College Athlete Pay: $20.5m a School, All Sports

On 6 June 2025, US District Judge Claudia Wilken granted final approval to the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement, and American college sport stopped being amateur.

Schools may now pay athletes directly. The cap is about $20.5 million per school — for every athlete in every sport, combined. Related pay guides are collected in our salaries and earnings hub.

Settlement value	$2.8bn
Final approval	6 June 2025
Cap, 2025-26	~$20.5m per school
Basis	~22% of average athletic revenues
Term	10 years
Projected 2035 cap	~$33m

The comparison that frames everything

Kirby Smart is reported on $13.3 million a year at Georgia, as our guide to the highest paid college football coaches sets out.

A school’s entire revenue-share pool is about $20.5 million.

One coach’s salary is roughly 65% of the total a school may distribute among all of its athletes, across all of its sports.

Extend it across the market: the nine highest-paid coaches earn about $109 million between them, against roughly $184.5 million available to every athlete at those nine schools combined — about 59%.

These are different budget lines, and a coach’s salary does not come out of the athlete pool. That is exactly what makes the comparison informative rather than accusatory: the constraint on athlete compensation is a negotiated cap, and the constraint on coaching pay is the market. Only one of them has a ceiling.

How the new system works

Three features matter, and most coverage collapses them.

It is permitted, not required. Division I schools may share up to the cap. Nothing obliges them to reach it.

Each school decides its own distribution. How the pool is split between football, basketball and every other programme is a school-level decision, not a formula.

The cap moves. It is set at roughly 22% of average athletic revenues, projected to rise about 4% annually for the next two years, and recalculated periodically across the ten-year term — reaching an estimated $33 million by 2035.

NIL did not go away

The most common misunderstanding is that revenue sharing replaced NIL. It did not.

	Paid by	Counts against cap?
Revenue share	The school	Yes
NIL	Third parties	No

Legitimate third-party NIL payments do not count toward a school’s cap, and are reviewed by an independent clearing house against fair market value rules.

That clearing house is the whole system’s load-bearing element. Without it, NIL would be an unlimited channel around a capped one, and the cap would mean nothing. With it, the question becomes who decides what a deal is genuinely worth — which is where the next decade of disputes will sit.

A College Sports Commission has been established to administer the new arrangements.

Where this sits in sport’s money

College athletics now occupies an unusual position: an enormous revenue business whose labour costs are capped by settlement rather than by a collective bargaining agreement.

One school’s athlete pool	~$20.5m
One top coach’s salary	$13.3m
Champions League participation fee, per club	€18.62m
WNBA maximum player salary	$1.4m

A single school may distribute roughly what a Champions League club receives for reaching the league phase. It is a professional-scale sum, arriving in an institution that spent a century insisting the athletes could not be paid at all.

The transparency point from our coaching salaries coverage applies here too: because most of these schools are public universities, far more of this is on the record than in professional sport, where boxing purses are filed in part and manager pay is never disclosed at all.

What is still unsettled

Athletes are not employees under the settlement, and that classification question has not gone away.

The clearing house’s fair-market-value judgements are new and untested at scale. The cap’s ten-year path assumes revenue growth that may not arrive evenly. And further litigation over how the settlement interacts with NIL spending is live.

This is the first year of a ten-year arrangement, not a settled system.

How we checked these numbers

The $2.8 billion settlement value, Judge Claudia Wilken’s final approval on 6 June 2025 and the opening of direct revenue sharing are from CBS Sports and Stone Pigman. The approximately $20.5 million cap for 2025-26, its basis at 22% of average athletic revenues, the projected 4% annual increases, periodic recalculation across the ten-year term and the estimated $33 million by 2035 are from Clemson Athletics’ settlement FAQ and California Sports Law’s explainer. The permissive rather than mandatory nature of revenue sharing, school-level distribution discretion, the coexistence of NIL with revenue sharing, the exclusion of third-party NIL from the cap and the independent clearing house are from the same sources, with the College Sports Commission and the end of amateurism from Jackson Lewis.

The 65% and 59% comparisons are our own arithmetic, using coaching salaries from our own reporting against the published cap. They compare separate budget lines and are offered as a measure of scale, not as a claim that one is funded from the other.

Review class: annual, event-driven. Recheck on each cap recalculation, any clearing house rule change, and on further litigation affecting the settlement.