Highest Paid NBA Coaches: Steve Kerr on $17.5m

Steve Kerr earns $17.5 million a year to coach the Golden State Warriors — the most of any coach in the NBA.

The coaches ranked around seventh on this list, at roughly $11 million, still earn about thirteen times the best-paid coach in world rugby.

The 2025-26 list

Rank	Coach	Team	Reported salary
1	Steve Kerr	Golden State Warriors	$17.5m
2	Erik Spoelstra	Miami Heat	$15m
3	Tyronn Lue	LA Clippers	$15m
4	Monty Williams	Detroit Pistons	~$13.08m
5	Doc Rivers	Milwaukee Bucks	~$11m
6	Ime Udoka	Houston Rockets	~$11m
7	Joe Mazzulla	Boston Celtics	~$11m
8	Rick Carlisle	Indiana Pacers	~$11m

Kerr also holds four championships, the most among active NBA coaches after Gregg Popovich stepped down at San Antonio in May.

Spoelstra and Lue are level at $15m, and four coaches sit together at around $11m, so positions 5 to 8 are a cluster rather than a strict order.

The contracts are long, and that is the point

The headline annual figure understates what is being negotiated.

Coach	Contract
Monty Williams	6 years, $78.5m
Gregg Popovich	5 years, $80m — the richest NBA coaching deal

Popovich’s $80 million over five years — about $16 million a year — remains the richest contract given to an NBA head coach. He stepped down as Spurs coach in May, which is why he does not appear in the 2025-26 rankings.

These are multi-year guarantees, not rolling salaries. A six-year term is part of what a coach is buying with their leverage, and it means the total is as meaningful as the annual rate.

Four sports, one job

This completes a comparison this site has now built across four sports.

Sport	Top reported salary
Football (club)	~€35m — Simeone
Football (Premier League)	~£20m — Guardiola
NBA	$17.5m — Kerr
US college football	$13.3m — Kirby Smart
Rugby union	~£800,000 — Farrell

Two things stand out.

Kerr out-earns Kirby Smart — but only by about $4 million, and the college figure comes from a public university, covered in our guide to the highest paid college football coaches. A university is paying within a few million of an NBA franchise.

Rugby is not in the same conversation. Its best-paid coach is reported at around £800,000, as our guide to the highest paid rugby coaches sets out — less than a tenth of the coaches clustered at $11 million here.

What it costs against what the teams are worth

NBA coaching salaries look large until you set them beside the franchises paying them.

Our ranking of the most valuable sports teams covers the valuations, and the direction of travel is the same one we found in the WNBA, where CNBC valued the Golden State Valkyries at $1 billion while the league’s maximum player salary sits at $1.4 million.

A $17.5 million coaching salary is a rounding error against a franchise valuation, and a very large number against almost any other job in sport. Both are true, and which one you notice depends on what you are comparing it with.

The buildings themselves are the other half of that balance sheet — our ranking of the biggest NBA arenas covers what those franchises play in.

How reliable are these figures?

More reliable than football manager pay, less than college football.

NBA coaching salaries are reported rather than disclosed — no franchise publishes them — but they are covered closely by specialist outlets with access to contract terms, and the major figures corroborate across sources.

That places them in the middle of the transparency range this site keeps returning to: public-university contracts at one end, where the numbers can be checked, and boxing purses at the other, where the figures filed with commissions are known to be partial by design.

How we checked these numbers

Steve Kerr’s $17.5 million for 2025-26 and his position at the top of the list are from Sportico’s ranking. Erik Spoelstra’s and Tyronn Lue’s $15 million are from Sportico and FanSided’s post-extension list. Monty Williams’ six-year, $78.5 million Detroit contract is from the same reporting, and the ~$13.08 million annual figure is our own arithmetic from that total. The ~$11 million figures for Doc Rivers, Ime Udoka, Joe Mazzulla and Rick Carlisle are from Sportico and Front Office Sports. Gregg Popovich’s $80 million over five years, described as the richest NBA coaching contract, is from CBS Sports, and his May departure from the Spurs coaching role is from Sportico. Kerr’s four championships as the most among active coaches is from the same source.

Salaries are reported, not published. Franchises do not disclose coaching pay, so treat the ordering as sound and individual amounts as close approximations. Positions 5 to 8 sit at effectively the same figure and the order between them should not be read as precise.

Review class: annual, event-driven. Recheck at the start of each season and on any major extension, hiring or departure.