One Year of Revenue Sharing: What the New Cap Does and Doesn’t Tell You

One year ago today, schools began paying their athletes directly. The system that arrived with the House settlement has now completed a full cycle — a recruiting calendar, a transfer portal window, a championship season — and with the July 1 turn into its second year, the number at the center of it all rises: the revenue-sharing cap climbs from $20.5 million to $21.58 million per school. The settlement builds in a four percent base escalator; the actual 2026-27 increase was about 5.3%. Another increase is scheduled for 2027-28, with the figure re-evaluated every three years over the deal’s ten-year life.

That is the figure you will see in most headlines this week. It is also the number most often mistaken for something it is not.

What the cap actually covers

The revenue-sharing cap is a ceiling on one thing: the money a school can pay its athletes directly out of its own athletic revenue. For a program spending to the limit, that is $21.58 million to distribute across every scholarship sport this year — the overwhelming majority of it, at most Power Four schools, flowing to football and men’s basketball.

What the cap does not include is nearly everything that happens outside the athletic department’s own checkbook. Third-party name, image, and likeness deals — from brands, from local businesses, from collectives — do not count against it. A quarterback can draw a direct payment from his school and, separately, earn from endorsements and collective-backed agreements that sit entirely outside the $21.58 million line, provided those deals clear the sport’s new clearinghouse review.

That distinction is the whole game. It is why the cap and the cost of a roster are two very different numbers.

The real number is higher — often much higher

Add the two layers together and the ceiling looks very different. Presenting their own plans in February, Texas Tech’s athletic leaders put the real spending ceiling at the top of the sport closer to $40 million, as Sports Illustrated reported — direct revenue sharing plus the third-party money stacked on top of it. That is one program’s planning figure, not a league-wide number. The cap sets the floor of what a serious contender pays. The market sets the rest.

This is the single most important thing to understand about valuing a roster in 2026: the published cap is a starting point, not a budget. What a roster commands on the market is the sum of what the school pays directly and what its athletes earn on the open NIL market — and for the teams competing for championships, that total runs well beyond the number the settlement prints each summer.

The ground is still moving

None of this is settled, and the second year begins with more legal uncertainty than the first one ended with.

On June 9, two current players, USC linebacker Talanoa Ili and Stanford quarterback Charlie Mirer, filed an antitrust class action in federal court in Northern California against the NCAA, the major conferences, and the College Sports Commission — the body created to enforce the settlement. As Yahoo Sports reported, the suit does not challenge revenue sharing itself but its enforcement: the Commission’s limits on third-party NIL pay and the clearinghouse’s authority to reject deals, which the plaintiffs frame as a suppression of what athletes could otherwise earn. It is the most significant outside challenge since the settlement was approved. (This paragraph was corrected October 23, 2026: it first described the suit as challenging the revenue-sharing cap.)

At the same time, the enforcement machinery has been reworked from within. In June a special master declined to rule that multimedia-rights partners and school sponsors fall outside the settlement’s definition of associated entities, and Judge Claudia Wilken affirmed that decision on August 4. And from July 1, the College Sports Commission stopped running associated deals of $600 to $15,000 through its compensation-range check until an athlete’s associated deals for the year pass $50,000, up from the $2,500 and $15,000 lines it set in April. The rules that govern how third-party money reaches players have already changed since this piece was published. (This paragraph was updated October 23, 2026; it first described both changes as pending.)

And Congress has moved. The Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate 77-22 on September 28, 2026, and is pending in the House, which has until January 3, 2027. It would keep the revenue-sharing cap as the base, add a temporary retention fund on top, and write a ban on circumventing the cap into federal law. It is not law; our guide to the federal NIL legislation covers what it would do. (This paragraph was added October 23, 2026.)

What this means for how we value players and estimate roster spend

For a platform built to estimate player values and team roster spend, the lesson of July 1 is the same one that has shaped our approach from the start: the cap is not the measure.

Our player valuations are built to reflect total athlete market value — the direct-pay layer and the third-party layer together — because that is what actually determines the cost and the caliber of a roster. When a team’s Est. roster spend runs north of the published cap, it is not an error: the cap limits what a school can pay directly, and our team figure estimates spend on the roster as a whole. The $21.58 million figure tells you what a school may hand out directly. It does not tell you what a program spends on its roster, and it never has.

Our own figures follow a fixed rule. During the season, a player’s value moves only when his depth chart position changes, never on in-season production, and every roster is revalued before the winter transfer portal. The 2026 valuations on this site stay free; this season’s production feeds the 2027 outlook, which Pro adds player by player. (Added October 23, 2026.) What will not change is the principle: our player valuations take in the whole picture, we frame every figure as an estimate except where a deal has been credibly reported, and we build our model on what the market is actually paying — not on the line the calendar resets each July.

Figures current as of July 1, 2026, except the 2026-27 cap: this piece first used the $21.3 million estimate (the four percent escalator applied to year one), and on October 23, 2026 we updated it to the $21.58 million figure the College Sports Commission announced on October 1, 2026. Valuations referenced are estimates produced by The NIL Standard except where a deal has been credibly reported.