Million-Dollar Salaries in the WNBA: A New Chapter for Women’s Basketball
A momentous change is looming on the WNBA horizon. After months of negotiations, everything indicates that a player will reach a salary of one million dollars in 2026. This proposal, which is part of a new collective bargaining agreement, represents a historic milestone for the league and a significant step in valuing female talent in professional sports. The league’s most recent proposal includes a salary cap of $5 million, which implies a 230% increase. This unprecedented increase will generate some of the most lucrative contracts for female professional athletes in any sports discipline. A maximum salary of 20% is proposed for individual players, which could translate into base salaries of up to one million dollars. This would be added to increases based on league revenue, which, according to WNBA estimates, could raise the total value of contracts to $1.3 million. Negotiations are still ongoing, and revenue sharing remains a key point of disagreement between both parties. However, if the salary cap of 5 million dollars is established as a base, the resulting salary increase will be one of the most important achievements of this collective bargaining agreement.To contextualize these increases, it’s crucial to analyze the history of the WNBA and other leagues, such as the NBA (which oversees the WNBA) and the NWSL (women’s soccer), to understand why players still feel they are not being offered what they deserve.
WNBA Salary Cap Evolution
Although the WNBA is approaching its 30th season, the league didn’t implement a salary cap until 2003, as part of the negotiations for its second collective bargaining agreement. Before that agreement, the league directly assigned contracts to the players. With the introduction of free agency, each team individually negotiated the contracts.
The first salary cap was $622,000 per team, a figure that, according to WNBA projections, will barely exceed the average salary of a player in 2026 under the current proposal. However, reaching this goal has required years of gradual progress. The 2003 collective bargaining agreement established annual increases of 4%, while a new agreement in 2008 increased the cap by 6% that season and between 3% and 4% in the following years. In 2014, the WNBA’s financial situation stagnated, and the salary cap even regressed at the beginning of a new agreement, growing only 2% annually. In 2019, the WNBA salary cap was still less than $1 million.
This landscape changed significantly with the most recent collective bargaining agreement, agreed upon in January 2020. The salary cap saw a 30% increase, the largest increase in a single season in league history up to that point, although it only increased by 3% each year during the term of that agreement. The revenue sharing component based on the league’s accumulated revenue, which was targeted based on the 2019 season, was never activated, largely because the WNBA had no ticket sales during the 2020 season, playing in a “bubble” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and played in front of reduced crowds in many markets at the beginning of 2021. In this context, the enormous increase in the WNBA’s salary cap in this agreement is really a matter of catching up with the league’s growth. In 2025, the WNBA broke its single-season attendance record, previously set in 2002, when there were 16 teams. In addition, the new national television deals that will begin in 2026 and were signed jointly with the current NBA agreement will generate more than $200 million in annual revenue, eight times more than reported in 2019, when the previous collective bargaining agreement was negotiated.The First $1 Million Salary in the WNBA
The WNBA has had a maximum salary since its inaugural collective bargaining agreement, although the proportion of the cap has changed dramatically over that period. Initially, the maximum salary of $85,000 was set at 13.7% of the cap in 2003, but the increases failed to keep pace. By the end of the 2008-13 collective bargaining agreement, the players’ maximum was less than 12% of the cap, a limit that remained until 2019. This made WNBA superstars the best value in the sport. It also compressed the salary scales for veterans: a large percentage of the league’s starters who had reached free agency earned the maximum. That changed in the current collective bargaining agreement, which raised the so-called “supermax” of the WNBA for qualified players (those who re-signed with their own team or changed teams through a sign-and-trade deal) to 16.5% of the cap. In the current proposal, maximum salaries are about to increase even more: the supermax would represent 20% of the cap in the future. Compared to the NBA’s maximum salaries (ranging from 25% to 35% of the cap, depending on years of service), that seems insignificant. But it’s important to remember that the NBA has a flexible salary cap compared to the WNBA’s rigid cap, which means most teams exceed it. WNBA teams can only exceed the cap in hardship situations. The NBA’s luxury tax line is a more appropriate benchmark. On average, NBA teams tend to spend a similar percentage of the tax amount as the WNBA does of the hard salary cap. The WNBA’s 20% maximum would be equivalent to approximately 24% of the NBA’s luxury tax line, similar to the maximum for players with six or fewer years of experience. (That’s still not close to the most experienced and highest-paid players). Another notable comparison between the leagues is the difference between the maximum and the minimum. The NBA’s ratio is an astounding 42.5:1 for the highest-paid and lowest-paid players. With the WNBA’s most recent proposal, the ratio of the maximum salary to the minimum salary will be around 5:1. It is certainly higher than it used to be (before the 2020 collective bargaining agreement, the highest WNBA salaries were less than three times the smallest) but nowhere near the NBA. It’s worth remembering that the NBA’s salary cap wasn’t introduced until the league had played longer (almost four decades, starting with the BAA precursor) than the WNBA has played now. It has continued to evolve for decades. The WNBA’s finances continue to progress, and the results of these collective bargaining negotiations will mark the biggest step forward yet.
Title of the publication: After WNBA players opted out of the collective bargaining agreement in October 2024, virtually no veterans signed contracts extending to 2026, meaning more than 100 unrestricted free agents will need to sign contracts this offseason.
Comparison with other leagues
Earlier this winter, the NWSL for soccer surpassed the WNBA in the first $1 million salaries for women in American professional team sports. Sophia Wilson of the Portland Thorns became the first when she exercised a player option for 2026 in December. The NWSL approved a “high-impact player” rule this offseason to help teams exceed the $3.5 million cap to pay more to stars after several of the league’s top players left for higher salaries in Europe. Trinity Rodman of the Washington Spirit was the first player to take advantage of that rule, signing a deal worth over $2 million annually that makes her the highest-paid women’s soccer star worldwide, according to her agent Mike Senkowski told ESPN. WNBA salaries under the current proposal would not be as high despite a larger salary cap than the NWSL due to the league’s maximum salary, but the salaries of players who cross that threshold will be symbolically important anyway. Male team sports athletes began earning over $1 million a year in the late 1970s, after the advent of free agency but before the NBA salary cap. NBA stars Moses Malone and Bill Walton reached the mark in 1979-80, at the same time that Nolan Ryan became the first million-dollar MLB player. The modern history of the NBA salary cap begins in 1984-85, when it was first introduced and set at $3.6 million. That came amid the league’s rapid growth fueled by stars like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, as well as the arrival of cable television as a source of revenue. Since then, the largest relative jump in a single season in the NBA salary cap occurred in 1995-96, when a new collective bargaining agreement produced a 44% increase. The 2016 increase that allowed the Golden State Warriors to add Kevin Durant and form a super team resulted in a smaller increase, of 34.5%, although at $24.1 million, it was easily the largest change in dollar terms.The big difference between the NBA in the 1980s and the WNBA during the previous collective bargaining agreement is that the league’s revenue-sharing model, which defines the cap as a percentage of so-called “basketball-related income,” allowed for rapid growth in successive seasons. Then, from 1984-85 to 1990-91, the NBA’s first year on NBC, the salary cap collectively grew by 230%, almost identical to what the WNBA’s current proposal would provide in relation to 2025.
The WNBA’s proposal would introduce a model similar to the NBA, where players get 50% of net income after deducting expenses. The big difference is that fixed costs such as travel, support staff, and stadium rental represent a higher percentage of revenue in the WNBA than in the NBA.As a result, the WNBPA estimates that the WNBA’s proposal would provide them with less than 15% of gross revenue. The WNBPA has responded with a proposal demanding 30% of gross revenue before considering expenses. The WNBA projects that this would result in $700 million in operating losses over the course of the new collective bargaining agreement. The players respond by pointing out that those losses would be offset by the profits from expansion fees with Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia entering the league in 2030.
The WNBA, like other professional leagues, considers expansion fees to be capital rather than revenue. As a result, that money is not part of the pool to be shared with the players. However, it would potentially cover projected losses without forcing the WNBA to use capital calls. Like their counterparts in major professional sports, WNBA owners have benefited from the dizzying valuation of teams during the course of the current collective bargaining agreement. Those have increased many times more than the relative amount that players’ salaries will increase. For most of the WNBA’s history, $10 million was the official asking price for franchises, and much less cash actually changed hands. In May, the New York Liberty sold minority shares with a valuation of $450 million, representing a jump of approximately 4,400%.
