NFL All-Time Passing Touchdown Leaders

The all-time leader in NFL career passing touchdowns is Tom Brady, whose 649 regular-season touchdown passes over 23 seasons with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers stand as the highest total in league history through the 2025 season. Brady is the only quarterback ever to clear 600, and his mark sits 78 ahead of the second-place total held by Drew Brees. The list below reflects standings through the end of the 2025 NFL season; four of the top 15 were still active entering the 2026 season, led by Aaron Rodgers in fourth place.

The leaderboard

Rank	Player	Passing TDs	Teams (Years)
1	Tom Brady	649	Patriots, Buccaneers (2000–2022)
2	Drew Brees	571	Chargers, Saints (2001–2020)
3	Peyton Manning	539	Colts, Broncos (1998–2015)
4	Aaron Rodgers †	527	Packers, Jets, Steelers (2005–)
5	Brett Favre	508	Falcons, Packers, Jets, Vikings (1991–2010)
6	Philip Rivers	425	Chargers, Colts (2004–2020)
7	Matthew Stafford †	423	Lions, Rams (2009–)
8	Dan Marino	420	Dolphins (1983–1999)
9	Ben Roethlisberger	418	Steelers (2004–2021)
10	Matt Ryan	381	Falcons, Colts (2008–2022)
11	Eli Manning	366	Giants (2004–2019)
12	Russell Wilson †	353	Seahawks, Broncos, Steelers, Giants (2012–)
13	Fran Tarkenton	342	Vikings, Giants (1961–1978)
14	John Elway	300	Broncos (1983–1998)
15	Kirk Cousins †	298	Washington, Vikings, Falcons (2012–)

† Active entering the 2026 season; totals are through the 2025 campaign.

At a glance

Per Pro-Football-Reference and StatMuse, through the 2025 season.

• 4th Aaron Rodgers, highest active player (527)
• 7th Matthew Stafford, active (423)
• 12th Russell Wilson, active (353)
• 15th Kirk Cousins, active (298)

Per StatMuse, through the 2025 season.

• Brady, only QB with 600+ TD passes
• Five QBs with 500+ TD passes
• Nine QBs with 400+ TD passes
• Rodgers passed Favre, Sept. 21, 2025
• Stafford, highest-climbing active QB
• Marino held the record from 1995 to 2007

Per Pro-Football-Reference and NFL.com.

The chase

The only active player positioned to threaten the top of the list is Aaron Rodgers, who entered the 2026 season fourth all-time with 527 touchdown passes. Rodgers reached sole possession of fourth place on September 21, 2025, when a 12-yard strike to DK Metcalf against the New England Patriots became the 509th of his career, moving him past former Green Bay teammate Brett Favre, per NFL.com. He is 12 behind Peyton Manning’s 539 for third and 44 behind Drew Brees’ 571 for second. Brady’s 649 sits 122 ahead — a distance that, at the 24-touchdown pace Rodgers set with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2025, would represent roughly five more full seasons. Rodgers, who turned 42 on December 2, 2025, was reported by multiple outlets, including CBS Sports, to have framed 2026 as the final season of his career, which would place the No. 2 and No. 1 marks out of reach and third place as the realistic ceiling.

The next active climber is Matthew Stafford, seventh all-time with 423 through 2025 after a productive season with the Los Angeles Rams. Stafford’s 2025 total pushed him past Dan Marino (420) but left him behind Philip Rivers (425), who ranks sixth, and he remains 85 shy of Favre’s 508 and would need several more high-volume seasons to enter the top five. Russell Wilson (353) and Kirk Cousins (298) round out the active names in the top 15, both far enough back that a move into the upper tier would require an unusually long tail to their careers. No other active quarterback ranks inside the all-time top 15 through the 2025 season.

How it’s measured

Career passing touchdowns is a pure counting statistic: every regular-season touchdown pass a quarterback throws, summed across his career, with postseason totals excluded. Pro-Football-Reference, the reference standard the NFL’s own record book mirrors, tallies only regular-season games, which is why Brady’s 88 career playoff touchdown passes — themselves a record — do not appear in the 649. The figure also folds in American Football League statistics for players whose careers predated or straddled the 1970 AFL–NFL merger, so the totals span leagues that were once separate.

Because it is a counting stat, the list rewards longevity and opportunity as much as per-game brilliance. Two structural changes weigh heavily on any era comparison. First, rule changes since the mid-2000s — the 2004 re-emphasis of illegal-contact and defensive-holding penalties, followed by a decade of defenseless-receiver protections — reshaped the sport toward high-volume passing, inflating touchdown totals for quarterbacks of the Brady–Brees–Manning generation relative to their predecessors. Second, the regular season expanded from 16 games to 17 in 2021, giving modern quarterbacks an extra game every year to accumulate. Earlier leaders such as Fran Tarkenton and Johnny Unitas played 12- and 14-game schedules in run-first offenses, a context that makes raw totals across eras inherently uneven.

The arguments

The central debate over the list is the familiar counting-stat-versus-rate tension. Advocates for the counting total, reflected in how the NFL recognizes the official record, argue that durability and sustained production are precisely what a career record should measure, and that throwing 649 touchdowns requires both. Critics counter that raw totals flatter quarterbacks who simply played longer in pass-friendly systems, and point to rate measures — touchdown percentage, or touchdowns per game — where the order changes. On career touchdown percentage, according to Pro-Football-Reference, several older passers and efficiency-first modern quarterbacks rank ahead of some of the volume leaders, a reminder that “most” and “best rate” are different questions.

A second argument concerns era adjustment. Those who favor context weighting note that a touchdown thrown in 1975, against smaller rosters and stricter contact rules for offenses, is not the statistical equivalent of one thrown in 2015; those who favor the raw list respond that every quarterback is measured against the rules of his own time, and that adjustments introduce subjectivity a record book should avoid. A related, narrower dispute is whether postseason passing should count at all: Brady’s regular-season lead is decisive either way, but including playoff touchdowns would widen the gap between the modern leaders and the pre-expansion field. None of these debates is settled, and the NFL’s record book resolves them only by convention — regular season, all leagues, raw totals.

Per Pro-Football-Reference and NFL.com, through the 2025 season; era and rule context per NFL rulebook history.

Why it matters

The passing-touchdown leaderboard is one of the most-cited measures of quarterback greatness precisely because it compresses two things fans argue about endlessly — peak production and career length — into a single number that has changed hands only a handful of times in league history. Marino held it, then Favre, then Peyton Manning, and finally Brady, and the identity of the record-holder has repeatedly served as shorthand for which quarterback defined an era. With Rodgers the lone active player within striking distance of the podium and the top of the list likely to stand for years, the 649 is both a snapshot of the pass-heavy modern game and a benchmark the next generation of quarterbacks will be measured against long before any of them approaches it.