What Is the NFL Salary Cap? How It Works, Dead Money and Restructures
The NFL salary cap is a hard limit on how much a team can spend on player salaries in a season, set league-wide from a share of total football revenue. For 2026 it's $301.2 million per team, up from $279.2 million in 2025 — a 7.9% jump and the first time the cap has crossed $300 million.
Unlike the NBA's "soft cap" — where teams pay a luxury tax and keep spending — the NFL cap cannot be exceeded, period. Every trick discussed below (proration, restructures, void years) exists because teams are managing real money against a wall they're not allowed to touch.
The 2026 Cap at a Glance
| Metric | 2026 Figure |
|---|---|
| Salary cap per team | $301.2 million |
| 2025 cap (for comparison) | $279.2 million |
| Year-over-year change | +$22 million (+7.9%) |
| Total player spending per club (cap + benefits) | $378.8 million |
| Player share of All Revenue (CBA minimum) | 48% |
| Cash spending floor | 89% of the cap, in cash, per team, averaged over a rolling 4-year period |
The cap has nearly doubled in five seasons — $208.2 million in 2022 to $301.2 million in 2026 — driven mostly by the league's new national media contracts. Source: NFL.com, "NFL announces 2026 salary cap set at $301.2 million per team".
Hard Cap vs. the NBA's Soft Cap
This is where fans coming from other sports get confused. The NBA has a soft cap: teams can exceed it and just pay a luxury tax. The NFL has none of that. A team's total cap charges must be at or below $301.2 million on every single day of the league year — no tax, no penalty payment that buys extra room. Go over, and the league won't let you conduct business until you're compliant.
That hard ceiling is exactly why proration, restructures and void years exist — they're not loopholes, they're the mechanisms the CBA provides for moving money in time within a system that never simply lets you spend more.
Signing Bonus Proration: The Concept Everything Else Depends On
A signing bonus is cash the player is paid immediately, in full, when he signs. But for salary cap purposes, the league doesn't charge that whole amount in year one. Instead, it's spread — "prorated" — evenly across the contract, up to a maximum of five years, regardless of how the actual cash was paid. This is set out in Article 13 of the CBA and confirmed by Over The Cap's breakdown of the proration rules.
Illustrative example (round numbers, for teaching purposes): a player signs a 5-year, $50 million contract that includes a $25 million signing bonus, paid entirely in year one, plus base salaries that make up the rest of the deal.
- Cash paid in year one: the full $25M bonus, plus that year's base salary.
- Cap charge from the bonus: $25M ÷ 5 years = $5M per year, every year of the deal.
| League Year | Base Salary (illustrative) | Bonus Proration | Cap Hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $1M | $5M | $6M |
| Year 2 | $4M | $5M | $9M |
| Year 3 | $5M | $5M | $10M |
| Year 4 | $6M | $5M | $11M |
| Year 5 | $9M | $5M | $14M |
Notice the team paid $26M in real cash in year one alone, but the cap only charged $6M. That gap — cash spent now, cap charge spread later — is the single most important idea in understanding every other rule on this page.
Dead Money, Explained
Dead money is what's left of a player's prorated signing bonus (plus any guaranteed base salary) that hasn't yet counted against the cap when he's released or traded. The CBA doesn't let a team erase that money — it accelerates onto the current year's cap all at once.
Illustrative example, continuing from above: the team cuts that player after Year 2, with three years of proration left ($5M × 3 = $15M unaccounted for). Cut with a standard (pre-June 1) release, all $15M of remaining proration accelerates immediately into the current league year as dead money — even though the player is gone and on another roster. The team gets zero future cap benefit from those three years of bonus proration; it's simply owed to the cap ledger now.
This is why teams "eat" dead money: the guaranteed cash was already paid out at signing, and the cap accounting just catches up when the player leaves early.
The June 1 Designation
Cutting a player before June 1 dumps all his remaining dead money into the current year. The June 1 designation lets a team split that dead money across two league years instead: the current year absorbs only the proration that year would already have owed anyway, and everything else — every future year's proration — accelerates into the following year instead.
Using Over The Cap's own example: a player with $20 million in total remaining proration would create $20M in dead money if cut before June 1. Designate that same cut as a post-June-1 release, and it becomes $5M in dead money in the current year and $15M in the following year — the same $20M total, just split in two.
Two catches: teams get only two of these designations per year, and the player still counts against the roster and cap at full value until June 2, even though he's technically been released and is a free agent elsewhere. Teams can announce the designation earlier in the offseason, but the cap relief doesn't land until after June 1.
Restructures: Creating Space Out of Nothing
A restructure converts a player's already-agreed base salary into a signing bonus, then reprorates that new "bonus" over the remaining years of the deal (up to five). It doesn't create new money — it just re-times when the cap charges land, moving current-year room forward at the cost of adding to future years' dead money exposure.
Real example: in 2024, the New Orleans Saints restructured quarterback Derek Carr's contract, converting a large chunk of his base salary into a signing bonus to spread the cap hit over the deal's remaining years — including built-in void years. The move freed up roughly $23 million in cap space for that season. The trade-off: it pushed money forward hard enough that releasing Carr before 2025 would have left the Saints with a $50 million dead cap hit — reported by CBS Sports.
That's the honest cost of a restructure: it's "kicking the can." You're not saving money, you're borrowing cap room from your future self, and every restructure increases the dead money bill if that player is ever cut or traded before the contract naturally runs out.
Void Years
Void years are contract years added to the end of a deal that everyone — team, agent, league office — understands the player will never actually play. Their only purpose is to give a signing bonus (or restructured salary) more years to prorate over, which lowers the annual cap hit in the real years of the contract.
Say a team signs a player to a 2-year deal but tacks on three void years, turning it into a "5-year" contract for cap math. A signing bonus that would otherwise prorate over 2 years now prorates over 5 — cutting the annual charge by more than half. The instant those void years arrive (they void automatically, typically the day after the last real league year ends), all the proration that hadn't yet hit the cap accelerates as dead money in one shot, exactly like a release. Teams — the Saints most notoriously — have leaned on void years for years to stay cap-compliant now while building a growing dead money bill they keep having to outrun with new deals or trades.
Cap Carryover and the Top-51 Rule
Two more mechanics shape what a team's "real" cap number looks like. Cap carryover: any cap space a team doesn't use by the end of the league year rolls over onto the following year's cap rather than being lost — teams with young, cheap rosters often bank tens of millions this way. The top-51 rule: during the offseason, before the regular-season 53-man roster is set, only a team's 51 highest cap charges count against the cap — not the full 90-man offseason roster. That's why teams can sign an entire rookie draft class for very little functional cap space: a late-round rookie's modest cap number often just replaces the 51st-ranked player's charge rather than adding on top of it. The rule switches off and the full roster counts once the regular season begins.
The rookie wage scale, set by draft slot rather than negotiation, keeps first-year cap charges predictable and low relative to veteran deals — another reason rookies are cap-efficient early in a deal.
Cash vs. Cap: Why They're Not the Same
Two numbers get thrown around and confused constantly: cash spent (what a team actually pays out in a given year) and cap charge (what counts against the $301.2M limit that year). Proration is exactly why they diverge — a $25M signing bonus is $25M in real cash the moment it's paid, but only $5M a year on the cap if spread over five years.
The CBA prevents teams from gaming this too aggressively in the other direction: teams must spend, in cash, at least 89% of the total salary cap, averaged over a rolling four-year window (CBA Article 12, Section 9). A team that falls short doesn't get fined — the shortfall gets distributed to players around the league via the NFLPA. It's a spending floor sitting underneath the spending ceiling.
FAQ
What is the NFL salary cap for 2026? $301.2 million per team, up from $279.2 million in 2025 — a $22 million, 7.9% increase, and the first time it's exceeded $300 million.
Is the NFL salary cap hard or soft? Hard. Teams cannot exceed it under any circumstances, unlike the NBA's soft cap with a luxury tax.
What is dead money? The portion of a released or traded player's signing bonus proration (and any guaranteed salary) that hasn't yet counted against the cap, which accelerates onto the cap all at once when he leaves the team.
Can NFL teams go over the cap? No. Every team must be at or under the cap at all times; teams manage this through cuts, trades, and restructures rather than paying any kind of tax.
How many years can a signing bonus be prorated over? A maximum of five years, no matter how long the underlying contract is.
What's the difference between a June 1 cut and a regular cut? A regular release puts all remaining dead money on the current year's cap immediately. A June 1 designation splits it: the current year takes only its already-scheduled share, and the rest hits the following year. Teams get two June 1 designations per year.
Why do teams use void years if they just create more dead money later? Void years let a team spread a signing bonus over more seasons than the player is actually under contract, shrinking the cap hit in real years — at the cost of a lump-sum dead money charge the moment those void years arrive.
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