NBA All-Time 3-Point Leaders

The all-time leader in career regular-season three-pointers made is Golden State’s Stephen Curry, who had drained 4,248 of them through the 2025-26 season. Curry has held the record since December 14, 2021, and rather than merely holding it he has redrawn the scale of it: no other player in league history has reached 4,000 career threes, and only one other player has crossed 3,000. The list below is the counting record of the sport’s most transformative shot, and it is worth reading with one caveat in front of mind — it is dominated almost entirely by players still active or retired since 2005, because for the first three decades of the NBA the three-point line did not exist at all.

The leaderboard

Rank	Name	Threes	Team(s) / Span
1	Stephen Curry	4,248	Golden State, 2009–
2	James Harden	3,390	OKC / Houston / others, 2009–
3	Ray Allen	2,973	Milwaukee / Seattle / Boston / Miami, 1996–2014
4	Klay Thompson	2,899	Golden State / Dallas, 2011–
5	Damian Lillard	2,804	Portland / Milwaukee, 2012–
6	LeBron James	2,636	Cleveland / Miami / L.A. Lakers, 2003–
7	Reggie Miller	2,560	Indiana, 1987–2005
8	Kyle Korver	2,450	Multiple teams, 2003–2020
9	Paul George	2,449	Indiana / OKC / Clippers / Philadelphia, 2010–
10	Kevin Durant	2,377	Seattle-OKC / Golden State / others, 2007–
11	Vince Carter	2,290	Multiple teams, 1998–2020
12	Jason Terry	2,282	Multiple teams, 1999–2018
13	Jamal Crawford	2,221	Multiple teams, 2000–2020
14	Kyle Lowry	2,209	Multiple teams, 2006–
15	Buddy Hield	2,201	Multiple teams, 2016–

At a glance

Per StatMuse and NBA.com, through the 2025-26 season.

The chase

No active player is on a realistic pace to overtake Curry, and the arithmetic explains why. Second-place James Harden, who entered the 2025-26 season in his sixteenth year, trailed by 858 makes — a gap larger than the entire career output of every player ranked outside the top 20. At the roughly 150-to-200 makes a season a high-volume guard produces, erasing 858 would require four or five more full, healthy campaigns of elite shooting, and Harden turned 36 during the 2025-26 season. The closest younger names, Golden State’s Klay Thompson (2,899) and Milwaukee’s Damian Lillard (2,804), sit more than 1,300 behind. The most relevant threat to the record, in other words, remains the record-holder: Curry was still active with Golden State through the 2025-26 season and continued to extend the mark with every game. Any projection about who “catches” him is therefore a projection about how long Curry himself keeps playing, and the entry declines to guess at that.

How it’s measured

The list counts made three-point field goals in regular-season play only; playoff threes are tracked separately, and the two are not combined here. The shot itself is younger than the league. The American Basketball Association introduced a three-point line for its inaugural 1967-68 season, but the NBA did not adopt one until 1979-80, when Boston’s Chris Ford made the first three-pointer in NBA history on October 12, 1979. For its first several seasons the shot was a novelty — teams attempted fewer than three per game and made barely a quarter of them. Volume climbed slowly until the league shortened the line to a uniform 22 feet for three seasons beginning in 1994-95, then restored it, and only in the following decades did attempts explode into the modern deluge. Because the NBA and ABA records are frequently reported together, some leaderboards (Basketball-Reference labels its page “NBA & ABA”) fold ABA makes into the totals, while others count NBA play only; the figures in this entry reflect the NBA regular-season totals reported by the sources in the note below.

The arguments

The honest debates about this leaderboard are debates about eras, and each has a defensible side. The first is the counting-stat-versus-rate objection: a career-makes list rewards longevity and volume as much as marksmanship, which is why a designated specialist like Kyle Korver ranks eighth without ever being a franchise centerpiece, while a superior pure shooter with a shorter career would not appear at all. Curry’s defenders counter that he leads by rate and volume — a distinction the raw list cannot show. The second, and larger, argument is era adjustment. The all-time greats who played before 1979-80 have zero career threes not because they could not shoot but because the shot did not exist; comparing their scoring to a modern wing’s is a category error. Even players from the line’s first two decades operated in a low-volume culture — a role player in the 2020s hoists more threes in a month than Larry Bird’s teams attempted in stretches of a season — so cross-era totals measure opportunity as much as skill. A third, narrower dispute is official versus unofficial bookkeeping: whether ABA threes belong in an “NBA” record, and how to treat the seasons played on the shortened line, both of which shift totals depending on the source. What none of the arguments dispute is the shape of the modern list, only how to weigh it against a past that never took the shot.

Per StatMuse, Land of Basketball and NBA.com, through the 2025-26 season; three-point line history via Wikipedia.

Why it matters

The three-point leaderboard is the clearest statistical fingerprint of how the sport actually changed, and its top line ties directly to the story Swipe covers most closely. Curry’s 4,248 is not just a record but a marker of the Golden State era that reorganized the whole league around a shot the NBA once treated as a gimmick — a rewiring visible in the fact that he broke Ray Allen’s mark in his 789th game after Allen needed some 1,300 to set it, then reached 4,000 against Sacramento on March 13, 2025. Read carefully, the list settles the group-chat argument in both directions at once: Curry is unarguably the greatest volume three-point shooter the game has produced, and the leaderboard he tops is also the reason totals from different eras cannot be stacked side by side as though they measured the same game.