NFL career earnings and contract money

Fifteen of the twenty are quarterbacks, and that is the single most reliable fact about NFL money. A quarterback on this list has been paid $81,223,716 a career against $23,851,991 for a wide receiver, and the reason is arithmetic rather than judgement: there is one of him on the field, he plays every snap of every drive, and a roster carries a replacement who is paid like a reserve.

A hundredth place of $99,991,395 is what it costs to be in the top hundred of a league that has paid out $44.15bn.

• Base salary 52.9%
• Signing bonus 27.6%
• Restructured money 6.3%
• Roster bonus 6.6%
• Option bonus 5.3%
• Workout bonus 0.7%
• Incentives 0.5%

Base salary is 52.9% of everything the league has itemised, which is a bare half. The other half is bonus money of one kind or another, and the difference between the two is the whole reason a headline contract figure means so little: signing, roster, option and restructured money is 45.8% of the total and it is guaranteed, while base salary is a promise that survives only as long as the player is on the roster. Three pages take the pieces apart: signing bonus, base salary and every other kind of bonus.

The last five seasons hold 68.9% of everything on this page. That is partly the cap going up and mostly the archive: the file is thick from 2012 onward and thins to a handful of names before it, so a season with fewer than 40 players on it has no page of its own.

Per career rather than in total, because a total measures how many of a position a roster carries rather than what one of them is worth: there are 212 wide receivers on this list and 83 quarterbacks, and the quarterbacks have still been paid more.

This is a roster rather than a cap sheet. A player's whole career total lands on the franchise he plays for now, because that is the question a reader asks of a squad list, and it is a different question from what the franchise itself has written cheques for.

A first-round pick earns 8.4 times what a seventh-round pick earns, and the fall is not smooth: the drop from round one to round two is bigger than the drop from round two all the way to round seven.

Alabama has 64 players on this list and they have been paid $2,536,215,497 between them, which is more than any of the 32 franchises has on its current roster. All 111 schools are ranked here.

Athletes First represents 157 of the 1,924 players here and those clients have been paid $5,045,443,846.

$4,179,732,241 sits in contracts for seasons running to 2031, across 336 players. Patrick Mahomes holds $208,950,000 of it, more than 1,910 of the 1,924 careers on this site have earned in full. The whole list is ranked here.

760 of the 1,924 careers here have money in the 2026 season, and between them they hold 50.2% of everything the league has paid out since 2005. A sport whose current players own that much of its own payroll history is a sport whose cap went up, not one whose players got better.

Where to next

The careers, the seasons, the positions, the franchises and the draft

The all-time earnings list · Money under contract · Signing bonus · Base salary · Bonus money · By position · By franchise · By draft round · By college · By agency