NFL Salary Cap Tracker by Team

The NFL salary cap is a hard cap that limits the total amount teams can spend on player salaries in a given season. For the 2025 season, the salary cap is set at $255.4 million per team. Unlike the NBA's soft cap system, the NFL enforces a strict limit with few exceptions, ensuring competitive balance across all 32 teams.

The salary cap is calculated based on league revenues, including television contracts, ticket sales, merchandise, and sponsorships. Each year, the cap is adjusted to reflect the league's financial performance, with both the owners and players' union agreeing to split revenues based on the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).

Teams must also maintain a salary floor, which requires them to spend a minimum percentage of the cap. This ensures that all teams are competitive and prevents owners from pocketing profits instead of investing in their rosters. The salary floor is calculated over a multi-year period to give teams flexibility in managing their cap space.

The NFL's hard salary cap system means teams cannot exceed the cap limit except in very specific circumstances. However, teams can use various strategies to manage their cap space, including restructuring contracts, converting base salaries into signing bonuses, and releasing or trading players.

Dead money refers to salary cap charges from players who are no longer on the roster. This occurs when a team releases a player who had guaranteed money or unamortized signing bonus remaining on their contract. The remaining guaranteed money counts against the cap, creating "dead cap space" that reduces the team's ability to sign new players.

Teams can create cap space through several methods: releasing high-salary players (accepting dead cap hits), restructuring contracts to push cap hits into future years, signing players to front-loaded or back-loaded contracts, and utilizing performance-based incentives that don't count against the cap until earned.

The NFL also allows teams to carry over unused cap space from previous seasons, giving teams that manage their cap wisely additional flexibility. This rollover provision encourages teams to be fiscally responsible and rewards those who build their rosters efficiently.