Despite signing a contract extension a year ago, Cam Heyward is looking for a pay raise, which he calls being valued. The Steelers captain is currently orchestrating a hold-in, and he spoke about his contract situation yesterday after reports surfaced. In hindsight, his contract is very clearly below market, Heyward coming off an All-Pro season.
For Heyward, though, his previous extension was merely about security. He intended it as more of a placeholder, which the Steelers didn’t seem to agree with. Indeed, Heyward told reporters they approached him about a pay cut.
Now that he has improved his negotiating standpoint, however, he finds himself in a difficult position. The Steelers don’t adjust contracts with more than one year left except for franchise quarterbacks—with one exception. And that is an exception of which Heyward is well aware, even if he didn’t name it.
“I’m not here to throw other people under the bus, or talk about what happened. But it’s not unprecedented”, Heyward said when directly asked if there was a Steelers precedent here, via Pittsburgh’s DSEN. “There’s been instances where it’s happened before, and that just makes me kind of weary, because it’s not unprecedented. I think there’s an easier way to get this done to still respect the Steelers and what they do and having tiers of a contract. But we’ll see”.
The only Steelers precedent in recent memory is, of course, Antonio Brown. Having outearned a six-year contract extension he signed as a third-year player in 2012, Pittsburgh forwarded him $2 million in 2015. The following year, they forwarded him $4 million—including the $2 million removed the previous year. Cam Heyward believes they can do something similar for him.
“Are you looking for them to convert next year’s bonus into some guarantees for this year?”, Heyward was asked by one reporter. “Being respectful to the process and what both sides are trying to accomplish, I would definitely say that’s something similar to what I’m thinking about”. Heyward has a $1.3 million base salary for 2026, but a $12,950,000 roster bonus, which Dave Bryan has already addressed.
As previously mentioned, Heyward is due to get a 2026 March roster bonus of $12.95 million as things stand right now. That’s not fully guaranteed, however. If the Steelers were to pay him half of that roster bonus as a signing bonus this summer, his 2025 cash total would jump up to $21.225 million, which would be more than [Leonard] Williams and a little less than [DeForest] Buckner. That’s a nice range for Heyward, in my opinion.
Cam Heyward is clearly playing on a below-market salary relative to his performance level. He knows that, and that is why he intimated he is open to skipping games to get his point across. The Steelers may value their precedents, but the players value their pay checks. And if you ask somebody to make a choice between their income and someone else’s arbitrary principles, I think we know what choice most of us are making. There’s nothing stopping the Steelers from signing players to extensions two years out; they simply don’t want to.
