College Football Payroll by School

Estimated 2026-27 football payroll — all 68 Power 4 programs

Payroll is third-party NIL attributable to the football roster plus the revenue-share allocation to football — the money available to build the 2026 roster, excluding player income the program does not control. AD revenue is total athletic-department revenue on fiscal-2025 reporting, a year older than the payroll beside it. The final ratio column is the one that does not appear anywhere else: what share of the entire athletic department’s revenue the football roster alone now consumes. 23 of the 68 now run a roster at $30 million or more; a year ago none did.

Tier bands are recomputed for 2026-27 on the payroll midpoint: TOP $35M and above, UPPER-MID $25–35M, MID $18–25M, BOTTOM under $18M. The bands moved because the market did — last season’s TOP threshold of $25M is this season’s middle of the table, and 16 programs now clear $35M.

^§ Thirteen ACC programs — North Carolina, NC State, Louisville, SMU, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, Syracuse, Duke, Virginia, California, Stanford and Wake Forest — were reported by the conference’s own aggregators as tiers rather than as school-level ranges, so no survey figure exists for them. Their figures are NIL-NCAA.com’s published 2026-27 ACC roster-cost model (Patrick O’Rourke, CPA), retrieved September 28, 2026 — a point estimate from a model, not a range from a survey, and on a different basis from every other row in this table. The two disagree: The Athletic’s ACC band is $21–25M and its reporting places seven of these thirteen below $20M, while the NIL-NCAA model places all thirteen at $20.0–22.0M because it assumes every school pays the full $15.6M revenue-share allocation to football. That disagreement is left standing rather than resolved, because resolving it would mean picking a side without evidence. ^‡ Virginia Tech, Cincinnati, and UCF carry a wider error band than the rest of the table. They were absent from the Broadcaster’s Field Guide v1 master table, which covered 65 programs; that gap is closed — Volume 2, published October 2026, prints all sixty-eight, so this page and the Field Guide now carry the same field. The wider band on these three remains.

Sources. Payroll: The Athletic’s estimated 2026 roster budgets, published on or about September 17–18, 2026, built on roughly seventy anonymous sources and reprinted by On3, 247Sports, Yahoo Sports, Sports Illustrated, Heartland College Sports, Saturday Down South, Backing The Pack, HailWV and TEGNA stations; the thirteen ^§ rows from NIL-NCAA.com. Athletic-department revenue: NCAA and EADA annual financial reporting, fiscal 2025. Head coaches: school athletics releases, ESPN, AP and CBS Sports carousel trackers, current to September 28, 2026 — fifteen of the seventeen Power 4 changes in the 2025-26 cycle are individually confirmed and two remain unidentified. Head-coach compensation is maintained separately on the Coach Compensation & Buyout Tracker.

How the payroll splits: collective money versus capped money

The total is the headline, but the composition is the story. The revenue-share column is capped and compresses toward a common ceiling — nearly every football-dominant P4 program lands in the same $14–16M band, and the seventeen ACC rows sit on an identical $15.6M because that is what their estimator assumes. The third-party column is uncapped and does not compress at all. That is why the spread at the top of Table 1 is a third-party spread, not a revenue-sharing spread: the gap between a $51M roster and a $10M roster is almost entirely money that never touches an athletic department’s books. The split is shown for 52 programs, up from 31.

Two methods in one table, and they are marked. Unmarked rows are Institute estimates: revenue-share allocation to football is banded at roughly 70–75% of the $21.58M 2026-27 cap for football-dominant programs and lower where the revenue base will not fund the full allocation, with the third-party figure derived as the residual against the Table 1 midpoint. Each institution’s board sets its own split across sports, so these are bands and not disclosures. Rows marked ^§ are not Institute estimates — they are NIL-NCAA.com’s own published 2026-27 ACC split, retrieved September 28, 2026, which prints both channels separately for all seventeen ACC programs and holds revenue share at a flat $15.6M for every one of them. A column of seventeen identical numbers is an assumption, not a measurement, and it is left visible here for exactly that reason. The 16 programs not shown are in Table 1 on total payroll only; the Institute does not publish a two-channel split where the reporting will not carry one.

What the payroll table actually tells you

The gap is a third-party gap, not a revenue-sharing gap

Every Power 4 school may allocate up to the same revenue-share cap. In practice almost all of them allocate something close to the same amount to football, because the cap is the cap and football is the revenue sport. Table 2 shows that compression directly: the revenue-share column at the top of the league and the middle of the league is nearly the same number. What separates a $51.5M roster from a $10.5M roster is almost entirely the uncapped third-party channel — and it is now the larger of the two channels at the top of the league by a wide margin, where a year ago it was roughly half. The cap did not restrain the gap. It moved the gap somewhere the cap cannot reach.

This matters for how the gap is discussed on air. The House settlement is routinely described as the thing that professionalized college football payroll. It did the opposite of what a salary cap normally does. It capped the visible channel and left the invisible one alone, and the invisible one is where the spread lives.

Payroll is now a material line inside the athletic department

The final column of Table 1 is the one that should worry an athletic director, and this year it is the column that moved. The football roster alone now consumes an average of 17.3% of total athletic-department revenue across the Power 4, against 12.9% on the same table a season ago. At Ohio State the roster went from 12.1% of the entire department’s revenue to roughly 18%; at Miami and Indiana it is above a quarter. The denominator in that ratio is a fiscal-2025 figure and will grow a little. The numerator grew by half in twelve months. That is a cost line that did not exist in fiscal 2021, and it is being absorbed by departments that were already running operating losses.

The scale of those losses is not speculative. On fiscal-2025 reporting, ACC athletic departments averaged a net operating loss of $71.6 million per school — $97.6M of revenue against $169.3M of expenses — funded by booster contributions averaging $38.1M, student fees and institutional support averaging $23.8M, and endowment draws averaging $6.4M. Even after all three, the average ACC department finished fiscal 2025 $3.4 million in deficit. Florida State ran a $105.0M operating loss and California $98.8M. The year before, the same conference averaged a small surplus. ACC expenses under EADA reporting averaged $165.1M in fiscal 2025, a 37% increase in three years, with SMU up 89%, Miami 55%, North Carolina 54%, Georgia Tech 53%, California 51% and Boston College 49%. Revenue sharing was not yet in any of those numbers. It landed in fiscal 2026, and the 2026-27 cap is $1.08 million higher again.

The transfer portal is the amplifier

A payroll table understates the gap it measures. In the pre-NIL era a good player at a low-payroll program stayed four years. Under the transfer portal and NIL together, that player moves to a top-payroll program after his breakout season. Bottom-tier programs cannot retain the talent they develop, so the effective competitive gap compounds beyond what the roster-cost differential alone would predict.

What it predicts on Saturday

Since the House settlement took effect in July 2025 — now two seasons of evidence — top-payroll programs have won the overwhelming majority of head-to-head matchups against bottom-tier Power 4 opponents. The base-rate expectation is that payroll wins. The useful on-air move is not to restate that; it is to treat the exceptions as the story, and to know which side of the payroll line the underdog is standing on before the game starts.

A second, independent estimate — and where it disagrees

The Institute is not the only party estimating roster cost. NIL-NCAA.com, compiled by Patrick O’Rourke, CPA, publishes 2026-27 roster-cost estimates for the ACC and Big 12 built from NCAA and EADA filings. Where two independent estimates disagree, the disagreement is more informative than either number alone, so it is worth stating plainly rather than quietly picking one.

The comparison got cleaner this year and narrower at the same time. Last season the two sets were measured a year apart, so every gap was partly just cost growth. Both now sit on 2026-27, and the clock excuse is gone. What is left is a real methodological difference: the NIL-NCAA model assumes every Power 4 school pays the full $15.6 million revenue-share allocation to football, which produces a hard floor around $19–20 million for even the smallest program. The Athletic’s survey asks people inside the buildings and does not assume the floor is universal, which is why it can report a roster at $8–13M that no model would produce.

And the comparison is no longer fully independent, which has to be said. Thirteen ACC rows in Table 1 are themselves taken from NIL-NCAA because no survey figure exists for them. Those thirteen cannot cross-check anything. The six pairs below are drawn only from programs where the two sets were built separately.

Both sets are estimates and neither is a disclosure. Read the comparison as a range check, not a scoring of who is right. Where they now agree — and at the top of the market they largely do — that agreement is worth more than either figure was worth alone. Source: NIL-NCAA.com, ACC and Big 12, both retrieved September 28, 2026.

What actually happens to an NIL deal now: the clearinghouse

A payroll table answers what a roster costs. The question underneath it — the one that reaches this page most often from search — is how any individual number gets set and who is allowed to say no. Since June 2025 there has been an answer, and it has a record.

NIL Go, and the three gates every third-party deal passes through

Every third-party NIL agreement worth $600 or more must be submitted to NIL Go, the clearinghouse the College Sports Commission operates with Deloitte, within five business days of signature. It is not a registry. It is an approval process, and it applies three tests in order.

The submission threshold and the review threshold are two different numbers, and only one of them moved. Every deal at $600 and above is still filed, and every filed deal still faces the payor-association and valid-business-purpose tests. But in April 2026 the Commission raised the floor at which the third test — range of compensation — is actually run, from $600 to $2,500, and relaxed it again from July 1, 2026 for deals below roughly $15,000. The Institute has found the total-earnings ceiling attached to that relaxation reported two different ways — a $15,000 cap in one account and a $50,000 annual aggregate in another — and prints neither as settled. The operative point for anyone structuring a deal is that a small deal is reviewed for what it is, and a large one is reviewed for what it is worth.

Payor association. Is the party paying the athlete a booster, a collective, or an entity associated with the school? If it is, the deal goes to the third test. A genuinely arm’s-length national brand generally does not.

Valid business purpose. Is the payor buying something a business would actually buy — an appearance, an endorsement, a licensed likeness — for a good or service it sells to the public? A payment whose only purpose is to put a player on a roster fails here.

Range of compensation. Does the amount sit inside a defensible fair-market range for what is being bought? This is the gate that does the work, and it is the one most often searched for by name.

How the range of compensation is actually computed

Deloitte runs a twelve-factor valuation model. The full rubric is confidential and the Institute will not pretend otherwise. What has been disclosed about its inputs is specific enough to be useful: athletic performance, the athlete’s social-media reach and engagement, the size and characteristics of the local market, the institution’s own market reach, and the actual performance obligations written into the deal — how many appearances, how many posts, what rights are granted for how long.

Two exclusions matter more than anything in the list. The model does not price roster value, and it does not price recruiting inducement. A deal that is worth what it is worth because of who else is on the roster, or because it arrives at signing day, is being valued on its commercial merits alone — which is the entire design intent, and the entire source of the litigation.

The practical consequence for anyone structuring one: the deliverables are the valuation. A contract that specifies four appearances, twelve posts and a named licensing term is being priced on those deliverables. A contract that specifies a dollar figure and nothing else has nothing to price.

The record so far, and what the rejection rate says

The College Sports Commission’s report of September 9, 2026, covering July 1 through August 31, 2026, is the clearest read available on how the gate is operating.

Source: College Sports Commission report dated September 9, 2026. The two-month window is the highest total value cleared in any period since the clearinghouse opened, and represents roughly forty percent of all value ever cleared through it. The Commission staffs twenty-nine people, twelve of them on NIL Go, processing more than two hundred submissions a day. One rejected deal is in arbitration; the Commission won its first arbitration in May 2026.

The two averages are the finding. A rejected deal averages $51,593 and an approved one averages $14,792 — three and a half times larger. The clearinghouse is not screening out the ordinary local car dealership. It is screening the large deals, which is where the payor-association test and the range-of-compensation test both bite hardest. In the January–February 2026 window, 26.7% of all proposed value failed to clear, roughly double the rate over the back half of 2025.

What is unsettled, as of September 28, 2026

Two things could move all of the above, and neither has resolved.

The litigation. Ili and Mirer v. NCAA was filed June 9, 2026 before Judge Claudia Wilken — the same judge who approved the House settlement — challenging both NIL Go and the cap itself. A ruling against the clearinghouse would remove the only mechanism currently placing any ceiling on third-party money.

The legislation. The Protect College Sports Act — the Cruz–Cantwell bill — cleared a procedural vote in the Senate on September 17, 2026 by 77–22. That vote brought the bill to the floor; it was not final passage, and the two are routinely conflated in the coverage. It is not law. The House recessed early and is not scheduled to return until after the November midterms, and no House vote is scheduled. Any reporting that describes college-sports compensation as federally settled is ahead of the record.

The Institute is a publisher, not a law firm. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and a deal structure that clears NIL Go is not thereby compliant with anything else — state NIL statute, tax treatment, agent registration, or a school’s own policy. For the disclosure side of the same question — which collectives file 990s, what those filings show, and which states shield the numbers from open-records requests — see the NIL Payment Disclosure Reference.

Where the payroll money comes from

Roster cost does not appear from nowhere. It is downstream of conference media distribution, and the distribution gap and the payroll gap are the same story told from two directions. The SEC and Big Ten pay their member schools roughly twice what the ACC pays and roughly two and a half times what the Big 12 pays. A top-tier SEC or Big Ten program collects $70–95 million a year in media distribution before a single ticket is sold; an ACC peer collects $40–45 million; a Big 12 peer collects $30–35 million. That distribution funds both the department’s capacity to reach the revenue-share cap and the donor base that underwrites the collective.

Estimates as of publication. Big Ten distributions are tiered, and the four former Pac-12 members are not yet at a full share — Oregon and Washington entered on reduced distributions, and USC and UCLA are phasing in. Full conference-distribution detail, including the phase-in schedules and the grant-of-rights litigation exposure, is in the Broadcaster’s Field Guide.

Related Institute references

Continue with the Coach Compensation & Buyout Tracker for what the sideline costs, the NIL Payment Disclosure Reference for which collectives file 990s and which states shield the numbers, House v. NCAA for how the revenue-share cap actually works inside a department, the Stadium Capex Tracker for the construction side of the same balance sheet, and Coaching Changes for the live carousel. For the same money in an individual sport with no depth chart and almost no school funding, see College Golf NIL Valuations, which prints every published figure in that sport — all ten of them. For how any of these numbers is arrived at in the first place — what the clearinghouse prices, what the published indexes measure, and what an athlete keeps after fees — see How a College NIL Deal Is Priced. The parent hub is the College Sports Division, which sits inside the Business of Sports.

If you are on the other side of this table — an athlete, a parent, or an adviser to one — the money questions are different ones. The NIL Commitment Decision Tool works through what a specific offer is actually worth once obligations, taxes and duration are priced in; the rookie-car problem is the most common way a first NIL cheque disappears; and the Athletes & NIL hub collects the rest.