College Football Scholarship Limits: From 85 to 105
College football scholarship limits explained: the NCAA's 105-player FBS roster cap, the old 85 rule, FCS equivalencies and what a full ride actually covers.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished College Football25 min read
- FBS roster cap from 2025-26
- 105
- Previous FBS scholarship limit
- 85
- FCS equivalency limit
- 63
- Division III athletic scholarships
- None
For 31 seasons, from 1994 through 2024, the number that decided how a major college football roster was built was 85. On July 1, 2025, it stopped applying to most of the sport's largest programs.
The rule now, for NCAA schools operating under the House v. NCAA settlement, is a roster cap of 105 players in which every place may carry a full scholarship. That is the college football scholarship limit as it stands: no separate ceiling on scholarships, only on the number of players. Before the change, a Football Bowl Subdivision team could have 85 players on athletic aid and as many walk-ons as it cared to dress. The Football Championship Subdivision has worked from 63 scholarships' worth of aid divided among its players, Division II from 36, and Division III from none. Whether a particular school pays for all 105 is a separate matter, settled by its conference and its budget.
The number now: a 105-player roster with every place fundable
The settlement in House v. NCAA received final approval from Judge Claudia Wilken on June 6, 2025, and its terms took effect on July 1. It did several things at once, including allowing schools to share revenue directly with athletes. For rosters, it replaced one kind of limit with another.
Under the old system the NCAA capped scholarships sport by sport and mostly left roster size alone. Under the new one, schools bound by the settlement have no scholarship caps in any sport. They have roster limits, and any athlete inside the limit may receive anything from nothing to a full grant. In football the limit is 105.
So the headline comparison of 85 against 105 is a comparison of two different things. Eighty-five was a count of scholarships on a roster of perhaps 120. One hundred and five is a count of players, with scholarships permitted for all of them.
- 85Old FBS scholarship limit
- 105New roster cap
- 20Added scholarships permitted
- 63Old FCS equivalency limit
NCAA Division I figures. The 85 was a scholarship limit with no roster cap; the 105 is a roster cap with no scholarship limit, at schools operating under the House settlement.
Who is inside the settlement
The defendants in the case were the NCAA and five conferences: the ACC, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the SEC. Their members are bound. Every other Division I school was given a choice to opt in, and those that did accepted the roster limits along with the right to share revenue. The cap is the same 105 for an FCS program that opted in as for an FBS one.
Schools that stayed out kept the old arrangement: scholarship limits by sport, no roster cap, and no direct revenue sharing. That is why a complete answer to "how many scholarships does a college football team have" now starts with a question about which rules the school plays under. The division between the two subdivisions of Division I football is laid out in our guide to FBS and FCS.
How the 85 worked as a head-count limit
The NCAA sorted its sports into two kinds for scholarship purposes. FBS football was one of a small group of head-count sports. In those, every athlete who received any athletic aid at all was a "counter," and each counter used up one whole place against the team limit no matter how small the award. A player given $500 for books counted the same as a player given everything.
The incentive that created was obvious. If a partial award costs a full place, nobody gives partial awards. FBS football scholarships were full scholarships, almost without exception, and the 85 counters were 85 players on what everyone called a full ride.
| Former Division I head-count sport | Scholarship limit |
|---|---|
| FBS football | 85 |
| Men's basketball | 13 |
| Women's basketball | 15 |
| Women's volleyball | 12 |
| Women's gymnastics | 12 |
| Women's tennis | 8 |
Every other Division I sport was an equivalency sport, FCS football among them. An equivalency limit is a pool of money expressed in scholarships. A baseball coach with 11.7 equivalencies could spread them across 27 players, giving one a half, another a quarter, a third just tuition. The total value could not exceed the pool.
The roster above the 85
The 85 was never the size of the team. Nothing in the manual limited how many players could be on a roster once the school year began, and FBS programs filled the space above 85 with players who paid their own way. A typical major-college roster ran to 115 or 120. Some went much higher.
Those extra players made the 85 workable. They filled out the scout teams that let the starters practice against a full opponent, covered kickoffs, and gave coaches a pool of proven, low-cost candidates for any scholarship that came open. Their status, rights and odds are the subject of our guide to what a walk-on is in college football.
Head-count accounting also explains the workarounds that grew up around it. Because the limit counted bodies on aid and not dollars, the valuable thing was to keep a player off the count for a semester or a year. Delayed enrollments, scholarships charged to the following year's class, and players steered to academic aid all came from that one feature of the rule.
Who decides how many of the 105 to fund
Permission is not obligation. The settlement lets a school put all 105 football players on scholarship. It does not make any school do it, and the decision sits at two levels above the head coach.
The first is the conference. Leagues can set their own rules inside NCAA limits, and a conference is free to agree on a common football figure below 105 for its members. The reasoning for doing so is competitive as much as financial. No school wants to be the one that does not spend when a rival does, and a shared ceiling removes the question while athletic directors work out what the new era costs. A league that sets no figure leaves each member to decide alone, which in practice means deciding against its richest rival.
The second level is the campus budget. A scholarship is not a discount the athletic department gives itself. At most universities the department pays the institution for each athlete's tuition, fees, housing and meals, at a rate that is higher for out-of-state students at public schools. Twenty added football scholarships at a flagship state university with a national recruiting base is a seven-figure annual line.
How the revenue-sharing cap enters into it
The settlement also set a cap on what a school may pay its athletes directly, roughly $20.5 million in the first year, rising over the life of the agreement. New scholarships interact with that figure. Scholarships a school adds above the old sport-by-sport limits count against its revenue-sharing cap, up to $2.5 million a year.
That provision turns the scholarship decision into a trade. A dollar spent on a 95th football scholarship is, up to that threshold, a dollar not available to pay a starting quarterback or a point guard. Coaches at well-resourced programs have mostly concluded that depth is worth it. Programs with tighter budgets have had to decide whether 20 more funded linemen and linebackers help more than a few better-paid starters would. How the cap and the payments work is covered in our explainer on NIL deals and revenue sharing.
The conference a school belongs to shapes all of this, because conference media revenue is what pays for it. The widening gap between leagues is the subject of our guide to college football conferences.
FCS football scholarship limit and the levels below
Below FBS, football scholarships have always been divided.
| Level | Football scholarship limit | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| FBS under the House settlement | No scholarship limit; 105-player roster cap | Any player on the roster may receive up to a full grant |
| FBS before 2025-26 | 85 | Head-count; every counter was one full scholarship |
| FCS | 63 | Equivalency, traditionally spread among no more than 85 players |
| NCAA Division II | 36 | Equivalency |
| NCAA Division III | 0 | No athletic scholarships in any sport |
| NAIA | 24 | Equivalency |
| NJCAA junior colleges | 85 | Awards for two-year college players |
The FCS number needs unpacking. Sixty-three is not the number of players on aid. It is the total value of aid, measured in full scholarships, and the traditional rule let a program spread that value over as many as 85 counters. An FCS coach's spring is spent on arithmetic that an FBS coach never had to do: whether a full scholarship for a quarterback is worth more to the team than two halves for a safety and a guard.
The effect on families is that an FCS "scholarship offer" tells them little until it comes with a percentage. A 40 percent award at an expensive private school can leave a larger bill than no athletic aid at a state school with in-state tuition.
Division II, the NAIA and junior college
Division II's 36 equivalencies, spread across a roster that can exceed 100, mean that full scholarships are rare and most players combine a partial athletic award with academic money and need-based aid. Division II coaches are, in practice, financial aid counselors for half the year.
The NAIA sets its limit at 24 and lets academic achievement soften the count: aid to players who meet certain academic marks can be partly or wholly exempt. The mechanics are in the NAIA's handbook and change from time to time, so a recruit should ask a coach how his own package is being counted.
Junior colleges are the surprise in the table. The NJCAA allows football programs as many as 85 scholarships, though few two-year colleges have the budget to fund anything close to that, and what an award covers varies from one college to the next. California's community colleges, which run their own association, offer no athletic scholarships.
What a full ride football scholarship covers
The NCAA's term is a full grant-in-aid. For decades it had five components and no more.
| Component | Covered by a full scholarship |
|---|---|
| Tuition | Yes, at the in-state or out-of-state rate that applies to the player |
| Required fees | Yes |
| Room | Yes, in campus housing or as an allowance toward rent |
| Board | Yes, through a meal plan or an allowance |
| Required course books | Yes |
| Cost-of-attendance stipend | Yes since 2015, at schools that fund it |
| Travel home, a car, a phone bill | Not as line items; the stipend is meant to offset costs of this kind |
| Costs after eligibility ends | Depends on the school's policy |
The gap between that package and what college costs was the subject of argument for years. A university's financial aid office calculates a "cost of attendance" for every student under federal rules, and it includes transportation, laundry, a phone and other personal expenses. The full grant-in-aid stopped short of that figure by a few thousand dollars a year. An athlete on a full ride, with little time left over for a job during the season, was expected to find the difference.
The cost-of-attendance stipend
In January 2015, at the NCAA convention, the five wealthiest conferences used their newly granted autonomy to redefine a full scholarship as the full cost of attendance. The vote was 79 to 1. It took effect that August. Since then a full scholarship at those schools, and at others that chose to follow, has included a cash stipend covering the gap.
The amount differs from campus to campus, because each school's aid office sets its own cost-of-attendance figure. That quickly became a recruiting point: a school in an expensive city could truthfully tell a recruit its stipend was larger than a rival's.
A later addition came from the courts. After the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in NCAA v. Alston in June 2021, schools were permitted to pay education-related awards on top of the scholarship, up to $5,980 a year.
What it leaves out
A scholarship is not a salary and was never taxed like one in full, but it is not wholly tax-free either. Under federal rules the portions that pay for tuition, fees and books are generally not income, and the portions that pay for room and board generally are. Many families learn this in the first April.
The scholarship also does not, by itself, cover summer school before freshman year, graduate tuition for a fifth-year player in every case, or medical costs that outlast a career. Schools often provide all of these. They do so by policy and not because the definition of a grant-in-aid requires it.
One year or four: multi-year scholarships since 2012
Ask a parent how long an athletic scholarship lasts and most will say four years. From 1973 until 2012 the correct answer was one.
The NCAA had allowed four-year awards before 1973. That year it changed the rule so that athletic aid could be given for no more than one academic year at a time, renewable each summer at the school's discretion. The stated reasons had to do with athletes who accepted a scholarship and then stopped participating. The effect was to hand coaches an annual decision over every player on the roster. A scholarship could be not renewed for a poor season, an injury that would not heal, or the arrival of a new head coach with other plans.
- Before 1973Schools could award athletic scholarships for four years.
- 1973The NCAA limited awards to one year at a time, renewable each year at the school's discretion.
- Late 2011The Division I Board of Directors approved a rule letting schools offer multi-year scholarships again.
- February 2012An attempt by member schools to override the rule fell just short. About 62.1 percent voted to overturn it, and 62.5 percent was needed.
- January 2015The autonomy conferences barred their members from reducing or canceling aid for athletic reasons.
The main steps in NCAA Division I rules on the length and security of an athletic scholarship.
The 2012 vote is worth dwelling on. A majority of Division I schools that voted wanted to keep scholarships at one year, and many said so on the record: multi-year awards would cost more and would tie a coach's hands. The rule survived because overriding the board required a five-eighths supermajority and the opponents came up two votes short.
Multi-year awards were then permitted, not required. Their use spread unevenly until the 2015 autonomy legislation, which went at the same problem from the other side. In the conferences that adopted it, a scholarship may not be reduced or canceled because of athletic ability, performance or injury. A coach can still decide a player will never see the field. He cannot take the scholarship away for that reason.
When aid can still be taken away
The protections have limits, and they are written into every aid agreement. A scholarship can be canceled during its term if the player becomes ineligible, gives false information on an application or agreement, commits serious misconduct, or quits the team. A player who enters the transfer portal can have his aid ended at the close of that academic term, a rule explained in our guide to the transfer portal's windows.
A school that reduces or declines to renew an award must tell the player in writing and offer a hearing before a body outside the athletic department. Few players use the hearing. It exists.
The practical difference between 2010 and now is this. Then, a scholarship was a one-year contract the school could decline to renew for any football reason. Now, at the major programs, it is closer to a commitment for the length of the player's eligibility, which he can end by transferring and the school largely cannot end for him.
The yearly signing cap of 25 that disappeared
The 85 limited how many scholarship players a team could have. A second, less famous number limited how many it could add. For most of the modern era an FBS program could bring in no more than 25 new scholarship players a year, "initial counters" in the manual's language.
Eighty-five divided by 25 is 3.4. A program that signed 25 every year and kept them all for four or five seasons would be far over the total, so the two limits only fit together if players left. The annual cap existed to control how many left and why.
Why it existed
Without an annual limit, the efficient strategy was ugly. A coach could sign 35 players each winter, see who developed, and clear room by pushing out the ones who had not, through non-renewal, pressure to transfer, or a medical exemption for an injury that might have healed. The practice was called oversigning, and it was most associated with the SEC of the 2000s. After Mississippi signed 37 players in February 2009, the conference capped its members' signing classes at 28, then tightened that to 25 in 2011. The NCAA later set national limits on signings of its own.
Coaches adapted. A signee who enrolled in January could sometimes be counted back against the previous year's class if it had been short of 25. A player could be asked to delay enrollment, or arrive nominally as a walk-on. Those techniques are described in our guide to redshirt rules and the other shirts, and what signing a class involves today is in our guide to how college football signing works.
Why it went
The cap was designed for a world in which players left a program slowly. The transfer portal ended that. Once a team could lose 15 or 20 scholarship players in a single winter, a hard limit of 25 arrivals meant it might be unable to replace them and could fall well under 85 through no decision of its own. New head coaches, who often inherit a wave of departures, were hit hardest.
The NCAA first loosened the cap after the one-time transfer rule arrived in 2021, allowing programs to replace a number of departing transfers above the 25. It then suspended the limit altogether, and the limit was never restored. A program can now sign as many high school players and transfers as it has room for under the overall limit.
The repeal solved the roster-replacement problem and removed a protection at the same stroke. With no annual cap, nothing in the numbers discourages a staff from turning over a large share of its roster each year, and some have replaced close to half in a single offseason.
Who lost out when roster limits arrived
A cap of 105 sounds like an expansion beside 85. For the 20 or so players at the bottom of a 125-man roster, it was a cut.
The losers were walk-ons, and the cuts came before the settlement was even final. Through the winter and spring of 2025, FBS programs trimmed toward 105 in anticipation of approval. Players who had spent two or three years on scout teams were told there was no longer a place. Judge Wilken refused to approve the settlement that April until the parties addressed them.
The fix is usually called grandfathering. Athletes who were on a roster in 2024-25, or had been promised a place for the following year, and who lost it because of the new limits were made exempt from the cap for as long as their eligibility lasts, at their original school or any other. The exemption gives a school permission to carry them. It gives the player no right to be carried, and by the time it existed a number of programs had moved on.
The squeeze on high school recruits
The less visible losers are still in high school. Two changes have arrived together. Rosters are capped, so there are fewer total places. And the annual signing limit is gone while transfers move freely, so a coach can fill a need with a 22-year-old who has started 25 college games instead of an 18-year-old who has started none.
Each change is defensible on its own terms. Together they tilt every roster decision toward the proven older player and away from the 18-year-old who needs developing. The prospects ranked at the top of a class are unaffected; any program will find room for them. The pressure falls on the three-star lineman who used to be the 22nd member of a 25-man class and is now competing for that place with the portal. How those rankings are assigned is covered in our guide to recruiting star ratings.
Some of that talent moves down a level, which is good for the FCS and Division II programs that receive it. Some of it stops playing.
Title IX arithmetic: what 20 more football scholarships does to the women's count
Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex discrimination in education, applies to athletic scholarships through a specific test. The total dollars of athletic aid a school awards to men and to women must be substantially proportionate to each sex's share of its athletes. Federal guidance has treated a gap of more than about one percentage point as requiring an explanation.
The test is in dollars and it is school-wide. It does not ask whether women's soccer has as many scholarships as football. It asks whether, if 47 percent of a school's athletes are women, about 47 percent of its athletic aid goes to women.
Now add 20 full football scholarships. At a school where a full grant is worth $50,000 a year, a figure chosen here only to make the arithmetic visible, that is $1 million of new aid to men. If the school was in balance before, it is out of balance after, and it has two honest ways back. It can add a comparable amount of aid for women, which the removal of scholarship caps in every sport now allows. Or it can reduce aid to men elsewhere, which usually means the men's sports that were already on partial scholarships.
The part of the cap that helps
The roster cap pushes the other way on a different Title IX measure. The participation test compares the share of athletes who are women with the share of undergraduates who are women, and football has always been the reason that comparison is hard to satisfy: 120 or more men with no women's team of similar size. Cutting football from 120 to 105 removes 15 men from the count at a stroke.
So the same reform makes the participation numbers easier and the scholarship numbers harder. Athletic departments that fund all 105 are, in most cases, also adding women's scholarships in sports where the old equivalency limits had kept most athletes on partial aid. That is a real gain for those athletes and it does not show up in football coverage.
One question remains open. Whether direct revenue-sharing payments to athletes count as financial aid for Title IX purposes has been answered differently by different federal administrations, and it is likely to be settled in court. Since most of that money is going to football and men's basketball players, the answer matters a great deal. We are not in a position to predict it.
Schools outside the system: the Ivy League, the Pioneer League and the academies
Not every Division I football program gives athletic scholarships, and one group gives something that is not a scholarship at all.
The Ivy League is the oldest case. Its eight members agreed in the Ivy Group Agreement, first for football in 1945 and for every sport in 1954, that athletes would be admitted and aided as students, with no award based on athletic ability. That remains the rule. An Ivy football player's aid is calculated from his family's finances by the same office and the same formula as his roommate's. The league also declined to opt in to the House settlement. Because several of its schools meet full demonstrated need from very large endowments, a player from a middle-income family may pay little or nothing, which makes the Ivy model less austere in practice than it sounds.
The Pioneer Football League exists for a different reason. Its members, among them Dayton, Drake, Butler and San Diego, are mostly schools whose other sports play in scholarship-granting Division I conferences. When the NCAA required Division I schools to play football at the Division I level, they formed a football-only FCS league that awards no athletic aid for the sport, which began play in 1993. Football there is a cost-contained activity for students who are paying to attend.
The Patriot League once belonged on this list. It awarded only need-based aid in football until its members voted to allow athletic scholarships beginning with the class that entered in 2013.
The service academies
Army, Navy and Air Force are the special case. Nobody at West Point, Annapolis or Colorado Springs is on an athletic scholarship, and nobody pays tuition either. Every cadet and midshipman is educated, housed, fed and paid a modest salary by the federal government, and in return owes years of military service after graduation.
The consequence for football was that the 85 limit, which technically applied, never constrained them. There was no athletic aid to count. The academies have carried rosters far larger than their opponents', which suits the option-based offenses and the heavy attrition that come with military training. The academies have treated the settlement's roster caps as a poor fit for the same underlying reason: their numbers are a function of how the institutions are staffed and not of an athletic budget, and they do not share revenue with cadets and midshipmen.
The price is paid elsewhere. A recruit who chooses an academy is choosing a service commitment, and the best of them have had to seek permission to delay it in order to play professionally. The rivalry among the three is the subject of our guide to the Army-Navy game.
How the limit fell: no cap, then 105, 95 and 85
Before 1973 the NCAA set no national limit on football scholarships. Conferences had their own rules on how many players could be signed each year, and they varied. A program with money and a persuasive coach could stockpile.
The stories from that era are partly legend, but the incentive was real: a scholarship given to a good player was worth having even if he never played, because it kept him off an opponent's roster. Johnny Majors, hired at Pittsburgh for 1973 just as the door was closing, signed an unusually large first recruiting class. Tony Dorsett was in it. Pitt won the national championship three years later.
| Period | FBS scholarship limit | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Before 1973 | No national limit | Conference rules only |
| 1973 to 1977 | 105 | First NCAA cap, adopted the year the association split into three divisions |
| 1978 to 1991 | 95 | Cut in the same year Division I football divided into I-A and I-AA |
| 1992 | 92 | First step of a phased reduction adopted in 1991 |
| 1993 | 88 | Second step |
| 1994 to 2024 | 85 | The limit most fans know |
| From 2025-26 | No scholarship limit; 105 roster cap | House settlement schools |
Each reduction was sold as cost control, and each was that. The 1991 package, passed at a convention dominated by university presidents worried about spending, also cut coaching staffs and introduced the 20-hour weekly limit on athletic activity.
NCAA limits on total football scholarships in the top division. The 2025 point is the 105-player roster cap at House settlement schools, under which every place may be funded.
Show the numbers
| Item | Scholarships allowed |
|---|---|
| 1973 | 105 |
| 1978 | 95 |
| 1992 | 92 |
| 1993 | 88 |
| 1994 | 85 |
| 2025 | 105 |
What each cut did to competitive balance
The cuts spread talent, though not as evenly as their supporters hoped. Twenty players a year who would have been third-string at Alabama, Nebraska, Oklahoma or Southern California went somewhere else and started. The rise of Miami and Florida State in the 1980s, and of programs such as Kansas State, Virginia Tech and later Boise State, happened in a sport where the established powers could no longer absorb every good player in their region.
The top of the sport adjusted and stayed on top. Recruiting services, national signing-day coverage and larger staffs let the richest programs choose their 85 more accurately than they had once chosen 105. The middle class of college football got deeper. The elite got more efficient. Judged as cost control the cuts worked, and judged as a route to parity they worked about halfway.
Nebraska's answer was to replace the lost scholarships with walk-ons, which is one reason the roster cap of 2025 changed more in Lincoln than the scholarship cuts ever had.
There is an irony in the line on that chart. The sport spent two decades cutting from 105 to 85 in the name of saving money and spreading talent, then returned to 105 in a single court settlement, at a moment when the richest programs have more money than ever and the mechanisms for spreading talent are weaker than at any time since 1973.
The floor under the ceiling: what FBS membership requires
Limits get the attention. The NCAA also sets minimums, and for some schools those bind harder.
To be classified in the Football Bowl Subdivision, a school has had to do more than schedule FBS opponents. The long-standing requirements included sponsoring at least 16 varsity sports, awarding at least 90 percent of the permitted football scholarships averaged over a rolling two-year period, and either offering 200 athletic scholarships across all sports or spending $4 million a year on athletic aid. Ninety percent of 85 is 76.5, so an FBS program that let its football scholarships drift into the low 70s for two years was putting its status at risk.
There was also an attendance requirement, an average of 15,000 at home games, which was widely regarded as unenforceable and loosely audited. The NCAA abolished it in 2023.
In its place the association tightened the financial tests. From 2027-28, every FBS school will be required to award at least 210 athletic scholarships across its sports and to spend at least $6 million a year on them. A new requirement of that kind is aimed less at the SEC, whose members clear it easily, than at schools considering a move up from FCS. It sets a price of entry.
Why the floor matters more after House
The settlement makes the minimums more significant than they were. With scholarship caps gone at opted-in schools, the range between what the poorest and richest FBS programs fund has widened. One program may carry 105 football scholarships and add dozens in other sports. Another, in a conference with a fraction of the television money, may hold at 85 in football and partial awards elsewhere. Both are in the same subdivision and eligible for the same playoff.
A reader trying to judge a program's commitment should look at three numbers and not one: how many football scholarships it funds, how many athletic scholarships it awards across all sports, and whether it has opted in to revenue sharing. The first of those used to be 85 nearly everywhere and told you nothing. It now tells you a good deal.
For more on how the college and professional games are organized, our American football section gathers the rest of the site's coverage.