The 20 best goalscoring seasons in Premier League history

Erling Haaland’s 36 in 2022/23 is the record. Alan Shearer appears three times. Here are the best single seasons, and what they have in common.

A 30-goal Premier League season is rare. Since 1992 it has been done 13 times, by nine players. The table below shows every season of 27 goals or more. Two things stand out. Seasons in the early 1990s were longer, and the very best modern seasons have come in fewer games.

42 games versus 38

The Premier League had 22 clubs and a 42-game season for its first three years, until 1994/95. That matters when comparing Shearer and Cole with the modern record holders. Andy Cole’s 34 in 1993/94 came from 40 appearances, and Shearer’s 34 the following season from 42. Haaland’s 36 came from 35.

Measured per game, Haaland’s debut season is clearly the best on the list, at just over a goal a game. Harry Kane’s 29 in 30 games in 2016/17 is second, which is easy to forget because it did not win him anything beyond the Golden Boot. Luis Suárez’s 31 in 33 in 2013/14 is third, and he missed the first five games of that season through suspension.

Shearer’s three in a row

Alan Shearer is the only player with three 30-goal Premier League seasons in a row: 31, 34 and 31 for Blackburn between 1993/94 and 1995/96. The middle one won the title. Nobody else has had more than two 30-goal seasons, and Kane is the only other player with two.

Those three seasons are a big reason Shearer still holds the all-time Premier League scoring record, 260 goals, almost three decades after them. In 1996 he moved to Newcastle for what our transfer records list as €18m, a world record at the time.

Kevin Phillips: the outlier

Kevin Phillips scored 30 for newly promoted Sunderland in 1999/2000, in his first Premier League season. Sunderland finished seventh. He won the European Golden Shoe that season, and he is still the only English player to have won it. Nobody else has scored 30 in a season for a newly promoted club.

He is not the only player on the list whose team missed out on the top four. Shearer’s 31 in 1995/96 came as Blackburn, the defending champions, finished seventh. Kane’s 30 in 2022/23 came in a season when Tottenham finished eighth.

Salah’s two peaks

Mohamed Salah appears twice, seven seasons apart. His 32 in 2017/18, his first season at Liverpool, set the 38-game record at the time. His 29 in 2024/25, at the age of 32, came in Liverpool’s title-winning season. Few strikers produce their two best seasons that far apart, and it is a big part of why Salah is now fourth on the all-time list with 193.

Why seasons like these are hard to repeat

Several of these seasons were followed by a move or an injury. Ronaldo left for Real Madrid a year after his 31. Suárez left for Barcelona straight after his. Van Persie scored 30 for Arsenal in 2011/12 and then 26 for Manchester United the next season. That last one is not in the table, but it won the title.

Questions about single seasons like these are the backbone of Football Higher or Lower, where the gap between 27 and 31 is the difference between a correct guess and the end of a run. In Football 501, where you count down by naming players, the career totals behind these seasons are worth knowing: Shearer’s 260 takes more than half your 501 in one go.

The other end: the lowest Golden Boot totals

The flip side of these seasons is how few goals it has sometimes taken to finish top. The lowest winning tally in Premier League history is 18. It happened in two seasons running, and both times the award was shared three ways.

Michael Owen finished joint top in both of those 18-goal seasons, while still a teenager at Liverpool. That is part of why those totals were so low. Goals were spread around in the late 1990s, and no single forward dominated the way Shearer had a few years earlier or Henry would a few years later.

Who has finished top most often

Counting shared awards, two players have finished as the Premier League’s top scorer four times: Thierry Henry and Mohamed Salah. Alan Shearer, Harry Kane and Erling Haaland have done it three times each. Haaland got his three in his first four seasons in England.

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Sources and method

Appearances and goals are league matches only, from Transfermarkt’s season-by-season player records, as used by the games on this site. Figures were checked on 2 November 2026 against data collected on 24 October 2026, early in the 2026/27 season, so totals for players still active will have moved on since.

Where a player scored for two clubs in one season, both spells are added together. None of the seasons in the table involved a mid-season move.