NFL Career Passing Touchdown Leaders

Tom Brady threw 649 touchdown passes across his 23-year NFL career, a figure that sits more than 75 touchdowns clear of the next quarterback on this list. For context, that gap alone is larger than entire career totals posted by many long-tenured starting quarterbacks. Brady's touchdown total, compiled with the New England Patriots and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers between 2000 and 2022, is the benchmark against which every other career passing touchdown total in NFL history is measured.

What stands out beyond the raw number is the consistency of the group surrounding him. Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, and Philip Rivers complete the top five, and remarkably, these are the exact same five quarterbacks, in the exact same order, who top the career passing yardage list as well. That overlap is not a coincidence — it reflects how closely touchdown production tracks with total passing volume over a long career, and it reinforces that this particular group of quarterbacks represents a genuinely distinct tier of sustained passing production in NFL history.

How This Ranking Works

This list is ranked strictly by total regular-season passing touchdowns, counted exactly as the NFL records them. The methodology excludes postseason touchdown passes entirely, so a quarterback's playoff heroics, however memorable, play no role in where he lands on this particular leaderboard. That is a deliberate and consistent choice: mixing regular-season and postseason touchdown totals would both inflate the numbers for quarterbacks who played in more playoff games and make the ranking harder to compare against the NFL's own official career leaderboards, which maintain the same regular-season-only convention.

Because the measure is a cumulative career total rather than a per-season or per-game rate, it inherently favors quarterbacks who played for a long time at a high level, rather than those who had the single best peak season or the highest touchdown rate per pass attempt. A quarterback who throws 25 touchdowns a year for two decades will rank ahead of one who threw 40 touchdowns a year for eight seasons, even though the latter pace is statistically more impressive on a per-season basis.

How the Group Took Shape

All five quarterbacks on this list built their touchdown totals primarily within the modern passing era, generally dated from 1970 onward. Brett Favre, who played from 1991 to 2010 with Atlanta, Green Bay, the New York Jets, and Minnesota, finished with 508 touchdown passes and represented a bridge generation between earlier pass-focused quarterbacks and the Brady-Manning era that followed. Peyton Manning, who threw 539 touchdowns across stints with the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos from 1998 to 2015, overlapped with both Favre's later seasons and the bulk of Brady's career, and the Brady-Manning rivalry was frequently framed around exactly this kind of touchdown production.

Drew Brees, who reached 571 touchdown passes playing for the San Diego Chargers and New Orleans Saints from 2001 to 2020, sits second on the list, while Philip Rivers, the most recent of the five to begin his career, finished with 421 touchdowns across stops with the San Diego and Los Angeles Chargers and Indianapolis, retiring in 2020. Taken together, the five careers span roughly three decades of overlapping NFL seasons, during which touchdown-pass totals climbed steadily across the league as a whole.

Why Touchdown Totals Have Grown

League-wide passing touchdown totals have risen over the decades this ranking covers, driven by rule interpretations and officiating standards that favor passing offenses, an expanded regular-season schedule in more recent years, and offensive philosophies that lean more heavily on the pass than earlier eras of the league did. This is useful context for understanding why touchdown totals compiled since 1970 tend to be higher than those from the league's earlier decades, and it is also why this ranking is explicitly scoped to the modern era rather than attempting to compare across the full history of the NFL since its founding.

Limitations and Caveats

As a cumulative career statistic, this ranking says nothing about touchdown efficiency, interception rates, win-loss record, or postseason performance — each of those would tell a different and, in some cases, quite different story about these same five careers. It also reflects only regular-season production; readers interested in postseason touchdown passes should treat that as separate, uncounted data. None of the five quarterbacks listed here are still active, so unlike some other career leaderboards, these totals are final and not subject to further change.

It's also worth noting plainly that this list and the career passing yardage list are populated by the identical five names in the identical order. That is not an error or a coincidence in how the rankings were compiled — it simply reflects that touchdown production and yardage production are tightly linked for quarterbacks who sustain elite play over very long careers.

Sourcing and Verification

All figures are drawn from the NFL's official career statistics, maintained at nfl.com. This ranking was last verified as of February 2026. For a look at the same quarterbacks' career yardage totals, see the NFL Career Passing Yards Leaders ranking, and for a different statistical category entirely, see the NFL Career Rushing Yards Leaders ranking.

Brady's 649 touchdown passes, and the four Hall of Fame-caliber careers that follow his on this list, stand as a record of the quarterbacks who defined touchdown production in the NFL's modern passing era, a group whose dominance of this particular leaderboard is unlikely to be matched anytime soon.