How Do NHL Waivers Work? Claims, Priority and Exemptions
How NHL waivers work under the league's labor agreement: the 24-hour claim window, who gets priority, which young players are exempt and what clearing means.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NHL Season & Draft23 min read
- Claim window
- 24 hours
- Daily deadline
- 2 p.m. Eastern
- Clubs able to claim
- 31
- Re-entry waivers abolished
- 2013
Every October, in the last few days before opening-night rosters are due at the NHL office, a list of names goes out to all 32 clubs at about 2 p.m. Eastern. Some are fringe forwards who had a quiet camp. A few are veterans on contracts no one wants. Now and then there is a goaltender who started a playoff game the previous spring. All of them are on waivers, and for the next 24 hours any of the other 31 teams can take them for nothing but the contract.
That is the whole answer in one sentence. Before an NHL club can send a player who is not exempt to the minors, it must first offer him to every other club for 24 hours. If one claims him, the claiming team takes him and his existing contract, with no trade and no compensation. If none does, he has cleared waivers and his club can assign him to its American Hockey League affiliate. The system sits in Article 13 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the NHL Players' Association, and almost everything interesting about it comes from three details: who is exempt, which claiming club has priority, and what happens to the salary cap once a player goes down.
How NHL waivers work in one transaction, from wire to claim
Waivers exist to stop a club from stockpiling NHL-capable players in the minors. Without the rule, a rich organization could sign forty useful veterans, keep the best 23 on its roster and hide the rest in the AHL as insurance. Article 13 makes that expensive. A player past his exemption cannot be moved out of the NHL without the rest of the league getting a chance to use him.
The sequence is short. The club notifies the league's Central Registry that it is placing a player on waivers. The league circulates the name to the other clubs. Each club decides privately whether to claim. At the end of the window the league checks the claims, applies the priority order, and either awards the player to one club or confirms that he has cleared.
What "placed on waivers" does not mean
It is not a release. A player on waivers is still under contract to his club, still paid by it and still part of its organization. Fans sometimes read the news as a sign the club wants to be rid of him, and occasionally that is true. Far more often the club wants to keep him and simply needs to send him to the AHL, either to play more minutes or to make room on a roster that can hold at most 23 players during the regular season.
It is also not a trade. Nothing comes back. A club that loses a player on waivers loses him outright, which is why the decision to risk it is one of the more consequential small calls a general manager makes each fall.
| Outcome after 24 hours | Who has the player | What happens to his contract |
|---|---|---|
| No club claims him | The original club | Unchanged; he can be assigned to the minors |
| One club claims him | The claiming club | Transferred whole, salary and cap hit included |
| Several clubs claim him | The claimant highest in priority | Transferred whole to that club only |
| Club keeps him up after clearing | The original club | Unchanged; he stays on the NHL roster |
| Unconditional waivers, no claim | Neither, once bought out or terminated | Bought out or ended under the agreement |
The table looks simple because the transaction is simple. The complications live upstream, in who has to go through it at all.
The 2 p.m. clock and what a club can do while it runs
The NHL runs waivers on a daily cycle tied to Eastern time. A club that wants a player on the wire has to file by the daily deadline, and the league treats 2 p.m. Eastern as both the moment names go out and the moment claims close a day later. A player waived at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday is on the wire until 2 p.m. Wednesday. At that point the league tells his club, and every club that put in a claim, how it came out.
This is why waiver news arrives in a pattern. Reporters post the names shortly after two in the afternoon, and the results shortly after two the next day. A club that misses the deadline on a Monday is simply waiving the player on Tuesday.
- PlacementThe club files the request with the league before the daily deadline, and the name goes to all 31 other clubs at 2 p.m. Eastern.
- Claim windowFor 24 hours any club may submit a claim. Claims are private and are not visible to the other teams.
- Window closesAt 2 p.m. the next day the league stops taking claims and sorts any it has received by priority.
- Award or clearThe player goes to the claimant highest in priority, or, with no claims, he is cleared and stays with his club.
- Next moveA cleared player can be assigned to the minors. A claimed player joins his new club on his existing contract.
The sequence under Article 13 of the NHL-NHLPA agreement. Times are Eastern; the window is 24 hours from placement.
Inside the 24 hours
During the window the player remains on his club's roster and under its control in every practical sense. He practices. He is paid. What the club cannot do is change his status in a way that dodges the claim: it cannot quietly send him to the AHL while the window is open, because the entire point of the process is to give other clubs the first chance at him.
Claiming clubs face their own constraint. A team can only claim a player if it can absorb his contract, which means it needs room under the salary cap upper limit and a free place within the 50-contract limit the agreement sets for each organization. A claim that would push a club over either line is not a claim the league will award.
There is a little gamesmanship around the clock. A club that wants a player to slide through quietly will sometimes waive him on a day when other teams are busy, or on the same afternoon as a dozen other names, in the hope that he gets lost in the list. Pro scouting departments exist partly to make sure that does not work.
Who gets him when several clubs claim the same player
Waiver priority in the NHL rewards the weakest teams. When more than one club puts in a claim, the player goes to the claimant with the lowest points percentage in the league standings at the time the waiver request was made. Points percentage, not raw points, because clubs will have played different numbers of games on any given date.
Early in the season a few games of results would make that order close to random. So the agreement fixes a cutoff: any waiver request made before November 1 is ordered by the previous season's final standings. A club that finished last the spring before sits at the top of the priority list through the whole of training camp and October, however well it starts the new season.
Why the timing of the request matters
The order is frozen at the time of the request, not at the time the claim is made. A club that drops three places in the standings on the Tuesday night does not gain priority for a player who was put on the wire at 2 p.m. that afternoon. The snapshot is taken when the name goes out.
The system has a consequence that is easy to miss. A good team rarely gets a player it actually wants off waivers in the first two months, because someone below it in last season's table usually wants him too. By March, priority has reshuffled to match the current season, and a contender that has been playing well is still at the back of the line.
| When the request is made | What sets the claim order | Who tends to win contested claims |
|---|---|---|
| Training camp | Previous season's final standings | Clubs that finished at the bottom the spring before |
| October, before November 1 | Previous season's final standings | The same clubs, regardless of their start |
| November 1 onward | Current points percentage at time of request | Clubs struggling in the current season |
| After the trade deadline | Current points percentage at time of request | Struggling clubs, though the player cannot play in their playoffs |
The losing claimants receive nothing. There is no compensation pool and no priority credit carried forward. A claim is a request for the player, and it either succeeds or disappears.
What a waiver claim costs: nothing in trade, everything in the contract
A claiming club gives up no player and no draft pick. That part sounds like a free lunch, and it is the reason casual fans wonder why more good players are not claimed. The answer is that the claiming club inherits the contract whole: every dollar of salary still owed, every remaining year, the full cap hit and any clauses attached.
It also inherits the roster obligation. Once claimed, the player belongs to the new club's NHL roster. If that club decides it wants him in the AHL instead, he goes back on waivers first. So a team should claim only a player it intends to use in the NHL, at the salary he is on, for at least a while.
Why expensive veterans clear and cheap useful ones do not
Put those two facts together and the market sorts itself. A 32-year-old defenseman with three years left at a large cap hit can be waived in October and pass through untouched, because no one wants to absorb the contract for the value he still offers. A 24-year-old forward on a cheap two-way deal who just ran out of exemption is a different matter. He costs almost nothing against the cap, he may be a useful fourth-liner, and several clubs will claim him within the hour.
That is why the decision to waive a young player is the one general managers agonize over. A club can lose a prospect it spent years developing for nothing, purely because he crossed an exemption line in the wrong autumn. Most clubs will carry an extra player for a few weeks, or trade a borderline asset for a late pick, sooner than risk the wire.
The NHL's cheap-claim economics resemble the NBA's in one way and differ in another. In basketball a waived player is released once he clears, and the market for bought-out veterans peaks just before March 1, the last day a player can be waived and stay playoff-eligible with a new team, as our page on the NBA buyout market explains. In hockey the player is not released at all unless he clears unconditional waivers, a separate track covered further down.
The waiver exemption table for skaters
A player is exempt from waivers for a set period after he signs his first NHL contract, measured in two ways at once: years of professional hockey and NHL games played. The exemption ends when he passes either limit, whichever comes first. The length depends on how old he was when he signed.
The logic is developmental. A player signed at 18 is years away from the NHL and needs time in junior or the minors without being exposed. A player signed at 24 out of college or Europe is closer to finished, and the league gives his club less time to decide.
| Age at signing (skater) | Years of exemption | NHL games of exemption |
|---|---|---|
| 18 | 5 | 160 |
| 19 | 4 | 160 |
| 20 | 3 | 160 |
| 21 | 3 | 80 |
| 22 | 3 | 70 |
| 23 | 3 | 60 |
| 24 | 2 | 60 |
Below the table sits the floor: a skater who signs his first NHL contract at 25 or older gets a single season of exemption, which is why a late-blooming college free agent can find himself on the wire in his second autumn. Age at signing is calculated under the agreement's own definition rather than by reading the date on the contract, and a player with a late-summer birthday should check which row the league puts him in before assuming.
How the years are counted
For older signings the years start almost at once. For teenagers it is more forgiving: a player who signs at 18 and goes back to junior does not use up a year of exemption while he is there, because the count runs on seasons of professional hockey rather than seasons under contract. A related idea, a games threshold for teenagers, is what makes an entry-level deal slide, which our guide to the NHL entry-level contract covers in detail.
The games count is simpler: it is appearances in the NHL. AHL games do not count against it. A player can spend three years as an AHL regular and still be exempt if he signed young and his NHL appearances were scattered.
The 160-game ceiling for the youngest signings is generous in practice. Very few 18-year-old draftees who are still exempt after five seasons have played anything close to 160 NHL games; most who reach that number were regulars long before the years ran out, and nobody waives a regular.
The goaltender table and the teenage provision
Goaltenders get a longer runway, and for a reason everyone in hockey accepts. They develop later. A goalie drafted at 18 often needs five or six years before he is ready to start NHL games, and a skater's timetable would force clubs to expose many of them before they were ready.
So the agreement keeps a separate table. A goaltender who signs at 18 is exempt for six years or 80 NHL games, a year more than a skater signed at the same age. The extra year continues down the table for the next two ages, with a goalie signed at 19 exempt for five years and one signed at 20 for four. The games limit is lower than a skater's, at 80 rather than 160 for those first three rows, because a goalie who has started 80 NHL games has given his club ample evidence.
For goalies signed in their twenties the table narrows in steps, ending at a single season for those who sign at 25 or older, the same floor that applies to skaters. Clubs and agents work from the exact figures in Article 13, and readers who need the row for a specific goaltender signed at 22 or 23 should check it there rather than trust a summary.
The teenage games provision
There is one more wrinkle in the youngest rows. The agreement contains a provision under which a teenager who plays a set number of NHL games in a season starts using up his exemption faster, so that a club cannot keep a young player in the NHL all year and still bank years of protection for later. It works on a games-in-a-season threshold, a cousin of the entry-level slide, with the exact number written into Article 13. In practice it rarely bites. A teenager good enough to play that many NHL games is almost never a waiver candidate.
The goaltender table matters more than its rarity suggests. NHL clubs carry two goalies and usually a third in the AHL, and the third is often a 23- or 24-year-old whose exemption is running out. Losing him on waivers can leave the organization one injury from calling up a goalie it does not trust, which is one reason the emergency backup goalie rule exists at the far end of the depth chart.
After he clears: the ten-game, 30-day window
Clearing waivers is not a one-time pass to the minors. It is a window. Once a player clears, his club can assign him to the AHL, recall him, and send him back down again without new waivers, for as long as he has not played ten NHL games or spent 30 days on the NHL roster since he cleared. The counts are cumulative. Hit either one and the next assignment to the minors needs fresh waivers.
That window is what makes clearing valuable. A depth forward who clears in early October can ride the shuttle between the NHL and the AHL for a month or two, covering injuries and returning to the minors each time, with no further exposure. Clubs plan around it.
- 24Hours on the wire
- 31Clubs able to claim
- 10NHL games before re-waiving
- 30Days on roster before re-waiving
Fixed figures from Article 13 of the NHL-NHLPA agreement. The ten games and 30 days are counted from the moment the player clears, and whichever comes first closes the window.
Why the window resets
A player who goes back on waivers and clears again starts a new window. Some veterans clear several times in a season. Each clearance tells the league that nobody wanted his contract that day, and each one gives his club another ten games or 30 days of freedom to move him.
The 30-day count only runs while he is on the NHL roster. Days in the AHL do not use it up. A player who clears in October, spends November in the minors and comes up for a week in December has used only that week.
There is an AHL side to this, too. A player assigned after clearing joins his club's affiliate on whatever terms his contract sets for the minors. On a two-way contract that means a much lower minor-league salary. On a one-way contract he is paid his full NHL salary in the AHL. How the two leagues fit together is laid out in our guide to the AHL and the ECHL.
Claimed, then waived again by the new club
Sometimes a claim does not stick. A club claims a player, has a look at him in practice or for a game or two, and decides it wants him in the minors after all. Because a claimed player must stay on the claiming club's NHL roster, sending him down means putting him back on waivers.
That second trip is where the agreement gives the original club a specific right. If the claiming club re-waives the player, the club that first waived him can put in a claim of its own. If it is the only claimant, it gets him back and can send him straight to its minor-league affiliate without a third trip through the process. The player effectively returns to where he started, with the claiming club having had a short trial.
How clubs have used it
The rule creates a quiet reason to claim a player a rival does not want to lose. A club can take him, use him briefly, and put him back on the wire knowing his original organization is likely to claim him back. Nobody involved announces this as a strategy, and it would be unwise to read intent into any single case.
More often the effect is protective. A club that loses a prospect it did not expect to lose knows that if the claim does not work out, it has a route to recovering him. Agents watch for it, because a player bounced between two organizations in three weeks has been through a disrupting autumn without having done anything wrong.
It is an untidy corner of the agreement, and one most fans only meet when a player appears on the wire twice in a month.
Waivers and the salary cap: what clearing does and does not hide
The salary cap is where waivers turn into bookkeeping. A player assigned to the minors stops counting in full against his club's cap, but not all of his cap hit disappears. Since the 2013 agreement, a club may remove an amount equal to the league minimum salary plus $375,000. Anything above that figure keeps counting even while the player is in the AHL.
For most minor-league assignments that covers the whole contract. A depth player on a near-minimum cap hit drops off the books entirely when he goes down. For a veteran on a large contract, the deduction is a fraction of his cap hit, and the rest stays on the NHL payroll.
| Player's situation | Cap effect of assignment to the AHL |
|---|---|
| Cap hit at or below minimum salary plus $375,000 | Entire cap hit stops counting |
| Cap hit above that line | Only minimum salary plus $375,000 comes off |
| One-way contract, assigned after clearing | Same cap rule; full salary still paid in the minors |
| Two-way contract, assigned after clearing | Same cap rule; minor-league salary paid instead |
| Claimed by another club | Entire contract moves to the claiming club's cap |
Why "burying" a contract stopped working
Before the 2013 agreement a club could clear a big contract off its books completely by sending the player to the minors. The most-cited case was Wade Redden, who spent two seasons in the AHL on a Rangers contract that no longer counted against the New York cap. The current rule was written to stop that: a bad contract assigned to the minors still costs most of what it cost in the NHL.
So clearing waivers does not make a bad contract go away. It gives the club the minimum-plus-$375,000 deduction and nothing more. The rest has to be handled another way, through a trade with retained salary, a buyout or long-term injured reserve. How each of those affects the cap is set out in our explainer on how the NHL salary cap works.
The rush at the end of training camp
Most of a season's waiver traffic arrives in about a week. NHL clubs open camp with far more players than they can keep, and have to be down to 23 by the date the league sets for opening rosters. Exempt players are sent to the AHL or back to junior early. Non-exempt players who are not making the team have to be waived, and they cluster in the last few days because clubs keep them around as long as possible in case of injury.
That compression produces a predictable spectacle. On the final two or three afternoons, dozens of names go on the wire at once. Some clubs time their requests to coincide with the busiest day, betting that rival scouts will be stretched. Others waive borderline players earlier in camp, on the theory that they will clear more easily before the other 31 clubs have settled their own rosters and know where they are short.
Priority during camp is last season's
Because the November 1 cutoff applies, every camp claim is ordered by the previous season's standings. The club that finished last has first call on every player waived in camp. That gives bottom-feeding teams a real chance to add an NHL-ready depth player for nothing, and many of the useful waiver pickups in league history came in exactly this window.
The timing also explains why a player is sometimes waived, clears and then plays opening night for the same club. He was never going to be cut. He needed to clear so his club could send him down later without exposure, inside the ten-game, 30-day window, if he struggled or a healthier option appeared. To follow how the opening rosters fit inside the wider calendar, our page on how many games are in an NHL season sets out the schedule those rosters are built for.
Waivers late in the season and the no-movement clause
The trade deadline changes the value of a waiver claim without changing the waiver rules. A player claimed after the deadline can play for his new club in the regular season but is not eligible for that club's playoffs. The playoff roster has to be built from players the club held at the deadline. A contender that claims a useful defenseman in late March gets three weeks of regular-season games and a spectator for the postseason, which is why few contenders bother. The cutoff and its exceptions are set out in our guide to NHL trade deadline rules.
Clubs still use waivers after the deadline, mostly to send players down or to clear space for recalls. The claims that do happen tend to come from teams out of contention looking at next season.
Who can never be put on the wire
A full no-movement clause keeps a player off regular waivers altogether. The clause bars his club from trading him, waiving him or assigning him to the minors without his consent. A player with one cannot be sent to the AHL to save cap space, and that protection is precisely what veterans negotiate the clause for.
No-trade clauses are narrower. They block trades, and a modified version may block trades only to a list of clubs, but they do not by themselves stop a club from waiving the player. Clubs and agents read the exact wording of each clause, and the difference between the two has decided more than one roster crunch.
The exception to the no-movement protection is a buyout. Before a contract can be bought out, the player has to go through unconditional waivers, and the agreement allows that for a player with a no-movement clause during the buyout windows. That leads to the other kinds of waivers.
Unconditional waivers, European signings and the re-entry system that ended in 2013
Regular waivers are the familiar kind. They are not the only kind.
Unconditional waivers are the step before a buyout or a contract termination. A club that wants to buy out a player places him on unconditional waivers; if no club claims him, the buyout proceeds under the formula in the agreement. A claim is possible in theory and almost never happens, because the claiming club would take on the full contract the original club was trying to escape. Contract terminations for a material breach run through the same track.
Midseason signings from Europe carry their own requirement. A player who has played professionally in Europe during the current season and signs an NHL contract after the regular season has begun must clear waivers before he can play in the NHL. The rule prevents a club from shopping in European leagues in midwinter for a ready-made NHL player who never had to face the claim system. A player who signs in the summer, before the season starts, is not caught by it.
- Regular waiversRequired to assign a non-exempt player to the minors. A claim takes the whole contract; clearing opens a ten-game, 30-day window.
- Unconditional waiversThe step before a buyout or termination. A claim is rare because the claimant takes on the full contract.
- European midseason signingA player who played in Europe that season and signs after the NHL season starts must clear before playing.
- Re-entry waivers, until 2013A higher-paid player recalled from the minors could be claimed for half his salary, with the original club paying the rest.
A summary of the waiver types in the NHL-NHLPA agreement. Re-entry waivers were abolished in the 2013 agreement and no longer apply.
The re-entry waivers that no longer exist
Under the 2005 agreement, and until the 2013 agreement ended them, a player above a set salary level who had been sent to the minors had to go through re-entry waivers to be recalled. Any club could claim him, and the claiming club paid only half his salary and carried half his cap hit; the original club kept the other half. The idea was to stop clubs parking expensive players in the AHL and recalling them freely.
In practice it trapped players in the minors, because recalling them invited a cheap claim. The 2013 agreement abolished re-entry waivers and replaced the incentive with the cap rule described above. A player who clears regular waivers today can be recalled at any time without facing the wire again.
The broader picture of how waivers sit beside the draft, the minors and the roster limits runs through our NHL draft explainer, and the rest of our hockey coverage lives on the ice hockey hub.