2025 Salary Cap Estimate Increased by $7 Million

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

ESPN’s Dan Graziano had a nice scoop on this year’s NFL salary with the NFL Management Council sending out guidance to NFL teams that they should anticipate a salary cap between $277.5 and $281.5 million.

This is a nice bump over the projected number we were using of $272.5 million and we have now updated all of the numbers to reflect a $279.5 million salary cap. This will increase rookie contracts, restricted free agent tenders, and franchise/transition tenders for the year as well.

This number is much higher than all but one person I had spoken with on the salary cap expectations. The league is still dealing with Covid fallout from the past which has made projections much harder, but at some point I would expect the cap to increase at a rate that would be close to $15 million a year once everything settles back down to normal.

In the grand scheme of things the cap being a few million higher really doesn’t mean much. Nobody’s buying power changes that much and everyone still is in the same relative position as they were before the memo went out. It is beneficial for teams that have a bad salary cap position for 2025 (Saints, Browns, etc…) since those teams are very tight on the cap and may be helpful for teams who have extensions on the horizon that require the use of cap room (Brock Purdy for example), but I would not expect things to change much for free agents.