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 resets: the revenue-sharing cap climbs from $20.5 million to an estimated $21.3 million per school, the first of the settlement’s built-in four percent annual raises. 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 roughly $21.3 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 $21.3 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. Publicly reported spending plans at the sport’s wealthiest programs now target total athlete compensation in the neighborhood of $40 million — direct revenue sharing plus the third-party money stacked on top of it. 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. A program’s true investment in its players is the sum of what it pays directly and what its athletes command 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.

In June, two current players filed an antitrust class action 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 cap and the clearinghouse’s authority to reject third-party 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, and it is only beginning.

At the same time, the enforcement machinery is being reworked from within. A court recently declined to exempt certain categories of deals from review, a decision now headed for appeal. Separately, conference leaders are openly discussing loosening the clearinghouse — raising the threshold below which deals are automatically approved, and easing review for agreements that fall inside an accepted compensation range. The rules that govern how third-party money reaches players, in other words, may look different by the time this season kicks off.

What this means for how we value rosters

For a platform built to estimate what college rosters are worth, the lesson of July 1 is the same one that has shaped our approach from the start: the cap is not the measure.

Our 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 estimated value runs north of the published cap, it is not an error; it is the market working exactly as the structure invites it to. The $21.3 million figure tells you what a school may hand out directly. It does not tell you what a roster is worth, and it never has.

As the enforcement landscape shifts through the year, the specific numbers will move with it. What will not change is the principle: we value the whole picture, we frame every figure as an estimate, 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. All valuations referenced are estimates produced by The NIL Standard.