarantees that public authorities will cover any shortfall in the organising committee's budget. When Los Angeles was bidding for the 2024 Games, the city committed to covering any shortfall. California added its own guarantee, capped at $250 million, which would apply only after the city's. Los Angeles ended up with the 2028 Games, and the terms in force for them may differ.
The Oxford researchers Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg compare this to writing a blank check : the host agrees in advance to pay whatever the Games end up costing. In their study, the budget in a bid is on average only a 38 percent down payment on the final cost.
Every Olympics with cost data has gone over budget
The Oxford Olympics Study 2024 gathered cost data for every Games from 1960 to 2024. For the 23 Games where both the bid estimate and the final cost were known, every one ran over budget. After inflation the average overrun was 159 percent, the second highest of any type of large project the authors track. Only nuclear waste storage was worse. They also found that the cost of the Games is rising, not falling.
The Cour des comptes found no overall budget slippage in Paris. The Oxford authors, counting only sports-related costs and leaving out wider infrastructure, still put the cost of Paris at $8.7 billion in 2022 dollars, 115 percent above the original estimate. The two studies measure different things, so their totals should not be set side by side.
The Oxford method has critics. In 2022 Holger Preuss published a peer-reviewed paper disputing assumptions and comparisons in the team's earlier work. It did not show that hosting pays for itself.
The promised payoff rarely arrives
Hosts justify the bill with what comes afterwards : tourists, investment, a better-known city. In 2016 the economists Robert Baade and Victor Matheson reviewed the research and concluded that in most cases the Olympics lose money for host cities. They found the Games pay off only in very specific and unusual circumstances, and that the case is weaker still in developing countries.
Paris is consistent with that so far. The Cour des comptes estimated that the Games added about 0.07 percentage points to France's growth in 2024. Hotel stays in the Paris region fell significantly that summer, among both residents and foreign visitors. On the new infrastructure, the auditors wrote that its operation seems unlikely to produce positive economic returns, though they also said its longer-term value was not yet established.
Baade and Matheson also count civic pride and the feel-good effect as real benefits. Those benefits are just hard to weigh against a bill in billions.
Fewer cities want the deal
Voters have noticed. In the race for 2024, Boston, Hamburg, Rome and Budapest all dropped out, largely because residents were worried about cost. That left Paris and Los Angeles, and the IOC gave one the 2024 Games and the other 2028. The 2022 Winter Games had come down to just China and Kazakhstan.
The IOC has changed how it chooses. Instead of an open race, it now picks a preferred host and negotiates with that city alone. Brisbane was the first host chosen this way, confirmed for 2032 by 72 votes to 5 with no rival city on the ballot. The Los Angeles organisers say they plan to build no new permanent venues. The Oxford authors doubt that reusing venues is enough : they found it did not have the desired effect in Tokyo and looked ineffective in Paris.
So who comes out ahead?
The IOC's income is largely sold before a host is chosen, and it passes a large share of it on to organisers and the wider Olympic Movement. Public authorities in the host country guarantee any shortfall and pay for the stadiums, trains and police, and whether that spending earns anything back over the long run is not yet known in Paris. An organising committee can end in profit, as Paris did, while the public bill runs to billions. So when someone says an Olympics made money, the question to ask is : whose accounts?
