NHL Career Goals Leaders

On April 6, 2025, Alex Ovechkin scored the 895th goal of his NHL career, surpassing Wayne Gretzky's long-standing mark of 894 and becoming the league's all-time leading goal scorer. It closed out one of the most closely watched individual pursuits in hockey history, a chase that stretched across Ovechkin's two decades with the Washington Capitals and that many hockey observers had, for years, assumed would never actually be completed. Gretzky's 894 goals had stood as the standard since his retirement in 1999, and few records in major professional sports are discussed with the same mixture of reverence and perceived permanence that Gretzky's goal total carried for a generation of hockey fans.

Because Ovechkin was still playing when he broke the record, and remains active, his total continues to climb past the number captured here. That makes this ranking slightly different in character from most career leaderboards: the top spot is a moving target rather than a settled historical fact, and readers should treat the figure listed for Ovechkin as a snapshot rather than a final word.

How This Ranking Works

The ranking is sorted by total regular-season goals, counted exactly as the NHL records them. The methodology counts regular-season goals only, which means playoff goals — a separate and, for some of these players, substantial body of additional scoring — are not included in the totals shown here. This keeps the ranking aligned with how the NHL's own official records track career goal-scoring leaders, and it avoids mixing two statistical pools that are typically kept separate in hockey's record-keeping tradition.

As a cumulative career total, the ranking inherently rewards players who combined high per-season scoring rates with unusually long careers. Several of the names on this list played into their 40s or compiled seasons across five different decades, underscoring that sustained goal-scoring over a long NHL career is itself a rare and demanding feat, distinct from simply having the best single season or the highest goals-per-game rate.

A Quarter-Century Record, and What Came Before It

Wayne Gretzky scored his 894 goals between 1979 and 1999, playing for the Edmonton Oilers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues, and New York Rangers. The record held for roughly twenty-five years after his retirement, a span long enough that an entire generation of NHL players came and went without ever seriously threatening it. Gordie Howe, who sits third on this list with 801 goals compiled across an NHL career that spanned five decades, from 1946 to 1980, represents the generation before Gretzky's, and his own longevity — rare even by the standards of this list — speaks to a similar durability theme that runs through much of hockey's career scoring history.

Jaromir Jagr, fourth on the list with 766 goals scored between 1990 and 2024, is frequently cited as having one of the longest playing careers in major professional sports history, a career that overlapped with both the tail end of Gretzky's playing days and, remarkably, much of Ovechkin's chase toward the record decades later. Brett Hull and Marcel Dionne round out the list at 741 and 731 goals respectively, each compiled during the 1980s and 1990s, a period often remembered for some of the highest-scoring seasons in NHL history.

A Record That Resisted Its Challengers for Decades

Part of what made Gretzky's goal record so enduring was the sheer scale of the gap he built during his own career, combined with changes to the way the game was played and defended in the decades that followed his retirement, which generally made high-volume goal-scoring more difficult to sustain over a full career than it had been during his own era. That combination of factors is a meaningful part of why it took roughly twenty-five years, and a player of Ovechkin's particular combination of scoring touch and career longevity, for the record to finally change hands.

Limitations and Caveats

The most important caveat attached to this ranking concerns its top entry. Alex Ovechkin was still active when he passed Gretzky's total on April 6, 2025, and his goal count has continued to rise since. The figure listed here should be read as reflecting his total as of the ranking's last verification date, not as a final career number, and readers seeking his current count should consult the NHL's official records directly. This is a meaningfully different situation from every other entry on this list, all of which reflect completed careers and are not subject to further change. Readers should also keep in mind that none of the totals shown here include playoff goals, which for several of these players represent a notable additional body of postseason scoring kept separate under the league's own record-keeping conventions.

Sourcing and Verification

Figures in this ranking come from the NHL's official career statistics, maintained at records.nhl.com. This ranking was last verified as of January 2026. Notably, Gretzky himself attended the game in which Ovechkin broke his record, a detail that underscores how closely this particular changing-of-the-guard was followed within the sport. For a related look at career playmaking rather than scoring, see the NHL Career Assist Leaders ranking, where Gretzky remains the all-time leader by a wide margin.

Ovechkin's record, still growing as he continues his career with the Capitals, now stands where Gretzky's once did: as the new standard against which future generations of NHL goal scorers will inevitably be measured.