Per multiple reports, the NFL salary cap is expected to see a bump heading in 2025. With the current salary cap at $255.4 million, it could increase to around $275 million, per ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler.
” Team officials would have loved to walk away from the session with a set salary cap for 2025, but they didn’t get one. That usually comes closer to free agency. Still, a few team officials predicted that the cap would land around $275 million, roughly an 8% increase from the $255.4 million figure in 2024,” Fowler wrote in his weekly news and notes column.
That tracks with the latest from NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero, who reported that NFL teams were budgeting for the cap to be between $265-275 million. Obviously, the $275 million would be on the high end of that, but Rapoport and Pelissero report that NFL teams are outperforming their local revenue projections.
In the past, salary cap projections are usually given at the NFL’s annual December meetings, which began Monday in Dallas. However, last week the league and NFLPA agreed not to release those projections this week. This is now the second year in a row that projections haven’t been released at the December meetings, as the NFLPA and NFL also agreed not to release projections for the 2024 salary cap until January of last year. It seems as if that will be the case once again this year. The official salary cap number is usually finalized around late February, so the projection will come a month ahead of the cap being finalized.
All teams will need to be cap compliant by the start of the new league year on March 12, and teams will have a better idea of what number they need to get to sometime shortly after New Year’s Day. Last season, the cap saw a record $30.6 million spike, and per Rapoport and Pelissero, there was an extra $9 million that the union deferred from 2024 to avoid an even larger cap number. That $9 million will be spread between the 2025 and 2026 cap, with no more than half being used this offseason. If the union does choose to use the full $4.5 million, it could lead to a cap that’s on the higher end of the $265-275 million range as team officials predicted to Fowler.
