NBA All-Time Scoring Leaders

The NBA’s all-time regular-season scoring leader is LeBron James, who closed the 2025-26 season with 43,440 career points, more than 5,000 clear of the man he passed. James took over the top spot on February 7, 2023, when his 38,388th point moved him past Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose record of 38,387 had stood for nearly 39 years. The list below is the NBA regular-season career points leaderboard as of September 18, 2026; it counts only regular-season NBA games, which is why some totals differ from the combined NBA/ABA figures kept separately by Basketball-Reference.

The leaderboard

Rank	Player	Points	Teams (Years)
1	LeBron James (active)	43,440	Cavaliers, Heat, Lakers (2003–2026)
2	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar	38,387	Bucks, Lakers (1969–1989)
3	Karl Malone	36,928	Jazz, Lakers (1985–2004)
4	Kobe Bryant	33,643	Lakers (1996–2016)
5	Kevin Durant (active)	32,597	Thunder, Warriors, Nets, Suns, Rockets (2007–2026)
6	Michael Jordan	32,292	Bulls, Wizards (1984–2003)
7	Dirk Nowitzki	31,560	Mavericks (1998–2019)
8	Wilt Chamberlain	31,419	Warriors, 76ers, Lakers (1959–1973)
9	James Harden (active)	29,339	Thunder, Rockets, Nets, 76ers, Clippers (2009–2026)
10	Shaquille O’Neal	28,596	Magic, Lakers, Heat, Suns, Cavaliers, Celtics (1992–2011)
11	Carmelo Anthony	28,289	Nuggets, Knicks, Thunder, Rockets, Blazers, Lakers (2003–2022)
12	Moses Malone	27,409	Rockets, 76ers, Bullets, Hawks, Bucks, Spurs (1976–1995)
13	Elvin Hayes	27,313	Rockets, Bullets (1968–1984)
14	Russell Westbrook (active)	27,176	Thunder, Rockets, Wizards, Lakers, Clippers, Nuggets, Kings (2008–2026)
15	Hakeem Olajuwon	26,946	Rockets, Raptors (1984–2002)

At a glance

• 1st Points, all-time — LeBron James (43,440)
• 5th Points, all-time — Kevin Durant (highest active behind James)
• 9th Points, all-time — James Harden
• 14th Points, all-time — Russell Westbrook

Per Basketball-Reference, NBA regular-season career points through the 2025-26 season.

The chase

No active player is within realistic range of the record. The highest active scorer is Kevin Durant, whose 32,597 points sit 10,843 behind James — a gap larger than the entire career total of most Hall of Famers. Durant, who turned 37 during the 2025-26 season, passed Michael Jordan for fifth on the all-time list that year; at his 2025-26 rate of 26.0 points per game across 78 games, he would need roughly seven more full seasons simply to reach the record, an implausible ask for a player already in his late thirties.

The genuine movement is lower on the board. James Harden reached 28,290 points on December 6, 2025, passing Carmelo Anthony for 10th, and finished the 2025-26 season at 29,339, closing on Shaquille O’Neal’s 28,596 — which he cleared — and climbing toward the top eight. Russell Westbrook, who played the 2025-26 season with the Sacramento Kings, sits 14th at 27,176. Just outside the top 15, Stephen Curry (roughly 26,500 regular-season points) continues to climb. But the No. 1 line itself moves only as long as James keeps playing: he added to the record throughout 2025-26 and remained the all-time leader as of September 18, 2026. Whether the mark ever changes hands again depends less on a chaser than on how much longer the current holder extends it.

How it’s measured

The list counts regular-season points scored in the NBA only. That single rule shapes the whole board. Points from the rival American Basketball Association (1967–1976) are tracked separately; Basketball-Reference maintains a combined NBA/ABA leaderboard on which players like Moses Malone and Julius Erving rank higher than they do here — Malone’s NBA-only 27,409 grows by roughly 2,000 once his ABA seasons are added. Playoff points are also excluded from this list, which matters because James is the all-time postseason scoring leader as well; counting every game he has played widens his overall lead further still.

Era mechanics matter just as much. The three-point line did not exist until the 1979-80 season, so Wilt Chamberlain, most of Abdul-Jabbar’s prime and every scorer before them accumulated their totals without a shot now worth a large share of modern points. The schedule has also changed: seasons in the 1960s ran shorter than the 82 games standardized in 1967-68, and pace — the number of possessions per game — was far higher in Chamberlain’s era than in the decades that followed. Raw career totals therefore reward a specific combination of volume, efficiency, health and, above all, longevity.

The arguments

The central debate is counting stat versus rate. Because career points reward accumulation, the leaderboard tilts toward players with the longest careers: James built his record across 23 seasons. Critics note that per-game and per-possession scoring tell a different story — Chamberlain averaged 30.1 points per game across just 14 seasons, and Jordan matched that career average, both above James’s career mark near 27. Supporters of the counting-stat view answer that staying elite and available for two decades is itself the achievement, and that no rate statistic captures it.

A second argument is era adjustment. One side holds that 1960s totals are inflated by pace and by weaker, less integrated competition; the other holds that modern scoring is inflated by spacing, freedom-of-movement rules and the three-point shot, and that comparing raw numbers across 60 years is the flaw, not the era. A third dispute is definitional: whether ABA production should count as “major-league” scoring, and whether the “official” NBA-only list or the combined list is the truer record. The NBA’s own recognition and this leaderboard use NBA regular-season points; Basketball-Reference publishes both. None of these disputes has a settled answer, and each depends on which question — most points, best scorer, or most valuable across an era — the reader is actually asking.

Per Basketball-Reference and the NBA, through the 2025-26 season.

Why it matters

“All-time leading scorer” is one of the few sports titles a casual fan and a historian will both invoke, which is exactly why the list is worth getting right: it is a single number that stands in for greatness in arguments that never end. Read carefully, though, the leaderboard is less a ranking of the best scorers than a record of who combined excellence with staying power — and a reminder that a total from 1962 and a total from 2026 were built under different rules, on different schedules, against different fields. James holds the line for now; the history around it, from Chamberlain to Abdul-Jabbar to the active names still climbing, is what makes the number mean something.