The NFL salary cap increased to $279.2 million in 2025, raising the average player salary yet again, but their actual earnings are less than you’d think.
What is the average NFL player salary in 2025?
The NFL is one of the most widely-watched, closely-followed, and well-financed competitions in the world of spots, generating more than $23 billion annually. Top players can sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, often receiving lucrative sponsorship endorsements on the side to complement their vast playing salaries.
But those eye-watering sums are balanced out by a number of other factors, including the instability of a career in professional sports and the short duration of their time at the top level. Most NFL players have just a few years to earn enough money to set them up for life, often finding themselves essentially out of work by the age of 30.
With such high stakes, these elite athletes earning billions of dollars for the league are within their rights to demand appropriate recompense. Here’s how the average NFL salary looks for 2025.
What is the average NFL salary in 2025?
Doc’s Sports reports that the average salary for an NFL player is around $3.2 million per year. However, this figure is not reflective of the wage that most players signed to NFL teams can expect to earn. The vast salaries offered to star players, particularly quarterbacks, drag the league-wide figure far higher than the majority of players will ever receive.
For example, in 2022 the average salary for an NFL quarterback was $7 million. The top ten most expensive contracts currently running in NFL are all for quarterbacks. The mammoth $450 million, ten-year deal tying Patrick Mahomes to the Kansas City Chiefs is the biggest of the lot.
The top ten highest-paid quarterbacks get an average salary of $55.5 million, and that figure will only rise in the coming years.
Which is the lowest-paid position in the NFL?
The discrepancy between positions can be seen right across the field. The top ten wide receivers earn $33.4 million per year on average, another well-paid position. At the other end of the scale are members of special teams, whose top ten average $5.353 million per year. That is the lowest average in the league.
For the majority of players, with earnings around the average, a career in the NFL is not the goldmine that it may seem. Across the NFL the average career length is just 3.3 years, giving them a terrifyingly short window to maximize their earnings.
This, along with the unstable nature of sports, combines to create difficult conditions for young athletes unaccustomed to the large amounts of money that they will receive upon signing for a team. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (2015) found that 15.7 percent of NFL players file for bankruptcy within 12 years of retiring, far higher than the national average. Far from setting them up for life, many professional players find themselves in significant financial trouble after reaching the promised land of the NFL.
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