The AFL Salary Cap and Total Player Payments Explained

The AFL salary cap is properly called total player payments, and for 2025 it was set at about 17.76 million dollars per club. Every one of the eighteen clubs works to the same figure, every club must spend at least 95 per cent of it, and no club may exceed it by paying a penalty. It is a hard ceiling, and the AFL verifies compliance before it will register a trade or a free agency signing.

That single number does more to shape Australian rules football than any rule about how the game is played. It is why a club that finishes eighteenth can be playing finals within three seasons, why the competition has not developed a permanent aristocracy of four or five wealthy clubs, and why an AFL list manager spends as much time modelling contract expiry as watching vision. The AFL salary cap is the competition's main equalisation instrument and it has been in place, in some form, since the late 1980s.

This page covers what total player payments actually includes, the separate and frequently confused football department soft cap, what AFL players are really paid, how the league polices the system, and the two cases — Carlton in 2002 and Adelaide in 2012 — that established what happens when a club is caught.

What total player payments actually means

Total player payments is the aggregate a club may pay its listed players in a season. It captures base salary, match payments, signing and performance bonuses, and the assessed value of ancillary benefits including vehicles, flights and accommodation.

The definition is deliberately broad. The history of salary cap enforcement in every code is a history of clubs finding categories of value that were not caught by the drafting, so the AFL's rules work from the presumption that anything of value flowing to a player counts unless it is specifically excluded. The excluded categories are narrow: registered additional services agreements, which have their own cap, and defined allowances such as the veteran allowance.

The 2025 figure and how it got there

The current numbers come from Schedule 2A of the 2023 to 2027 collective bargaining agreement between the AFL and the AFL Players' Association. That agreement set the aggregate total player payment figure at 15,022,778 dollars in 2023, rising to 18,440,415 dollars in 2027.

The intervening steps have been substantial. The 2024 figure was about 15,788,222 dollars and 2025 was about 17,761,999 dollars, a jump of close to two million dollars in a single season. That is the largest single-year rise the competition has seen and it flowed directly from the broadcast agreement that underpins the current CBA.

The mechanism behind those numbers is worth understanding, because it explains why the cap moves the way it does. Under successive collective bargaining agreements the players receive a defined share of forecast industry revenue, with certain categories excluded from the calculation. When the AFL signs a larger broadcast deal, the players' share rises with it, and the cap rises accordingly. Player payments are not negotiated as a flat dollar figure each year and then defended; they are indexed to how much money the competition makes.

That has two consequences. Rises are lumpy rather than smooth, arriving in steps that track broadcast cycles rather than inflation. And clubs plan against numbers that are fixed years in advance, which is why a list manager can commit to a six-year contract in October 2025 with a reasonable idea of what share of the 2029 cap it will consume.

The published cap figure per club by season, in dollars. These are the headline caps only and exclude allowances and exemptions that sit outside the figure. Sourced from the 2023 to 2027 collective bargaining agreement and AFL releases.

Show the numbers

Total player payments per AFL club

Item	Value
2022	13540000
2023	15022778
2024	15788222
2025	17761999

Cap, floor and why the floor matters

Since 2013 the salary floor has been 95 per cent of the cap. A club must spend at least that much on its players or face sanction. When the cap was introduced in the late 1980s the floor sat at 90 per cent, and it moved to 92.5 per cent in 2001.

The floor is the less discussed half of the system and arguably the more important one. A cap alone stops rich clubs outspending poor ones; it does nothing to stop a poorly run or financially stressed club fielding a cheap list and pocketing the difference. With a 95 per cent floor the practical spread between the highest and lowest spending clubs in a season is about five per cent, which is a remarkably tight band by the standards of professional sport anywhere.

The floor also protects the players collectively. A guaranteed minimum spend across eighteen clubs turns the negotiated share of revenue into money that actually reaches players rather than a theoretical entitlement, which is why the players' association has pushed the floor upwards at every collective bargaining round since the 1980s. Moving it from 90 to 92.5 and then to 95 per cent has been one of the quieter but more consequential shifts in the competition's economics.

In practice the interesting question is not whether clubs reach the floor — nearly all of them spend at or very near the full cap — but how they distribute what they spend. Two clubs on identical totals can have completely different lists, one carrying four players above a million dollars and a long tail near the minimum, the other spreading the money across fifteen solid contracts. Neither approach has proved reliably superior, and the choice usually reflects where a club thinks it is in its cycle rather than a settled philosophy.

Season	Total player payments per club	Note
2022	13,540,000 dollars	Salary floor 12,863,000 dollars
2023	15,022,778 dollars	First year of the current agreement
2024	15,788,222 dollars
2025	17,761,999 dollars	Largest single-year increase
2027	18,440,415 dollars	Final year of the current agreement

What sits inside and what sits outside

Inside: everything the club pays the player for playing football, in cash or in kind. Outside: additional services agreements within their own cap, the veteran allowance, and defined injury and hardship exemptions that allow a club to carry a replacement without being punished for an absence it did not cause.

One consequence is visible in the league's own reporting. The 2025 total player payments summary put spending across primary-listed players at 327.65 million dollars, which is more than eighteen times the headline cap figure. The gap is accounted for by the allowances and exemptions that sit outside the number, which is a useful reminder that the cap is a ceiling on a defined category rather than a ceiling on everything a club pays a footballer.

Additional services agreements

An additional services agreement is a marketing contract. A player is paid to promote his club or a club sponsor and must genuinely perform that work. The payments do not count inside total player payments but they sit under their own separate cap, and they must be lodged with the AFL, generally within 28 days of signing.

They matter for two reasons beyond income. First, they are the most obvious potential vehicle for disguised football payments, which is why the lodgement requirement exists and why the AFL audits them. Second, they count in the salary assessment that determines whether a long-serving player is a restricted or an unrestricted free agent. A marketing deal can therefore change where a player is allowed to go, not just what he earns — the mechanics of that test are covered in our AFL free agency guide.

The veteran allowance and other concessions

The veteran allowance applies to players with ten years of service at one club and is calculated as a set percentage of total player payments per player. It gives a club relief on part of a long-serving player's contract.

The purpose is to prevent the cap from forcing clubs to discard their own history. Without it, a thirty-two-year-old former captain on a legacy contract becomes a pure cap liability and the rational move is always to move him on. With it, the club can carry him for another season at a discount. It is one of several places where the AFL has softened a hard rule for reasons that are as much cultural as competitive.

The other relief valves are narrower and situational. Long-term injury provisions allow a club to bring in a replacement without the absent player's contract crippling its list and its cap, and hardship provisions exist for exceptional circumstances. None of these are generous, and clubs cannot plan around them, but they stop the cap producing outcomes that would look absurd to any supporter watching a season fall apart in round three.

The football department soft cap is a different thing

This is the distinction most coverage gets wrong. Total player payments cover players. The football department soft cap covers everything else the football operation spends money on: senior and assistant coaches, high performance and sports science staff, medical and rehabilitation, recruiting and list management, analysis and football administration.

For 2025 the AFL set the soft cap at 7.675 million dollars, up from 7.275 million in 2024, with a separate AFLW limit of 1.175 million. A senior coach deduction was introduced for AFLW programs allowing clubs to deduct 20 per cent of the AFLW senior coach's salary, and a further 25,000 dollars per club was made available for professional development in women's programs. Across limits and deductions, clubs were projected to have football program expenditure capacity averaging in the range of eleven to eleven and a half million dollars across both competitions.

70%30%

• Total player payments17761999
• Football department soft cap7675000

Total player payments per club against the football department soft cap, in dollars, for the 2025 season. The first is a hard ceiling on player pay; the second is a soft limit on coaching, medical, recruiting and football administration spend, with deductions available.

Show the numbers

Two different caps, 2025

Item	Value
Total player payments	17761999
Football department soft cap	7675000

Why the soft cap exists at all

It was introduced as part of the AFL's equalisation package because capping player pay alone had stopped working as an equaliser. Wealthy clubs that could not pay players more simply hired more coaches, more analysts, more physiotherapists and more recruiters, and the arms race moved from the playing list to the building behind it.

The soft cap is genuinely soft — it operates with deductions and adjustments rather than as an absolute ceiling — and it has been the subject of continuous lobbying by clubs and by the coaches' association, particularly after the reductions imposed during the pandemic seasons. Clubs argue it constrains player development. The league argues that without it, the four richest clubs would employ twice the staff of the four poorest.

What AFL players actually earn

The 2025 average player payment was about 505,961 dollars, up 10.2 per cent on the 459,173 dollars averaged in 2024. That average is a useful headline and a poor description of any individual career, because the distribution is heavily skewed.

At the top, 58 players were paid a million dollars or more in 2025, more than double the 25 who reached that bracket in 2024. Two players passed 1.6 million dollars for the first time and a further 22 sat between 1.2 and 1.6 million. At the other end, a first-year rookie earns a base in the region of 85,000 to 105,000 dollars depending on where he was drafted, and a senior-listed minimum sits at around 100,000 dollars before match payments.

• 58Players paid a million or more
• 25Same bracket in 2024
• 22Players paid 1.2 to 1.6 million
• 2Players paid above 1.6 million

Counts of players by payment band in 2025, from the AFL's annual total player payments summary. These are player counts across the whole competition, not per club.

Why the top bracket exploded

The doubling of the million-dollar cohort in one season is a direct arithmetic consequence of the cap rising by roughly two million dollars per club. When every club has an extra two million to distribute across a list of the same size, the money does not spread evenly. It concentrates at the top, because that is where the competition for players is and where clubs are most afraid of losing someone.

The projection reported alongside the 2025 figures was that clubs would carry roughly five million-dollar players each by 2027. That reshapes list building. A club with five players on a million dollars is spending close to a third of its cap on five names, which forces it towards a barbell list — a small group of very well paid stars and a long tail of players on or near the minimum, with the middle squeezed out.

List sizes and the cap

The cap does not exist in isolation from list rules. A club carries a primary list of roughly 36 to 38 players, with Category A rookie spots filling the gap — up to six at a primary list of 36, five at 37 and four at 38 — plus up to two Category B rookies, for a total squad in the mid-forties.

That means the cap is divided across a fixed and fairly small number of people. Unlike a competition with unlimited squad sizes, an AFL club cannot solve a cap problem by spreading the same money over more players, and it cannot solve a list problem by adding a body it happens to be able to afford. The two constraints bind simultaneously, which is why list management is treated as a specialist discipline with its own staff.

How the AFL polices the cap

Clubs lodge every player contract with the league. Additional services agreements must be lodged separately. The AFL's integrity and salary cap functions audit club payments and, critically, verify compliance before registering a trade or a free agency signing rather than only after the fact.

The pre-registration check is the part that matters day to day. A club cannot agree a deal during the trade period and work out the cap consequences afterwards, because the league will not register the transaction unless the club can demonstrate room. That constraint shapes the whole October market, as our AFL trade period guide sets out.

Enforcement beyond the paperwork relies on the same two sources every capped competition depends on. The first is the audit trail: contracts, agreements, club accounts and, where the league has cause, the accounts of associated entities. The second is people. Salary cap breaches are almost always exposed by someone who knows — a departing employee, an agent who feels a rival client was favoured, a player who was promised something and did not receive it. Neither the AFL nor the NRL has ever uncovered a major breach purely through routine auditing, and both have said as much.

The penalties available are deliberately varied because the deterrent has to bite differently on different clubs. A fine hurts a poorly resourced club and is absorbed by a wealthy one. Draft sanctions hurt the club that needs to rebuild. Suspending officials hurts the individuals who make the decisions. In practice the AFL has combined all three in its serious cases, and the pattern of the two landmark cases below is that the draft penalty, not the fine, did the lasting damage.

Carlton in 2002

At the end of the 2002 season the AFL found that Carlton had breached the salary cap in a manner it described as deliberate, elaborate and sophisticated, through payments made outside the cap to a small group of senior players across several preceding seasons. Reported totals for the undisclosed payments run to well over a million dollars.

The penalty was the heaviest in Australian sport. The club was fined close to a million dollars — contemporary reporting put the figure at about 930,000 dollars, and later accounts at 987,500 dollars once previously suspended penalties were included — and stripped of premium draft capital. That included the first two selections of the 2002 national draft along with two later picks in the same draft, exclusion from the 2003 pre-season draft, and early-round selections in following national drafts.

The effect on the club was long-lasting. Carlton went into a period of sustained poor performance from which it took more than a decade to recover, and the case is still cited whenever a cap investigation begins as an illustration of what the AFL is prepared to do.

Adelaide and the Kurt Tippett affair

In 2012 the AFL found that Adelaide had made undisclosed payments of about 170,000 dollars to Kurt Tippett outside the cap, and had entered into an unregistered side agreement under which the club would trade him to a destination of his choosing for a second-round selection when his contract expired.

The penalties covered both offences. The club was barred from the first two rounds of the 2013 national draft and from making father-son selections that year. Tippett himself was suspended until 30 June 2013, missing eleven matches plus the pre-season, and fined 50,000 dollars, which was a record penalty for a player. Club officials were also sanctioned.

The case is instructive because the cap breach was almost secondary. What the league punished most heavily was the secret agreement about future movement, which struck at the draft and trade system rather than at the cap.

It also changed practice across the competition. Clubs and managers had, until then, treated informal understandings about future trades as ordinary business — an assurance given to a young player from Queensland that he would be helped home when the time came, say, was regarded as good management rather than as a rule breach. The AFL's ruling established that any such agreement must be disclosed and registered, and that an unregistered one is punishable whether or not any money changed hands. Compliance departments at every club were rebuilt in the following years, and the number of officials whose job is specifically to keep contracts and agreements lodged correctly grew accordingly.

The cost of living allowance and its removal

For years the AFL permitted Sydney-based clubs an additional payment on top of the cap, on the reasoning that living costs in Sydney were materially higher than in Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth. The allowance became one of the most resented features of the system among rival clubs, particularly after Sydney's on-field success in the early 2010s.

In 2014 the AFL announced it would be removed. It was phased down to 800,000 dollars for 2015 and 600,000 for 2016 before being eliminated from 2017. During the transition the league restricted the Sydney club's recruiting, at one stage limiting incoming free agents and traded players to those earning at or below the competition average wage, which at the time sat around 340,000 dollars and was adjusted to about 349,000 for 2015.

The club argued publicly that it was being punished for a rule the league itself had written. The AFL's position was that a club could not retain an advantage during a phase-out period and simultaneously use it to recruit. Both positions were reasonable and the episode left a lasting mark on the relationship.

Third-party payments are the recurring risk

Every serious cap scandal in Australian sport has involved money reaching a player from somewhere other than the club's own payroll: a sponsor, a supporter, a director's business, a job that does not require attendance. That is the structural weakness of any cap, because a league can audit its clubs and cannot easily audit every business in the country.

The AFL's response has been disclosure obligations rather than prohibition. Marketing arrangements are permitted, capped and required to be registered, on the reasoning that a system which drove all such payments underground would be harder to police than one which brought them into the light with a cap attached. The judgement is defensible and it does not eliminate the risk.

The cap and the trade period

Cap room is a recruiting asset in exactly the way a draft selection is. A club with three million dollars of expiring contracts going into an October window can pursue a marquee player. A club that is fully committed cannot, however many picks it holds.

This produces trades that make no sense on talent and perfect sense on money — a useful player moved for a modest return because the contract was the problem — and it produces deliberate one-season pauses where a club sits out a trade window to bank room for the next one. The trade mechanics are covered in our AFL trade period guide.

The cap and free agency

Free agency changes the route a player takes, not the price. A free agent's contract counts in full against total player payments, and the compensation selection his old club receives has no cap value at all.

The club losing a free agent therefore ends the window with both a draft pick and the money it was previously spending, which is a stronger position than it looks on the day. The club signing him has spent cap room and nothing else. Our AFL free agency guide covers the eight and ten year thresholds, the right to match and how compensation is assessed.

How the AFL cap compares with the NRL

The two Australian codes have converged on similar philosophies from different starting points. Both operate hard caps in national competitions with strong equalisation traditions, both have had major breach scandals, and both treat cap management as a specialist club function.

The differences are structural. The AFL cap operates alongside a national draft, a football department soft cap and a 95 per cent floor, and player movement is compressed into a ten-day October window. The NRL has no draft at all, so its cap carries the whole equalisation burden by itself and its player market runs closer to year-round. Our explainer on the NRL salary cap sets out how league's version works, and the wider differences between the codes are covered in our comparison of rugby league and rugby union.

What to watch through the current agreement

Three things. Whether the million-dollar cohort keeps expanding at the rate 2025 suggested, and what that does to the middle of club lists. Whether the football department soft cap holds, given continuous pressure from clubs and coaches to lift it. And whether the AFL Women's competition's payment tiers close on the men's — the AFLW has its own total player payments structure and its own soft cap, both rising, and the gap between the two competitions is a live issue in every collective bargaining round.

A short glossary

Total player payments: the hard cap on payments to listed players. Salary floor: the minimum, 95 per cent of the cap. Additional services agreement: a registered marketing contract, separately capped. Veteran allowance: relief for players with ten years at one club. Football department soft cap: the separate limit on non-player football spending. Third-party payment: money reaching a player from outside the club, the recurring enforcement problem.

Where to go next

The cap is one of three interlocking systems. The draft distributes talent, free agency governs who may move without permission, and the cap governs what all of it costs.

Read our AFL trade period guide and our AFL free agency guide for the movement side, and the NRL salary cap explained or rugby league versus rugby union for the comparison with the other football code.

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