The Australian Cricket Pay Deal and the Revenue Share Model
How the Australian cricket pay deal works: the 27.5 per cent revenue share, the MOU behind it, the 2017 dispute, and what it pays players now.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Money & governance18 min read
- Governing document
- The memorandum of understanding between Cricket Australia and the ACA
- Revenue share
- 27.5 per cent of Australian Cricket Revenue, plus a 2.5 per cent performance pool
- 2017 dispute length
- About ten months of negotiation before an in-principle deal
- Players out of contract
- Around 230 of roughly 300 from 1 July 2017
- 2017 settlement
- Announced 3 August 2017, a five-year agreement
- 2023 agreement
- Five years, about $634 million in total player payments
- Women's pool 2023 MOU
- Raised from about $80 million to $133 million
- Players' union
- Australian Cricketers' Association, formed in 1997
The Australian cricket pay deal is a collective agreement, not a salary scale. Formally it is the memorandum of understanding between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association, and its central feature is that players are paid a fixed percentage of the game's revenue rather than a fixed sum of money. That percentage has been 27.5 per cent of Australian Cricket Revenue since 2017, with a further 2.5 per cent held in a performance pool, and it was retained unchanged when a new five-year agreement was signed in 2023.
Everything else follows from that one number. National retainers, state contracts, Big Bash salary caps, match fees, minimum payments and women's pay all come out of the same pool, and the pool is sized by revenue. When broadcast income rises, the players' share rises automatically without anyone renegotiating. When it falls, the share falls. This is why the Australian cricket pay deal is argued about so fiercely: it is not a wage negotiation but a question of whether players are contractors being paid a rate or partners taking a share, and the two positions produce completely different arithmetic in a good year and a bad one.
In 2017 that argument nearly stopped Australian cricket altogether. The previous agreement expired on 30 June with no replacement, roughly 230 of about 300 professional cricketers were unemployed overnight, an Australia A tour was cancelled and an Ashes summer was in genuine doubt. The dispute ran about ten months and was settled in principle on 3 August 2017. The revenue share survived. What follows is how the model works, how it was nearly lost, and what it pays now.
What the memorandum of understanding actually is
The MOU is a long, unpublished commercial document — the 2017 version ran to around 700 pages — negotiated between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association and covering every professional cricketer in the country.
It sets the revenue-share percentage, the definition of the revenue it applies to, the total guaranteed player pool, the number of national contract places, the retainer bands, match fees, minimum payments, the salary caps for the Big Bash League and the WBBL, injury and pregnancy provisions, insurance, education and past-player funding, and the process for resolving disputes about any of it.
It is closer in shape to the collective bargaining agreements used in the AFL and the NRL than to the pay arrangements at most other cricket boards, where payments are set by the board and communicated rather than negotiated.
The revenue share model in plain terms
Take the defined revenue base — Australian Cricket Revenue, or ACR. Multiply it by 27.5 per cent. That is the players' guaranteed pool. Add a further 2.5 per cent held as a performance pool, and the theoretical ceiling reaches 30 per cent.
The pool is then divided across the whole professional playing group according to the rules in the agreement: national retainers first, then state contracts, then Big Bash and WBBL payments, then match fees and minimums. The board does not decide the size of the pool from year to year. The formula does.
Two design features make the model workable. There is a guaranteed floor, so the pool cannot collapse if revenue undershoots the forecast badly. And there is upside sharing, so if revenue beats the forecast the players take an agreed slice of the surplus — under the 2017 terms, 19 per cent of revenue above forecast up to a defined ceiling.
- Player guaranteed share27.5%
- Player performance pool2.5%
- Retained by the game70.0%
The headline shares set by the memorandum of understanding. The 27.5 per cent is a guaranteed player share of forecast revenue and the 2.5 per cent is a performance pool that is not automatically paid in full.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Player guaranteed share | 27.5 |
| Player performance pool | 2.5 |
| Retained by the game | 70 |
Why a percentage instead of a wage
The players' case is that cricket's income is generated by the cricket, and that a share aligns everyone's interests: if the game grows, everybody grows together, and if it shrinks, players absorb part of the pain rather than being insulated from it.
The board's case, made forcefully in 2017, is that a fixed percentage takes money off the top before anything can be invested, and that in a period when the game needed to spend heavily on facilities, participation and the women's game, a guaranteed share of the top line constrained exactly the spending that grows the sport.
Both arguments are honest. The reason the dispute became so bitter is that neither side was making a bad-faith case, and there is no obviously correct answer. A percentage is a claim on money that has not been earned yet, which is either a partnership or a first mortgage depending on which chair you are sitting in, and no amount of negotiation resolves that in the abstract.
The 2017 dispute, step by step
Negotiations opened in 2016 for an agreement to replace the one expiring on 30 June 2017. Cricket Australia's opening proposal removed the fixed-percentage revenue share, arguing it had "served its purpose". The ACA rejected it. Talks stalled through the Australian autumn.
The deadline passed. From 1 July 2017 around 230 of approximately 300 contracted cricketers — men and women, national and state — were out of contract and unpaid. Players continued training. An Australia A tour of South Africa was cancelled when the squad declined to travel while unemployed. A tour of Bangladesh was in doubt, and behind it sat a home Ashes summer that neither the board nor its broadcasters could afford to lose.
An in-principle agreement was announced on 3 August 2017, about ten months after negotiations began and more than a month past the expiry date. Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland described the agreements as "milestone" documents and noted that neither side got everything it wanted.
Total pool available for women's cricket under each memorandum of understanding, in millions of Australian dollars, as announced at the time each agreement was struck. Forecast pools, not audited spending.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Before 2017 | 7.5 |
| 2017 agreement | 55.2 |
| 2023 agreement | 133 |
What the 2017 settlement contained
The percentage survived at 27.5 per cent of forecast revenue plus a 2.5 per cent performance pool. The total player payment pool was guaranteed at $459 million over five years, calculated against forecast cricket revenue of $1.67 billion, with players taking 19 per cent of revenue above that forecast up to a ceiling of $1.96 billion.
Male international base payments rose from about $270,000 to $278,100 in the first year, reaching $313,004 by 2021-22. Female international base payments rose from about $40,000 to $72,076 in year one and $87,609 by the final year — an increase of well over one hundred per cent across the term, and the change that reshaped the women's game more than any other single decision of the period.
Total women's payments rose from $7.5 million to $55.2 million. And to address the board's grassroots argument directly, players agreed to contribute up to $25 million to community cricket over the term, matched by Cricket Australia through administrative savings.
The 2023 agreement
The agreement signed in 2023 kept the model intact — 27.5 per cent plus a 2.5 per cent performance pool — and increased the money flowing through it. Professional players were to share about $634 million over five years, a rise of roughly 26 per cent on the previous deal.
| Element | Under the 2023 agreement |
|---|---|
| Revenue share | 27.5 per cent, plus 2.5 per cent performance pool |
| Total player payments | About $634 million over five years |
| Women's pool | Raised from about $80 million to $133 million |
| Men's national average retainer | About $951,000 in year one, towards $1.2 million by 2027-28 |
| Men's state average retainer | Above $100,000, with annual rises built in |
| Women in WNCL and WBBL | Averaging about $151,019 across a year |
| BBL club payment pool | Towards $3 million per club per season |
| WBBL average retainer | Roughly doubled, to about $54,000 |
Cricket Australia's chief executive at the time, Nick Hockley, framed the deal as a step forward for the women's game, and the numbers support that reading: the women's pool grew by more than 60 per cent while the overall pool grew by around a quarter.
What the deal pays a national player
For men, the average retainer for a nationally contracted player was about $951,000 in the first year of the 2023 agreement, before match fees and superannuation, projected to pass $1 million by year four and approach $1.2 million in 2027-28.
For women, the top nationally contracted earners were projected to pass $800,000 a year by the end of the agreement, once a WBBL contract, match fees and marketing payments are added to the national retainer.
These are averages and projections. Individual retainers are ranked and confidential, and the mechanics of who gets one are covered in the guide to Cricket Australia central contracts.
What it pays everyone else
This is the part of the deal that gets least attention and matters most to the size of the professional game. Under the 2023 agreement, men's state retainers averaged above $100,000 with annual increases built in, and women contracted to both the WNCL and the WBBL averaged around $151,019 across a full year.
Those figures are what make a professional career possible for the roughly two hundred cricketers in Australia who never hold a national contract. They are also the figures most exposed to a revenue downturn, because the money at the top of a list is harder to cut than the money in the middle of it. The competition those players are paid for is explained in the guide to the Sheffield Shield.
The performance pool
The additional 2.5 per cent is not automatically paid. It sits in a pool tied to agreed performance measures, which is why the honest description of the model is "27.5 per cent guaranteed, up to 30 per cent in total" rather than a flat 30.
The design intent is to give players a stake in outcomes as well as in revenue, and to give the board something to point at when arguing that the share is not simply a fixed tax on the top line. In practice it is a modest component of total pay compared with retainers, match fees and Big Bash contracts.
Match fees and how they interact
Match fees are paid per international played and go to contracted and uncontracted players alike. They scale by format, with a Test worth substantially more than a Twenty20 international.
Fees are the mechanism by which a heavier schedule reaches players without any renegotiation, and they are why an uncontracted player who plays a full home summer can out-earn a contracted player who spends it injured. They also mean that changes to the international calendar have a direct payroll effect — one more Test series in a year moves real money.
The women's game and what the model did to it
The single clearest effect of embedding women's cricket inside the same agreement is that the women's pool grows automatically with the game's revenue rather than requiring a separate act of generosity each cycle.
From $7.5 million before 2017, to $55.2 million under that agreement, to $133 million under the 2023 deal, the trajectory is unusually steep for any women's sport anywhere. It underwrote full-time professionalism for the national squad, then for the WBBL, then for state WNCL contracts, and it is the financial reason behind the depth Australia has sustained. The competition it built is covered in the guide to the Women's Big Bash League.
Big Bash pay sits inside the same document
The BBL and WBBL salary caps, minimum payments and pool sizes are all set by the MOU rather than by the tournament. Under the 2023 agreement, club player payment pools in the men's competition rose towards $3 million per club per season, the highest club earners sat around $420,000, average retainers were near $167,000, and minimum payments rose by about 20 per cent.
That matters for how the tournament works on the field. A salary cap that rises brings better overseas players and holds more Australian internationals; a cap that stagnates while global franchise leagues grow does the opposite. The tournament structure itself is covered in the Big Bash League format guide.
The Australian Cricketers' Association
The ACA was formed in 1997, at a point when Australian players had strong individual bargaining power and almost no collective structure. Its founding purpose was to give the playing group a single counterparty in negotiations with the board, and the first collective agreement followed shortly afterwards.
It does more than negotiate. The association runs player education and career transition programs, provides welfare and mental health support, administers a past-players fund, and represents members in disputes with the board. It also holds a substantial institutional memory, which matters in a negotiation where one side turns over its personnel every few years and the other has a permanent staff.
Its position through the 2017 dispute — that the percentage was a principle rather than a rate — was only defensible because the membership held together across national, state, men's and women's cricketers. That solidarity was not obvious in advance. State players stood to gain least from defending a model that mostly benefited the top of the list, and women players had the most to lose from a summer without income. Both groups held, and the outcome reflected it.
How Australian players were paid before the model existed
For most of the twentieth century Australian Test cricketers were paid a modest match fee and not much else, and the amateur-adjacent structure that produced that arrangement collapsed in the late 1970s when a rival competition offered players multiples of what the board did. The professional era that followed established that players had leverage and would use it, but pay remained a board decision through the 1980s and much of the 1990s.
Collective agreement changed the mechanism, not just the amount. Once payments were set by a negotiated document with a percentage share, the question stopped being how much the board thought players were worth and became how much the game earned. That is a different argument, and it produces different numbers.
The full story of the 1977 rupture and its consequences is a subject in its own right; what matters here is that it is the reason Australian cricket has a players' union with real bargaining strength and a board that expects to negotiate rather than announce.
Minimum payments and the floor
The headline figures in any pay deal describe the top. The clauses that matter most to the size of the professional game describe the bottom.
The agreement sets minimum payments for state contracts, for BBL and WBBL contracts, and for rookie-level deals. Under the 2023 agreement, minimum BBL contracts rose by about 20 per cent and minimum WBBL contracts by about 30 per cent. Those percentages sound small against a $634 million pool, but they determine whether a twenty-two-year-old on the edge of a state squad can afford to keep playing rather than take full-time work.
The floor also does something less obvious: it stops clubs and states competing by paying badly. A minimum payment removes the option of filling a squad with cheap fringe players and concentrating the money on two names, which is the same reason salary floors exist alongside caps in the AFL and the NRL.
Injury, pregnancy and welfare provisions
A retainer that stops when a player is hurt is not much of a retainer, so the agreement guarantees payment through injury and provides for medical treatment, surgery and rehabilitation to be funded and managed by the program rather than by the individual.
Parental provisions were a significant addition as the women's game professionalised. Paid parental leave, retained contracts through pregnancy and return-to-play support are now standard features, and they exist because a twelve-month contract cycle would otherwise force a player to choose between a career and a family in a way male players never faced.
Insurance, income protection and post-career support round out the welfare package. None of this appears in the headline revenue-share number, and all of it is funded from the same pool.
How disputes are resolved
The agreement contains its own dispute process, which is how the parties handle disagreements about revenue definitions, payment calculations and interpretation without either side going public. Most disputes are settled there and never reach a headline.
What happened in 2017 was different in kind. It was not a dispute under the agreement but a failure to reach one, which left no mechanism running at all. That distinction explains why the 2017 stand-off escalated so far so fast: there was no document in force to arbitrate under, and no obligation on either side except commercial pressure.
Five numbers that explain the deal
27.5 per cent — the guaranteed player share of Australian Cricket Revenue, unchanged across the 2017 and 2023 agreements.
$634 million — the total player payment pool across five years under the 2023 agreement, up roughly 26 per cent on the previous deal.
$133 million — the pool funding women's cricket under the same agreement, up from about $80 million.
230 — the approximate number of professional cricketers out of contract and unpaid from 1 July 2017.
Ten months — how long the 2017 negotiation ran before an in-principle agreement was reached.
Those five between them describe the model, the money, the direction of travel, the cost of failure and the time it takes.
What happens when revenue falls
The percentage model cuts both ways, and the COVID-affected seasons were the first serious test. Cancelled and rearranged tours, empty or restricted grounds and disrupted broadcast schedules pushed revenue below forecast, and payments across Australian cricket were adjusted accordingly, alongside job losses in the administration.
The model held. That is a meaningful result: a fixed-wage system would have forced a renegotiation, while a percentage system absorbed the shock through its own arithmetic. It is also the strongest argument the players' association makes for keeping it — the share is not only a claim on the upside.
- 2017 agreement459
- 2023 agreement634
Total player payments in millions of Australian dollars across the five-year term of each agreement, as announced when each was struck. Forecast pools built on projected revenue, not audited spending.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 2017 agreement | 459 |
| 2023 agreement | 634 |
The adjustment ledger and why the numbers move
Because the share is calculated against forecast revenue and settled against actual revenue, there is a reconciliation process running through the life of any agreement. Payments are made on the forecast, and the difference is trued up afterwards.
This is why quoted figures for Australian player payments so often disagree with each other. A number announced when an agreement is signed is a projection. A number reported three years later may be an actual. Both can be correct and neither describes the other.
Where the money comes from
Almost all of it is broadcast income. Cricket Australia's revenue is dominated by domestic media rights, with sponsorship, matchday and ICC distributions making up the balance, which is why a broadcast negotiation is effectively a pay negotiation held a year or two in advance.
The current arrangements — a seven-year domestic deal running to the end of the 2030-31 summer — are set out in the guide to Australian cricket broadcast rights. Read the two together and the pay deal stops looking like a bargaining outcome and starts looking like arithmetic: the broadcast number sets the pool, and the MOU divides it.
What the dispute changed permanently
Three things. The revenue-share model was tested to destruction and survived, which makes it much harder to remove in any future negotiation. Women's cricket moved inside the same agreement on the same principles, which is now irreversible. And both parties learned what running to the deadline costs — an Australia A tour, a month of unpaid players, and a public argument neither side won.
Every negotiation since has started earlier and been conducted more quietly. That is the dispute's real legacy, more than any clause in the document.
It also changed how both parties talk in public. Cricket Australia no longer argues that revenue sharing is illegitimate, and the players' association no longer treats every proposed change to the revenue base as an attack on the principle. The 2023 agreement was signed without a public stand-off, and the absence of drama was the point.
What to watch in the next round
The agreement signed in 2023 runs five years, so a replacement negotiation is the next significant event in Australian cricket's finances. Three questions will shape it.
Whether the 27.5 per cent survives a fourth consecutive agreement, or whether the definition of Australian Cricket Revenue is where the argument moves instead — changing the base is a quieter way to change the outcome than changing the percentage.
How the agreement handles global franchise leagues, which now compete directly with the national retainer for a player's calendar in a way they did not in 2017.
And how the women's share is set once its revenue contribution becomes large enough to measure independently, rather than being funded as a share of a mostly men's revenue base.
Common misreadings of the deal
The first is that 27.5 per cent means players take 27.5 per cent of everything Cricket Australia earns. They do not. The share applies to a defined revenue base agreed between the parties, not to the whole of the board's income, and the definition is negotiated separately from the percentage.
The second is that the pool is split evenly. It is not. National retainers absorb a large share of it, and the gap between the top of the national list and a first-year state contract is very wide — wider, proportionally, than in either the AFL or the NRL, because cricket has no salary cap constraining the top end of national pay.
The third is that a bigger pool means every player earns more. It means the pool is larger; the distribution rules inside the agreement decide where the increase lands, and successive agreements have deliberately pushed a disproportionate share of growth towards women's cricket and towards minimum payments rather than towards the highest earners.
The fourth is that the 2017 dispute was about greed on one side or the other. It was about whether players are partners or employees, and both answers are defensible. Reading it as a wage argument makes the ten-month duration inexplicable.
Why this matters for anyone following Australian cricket
Almost every recurring argument in the Australian game runs back to this document. Why the Big Bash was shortened. Why a fast bowler is rested from a Sheffield Shield match. Why the women's schedule expanded so quickly. Why a player takes a No Objection Certificate for an overseas league rather than a domestic contract. Why there are twenty-one national contracts and not twenty-four.
None of those are decided by the pay deal alone, but all of them are constrained by it, because it sets both the money available and the obligations attached to taking it. Understanding the model is the shortest route to understanding why Australian cricket makes the decisions it does.
Where to read more
The individual contracts funded by this agreement are covered in the guide to Cricket Australia central contracts. For the broader shape of the Australian game, see the cricket in Australia hub, the history of Australian cricket, and the Australia sport hub. For a comparison with how another Australian code handles collective pay, the NRL salary cap guide is the closest parallel, and the cricket section collects the rest.