MLB Trade Deadline Rules: What Teams Can and Can't Do

Major League Baseball has one trade deadline. The Commissioner's Office sets it each season on a date between July 28 and August 3, a window written into the 2022 Basic Agreement with the MLB Players Association, and since 2022 it has fallen at 6 p.m. Eastern; in 2026 it was August 3. From that moment until the World Series ends, players on 40-man rosters cannot be traded. What clubs can still do is claim players on waivers, sign free agents, release people, and trade minor leaguers who are not on a 40-man roster. A second date, August 31, decides who is eligible to play in October.

The single deadline dates from 2019. Late on August 31, 2017, with the clock almost at midnight Eastern, the Detroit Tigers and Houston Astros sent the league office the paperwork that made Justin Verlander an Astro. He had passed through waivers earlier that month. He had to give up his right to refuse the deal, and by most accounts did so with only minutes left. Two months later he was the Most Valuable Player of the American League Championship Series and Houston had a title. It is among the most consequential August trades ever made, and under the rules MLB adopted in 2019 it could not be made at all.

The MLB trade deadline rule itself: one date, set by the commissioner

For more than three decades the answer to "when is the MLB trade deadline" was July 31, and nobody had to look it up. The 2022 agreement replaced the fixed date with a seven-day window. Each year the league picks a day from July 28 through August 3, mainly so the deadline can land on a weekday afternoon with a light schedule, away from a Sunday when half the league is playing day games and front offices are trying to pull players out of dugouts mid-inning.

Season	Deadline	What governed it
2019	July 31	First season with a single deadline and no August trades
2020	August 31	Moved for the shortened 60-game season
2021	July 30	Shifted a day so it fell on a Friday
2022	August 2	First date chosen under the flexible window
2023	August 1	Flexible window
2024	July 30	Flexible window
2025	July 31	Flexible window
2026	August 3	Flexible window; the latest date it allows

The hour changed with the date. Through 2021 the cutoff was 4 p.m. Eastern. From 2022 it has been 6 p.m.

Two details of the rule are often misstated. First, the test is not whether a player is in the majors on deadline day. It is whether he is on the 40-man roster. A prospect who was added to the 40-man in April and sent straight to Triple-A is frozen at the deadline exactly as the club's shortstop is. Second, the freeze has an end. Trading reopens once the World Series is over, which is why the first week of November often brings a small burst of minor deals that clubs had been sitting on since summer.

The agreement that created the window runs through the 2026 season. Its successor could keep the window, move it or go back to a fixed date; of all the rules on this page, the date is the one most likely to be renegotiated.

What still moves after the deadline passes

"No trades after the deadline" is close enough for a headline and wrong in the particulars. Rosters keep changing through August and September. They change by other routes.

Transaction	Allowed after the deadline	The catch
Trading a player on a 40-man roster	No	Frozen until the World Series ends
Trading a minor leaguer who is not on a 40-man roster	Yes	He will rarely be a player who helps in October
Claiming a player on outright or release waivers	Yes	The claiming club takes on the rest of his contract
Signing a free agent or a released player	Yes	He must be in the organization by August 31 to be eligible for the postseason
Calling up a club's own minor leaguers	Yes	Needs a place on the 40-man and active rosters
Naming a player to be named later from an earlier deal	Yes	He cannot be someone the deadline would have barred from being traded

The waiver wire is the route that matters. A club that wants to shed salary can no longer trade a veteran in August, but it can place him on outright waivers, and any club that puts in a claim gets the player and the remainder of his deal for nothing more than a waiver fee. The mechanics of claims, priority and what "outright" means are laid out in our explainer on MLB waivers and options.

The clearest demonstration came in late August 2023. The Los Angeles Angels, who had bought aggressively at the deadline four weeks earlier and then fallen out of the race, put six veterans on waivers at once, among them Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Matt Moore and Hunter Renfroe. The point was payroll: every claim took a salary off the Angels' books. Cleveland claimed three pitchers in one afternoon and Cincinnati took Renfroe. No trade had occurred. Clubs still in the race had improved their rosters just in time for the postseason eligibility cutoff all the same, and the order in which clubs got to claim was set by the standings, worst record first, so clubs on the fringe of the race got first choice ahead of the division leaders.

That is the oddity of the current system. It abolished the August trade market and left behind an August giveaway market, smaller and far less predictable.

August 31, the second date that matters for October

A player is eligible for a club's postseason roster if he is on its 40-man roster or 60-day injured list at the cutoff the league sets at the turn of August into September; in 2025 it was noon Eastern on September 1. Anyone acquired in September or later, by any route, can play out the regular season and then has to watch.

This is why the waiver claims described above cluster in the last days of August, and why a released veteran who signs on September 3 is a regular-season patch and nothing more.

Eligibility is a question of the 40-man roster, not of the active roster. A player on the 40-man can spend all of August in Triple-A and still be chosen for a series in October. September, when active rosters grow from 26 to 28, is when clubs take a look at such players in big-league games.

The injury-replacement route

The strict wording has a well-used side door. A club may petition the Commissioner's Office to replace an injured player on its postseason roster with any player who was in the organization on August 31, including a minor leaguer who was not on the 40-man roster at that time. The player being replaced must be on the injured list and have served the minimum stay that list requires, 60 days for the 60-day list, and since most clubs have someone who qualifies by October, the petition is close to a formality.

The most famous beneficiary was Francisco Rodriguez. The Anaheim Angels called him up in the middle of September 2002, a 20-year-old reliever with a handful of big-league innings. He had been in the organization all year, an injured teammate provided the opening, and he won five games in that postseason as the Angels took the World Series. Nobody had traded for him. The rule that let him pitch is the same one that governs a deadline acquisition's eligibility, read from the other side: what counts is where a player's contract sat on the last night of August.

How the various injured lists work, and what a 60-day placement does to a 40-man roster, is covered in our guide to MLB injured list rules.

Why the August waiver trade died in 2019

Verlander's trade was legal because, before 2019, July 31 was only the non-waiver deadline. The word carried the whole system. After July 31 a player could still be traded, provided he first went through revocable trade waivers.

1. 1Placed on waiversAfter July 31 a club put a player on revocable trade waivers. Clubs did this with most of their roster as a matter of routine.
2. 2Claim windowOther clubs had about two days to claim him. Priority went to the worst record in the player's own league, then the other league.
3. 3No claimA player who went unclaimed had cleared waivers and could be traded to any club for the rest of the season.
4. 4ClaimedThe original club had three choices and roughly two days to pick one.
5. 5Pull him backIt could revoke the waivers and keep the player, though a second trip through waivers that month could not be revoked.
6. 6Work out a tradeIt could negotiate a deal, but only with the one club that had won the claim.
7. 7Let him goIt could simply let the claiming club have the player and all of his remaining salary.

The revocable trade waiver process that applied from August 1 to the end of the season until MLB and the MLBPA abolished it ahead of the 2019 season.

The process generated real baseball. John Smoltz went from Detroit to Atlanta for Doyle Alexander on August 12, 1987. Jeff Bagwell, then a Red Sox minor leaguer, went to Houston for the reliever Larry Andersen on August 30, 1990. Larry Walker joined the Cardinals in August 2004. It also generated gamesmanship. A contender would claim a player it did not want purely to stop a rival from getting him, and sometimes the bluff was called. In 1998 the San Diego Padres claimed the Toronto closer Randy Myers, reportedly to keep him away from Atlanta, and the Blue Jays were content to hand him over along with the rest of his contract.

What the single deadline changed

MLB and the players' union agreed to scrap trade waivers in March 2019, in a package of mid-term changes that also produced the 26-man roster and the three-batter minimum for relievers. The league's argument was that one firm date would force clubs to decide earlier whether they were contending, and would stop teams treating August as a second chance to sell.

It did concentrate the action. The last 48 hours before the deadline are now far busier than they were, because there is no later. It also raised the cost of a late injury. A contender that loses its closer on August 10 once had three weeks to trade for another; now it has the waiver wire and its own farm system. Whether that is fairer or just harsher depends on which dugout is asked. The single deadline is a cleaner rule. It took away some of the most interesting weeks on the calendar to get there.

What can go into a trade: players, cash and bonus pool space

Baseball trades are built from a short list of permitted ingredients, and the list is narrower than fans of other leagues expect.

Asset	Tradeable	Main restriction
Players under contract, major or minor league	Yes	No-trade rights; recently drafted players only after that year's World Series
Cash	Yes	Large sums need the commissioner's approval
International bonus pool space	Yes	Moves in set increments, with a ceiling on how much a club may add
Players to be named later	Yes	Must be named within six months
Competitive Balance draft picks	Yes	Each pick can be traded once
All other draft picks	No	Must be used by the club that holds them

Players are the bulk of every deal, and the only limit on numbers is roster space on the receiving end.

Cash is the least understood piece. Money almost never buys a player outright in the modern game. It is used to adjust who pays a salary: a selling club agrees to keep covering part of a veteran's contract, and in return the buyer hands over better prospects than it otherwise would. The New York Mets worked this way at the 2023 deadline, sending Max Scherzer to Texas and Verlander back to Houston, staying on the hook for a large share of both contracts, and getting prospects of a caliber that a straight salary dump would never have fetched.

There is a ceiling on how freely cash can move, and it has a history. On June 15, 1976, the old deadline day, Oakland's owner Charlie Finley sold Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox and Vida Blue to the Yankees for $3.5 million in total. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided all three sales three days later as contrary to the best interests of baseball. The modern descendant of that ruling is a requirement that the commissioner approve any deal in which a large sum changes hands. The threshold long reported is $1 million; the principle matters more than the figure, which is that the league will not let a club liquidate its roster for money alone.

International bonus pool space is the allowance each club gets for signing amateur players from outside the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Clubs can trade portions of it, in fixed increments, and the agreement caps how much a club may add to the pool it started with. It turns up as the minor piece in a surprising number of July deals.

Draft picks, and why baseball is the odd league out

A fan who follows the NFL or NBA expects draft picks to be the small change of every trade. In baseball they are almost entirely off the table.

League	Can clubs trade draft picks	Principal limit
NFL	Yes	Picks several drafts ahead may be dealt
NBA	Yes	A club may not leave itself without a first-round pick in consecutive future drafts
NHL	Yes	Few restrictions; conditional picks are common
MLB	Only Competitive Balance picks	Each such pick may be traded once

Competitive Balance picks were created by the Basic Agreement that took effect in 2012. They are extra selections placed after the first round and after the second, awarded to clubs in the smallest markets and with the lowest revenues, and they came with a novelty: they could be traded. Each can change hands a single time. The club that acquires one must use it.

Everything else in the amateur draft, which MLB's rules call the Rule 4 draft, stays where it falls. The ban is old and its logic was defensive. Owners feared that poorer clubs would sell their picks for immediate cash and that the richest would hoard them, which is the same anxiety behind Kuhn's 1976 ruling. The practical argument is different: a baseball draftee is typically three to five years from the majors, far more uncertain than a first-round quarterback, so a pick is a murkier asset to price. Neither argument is airtight, and the case for letting clubs trade every pick gets made regularly. It has not carried.

The contrast with the other leagues' deadlines is sharp. In basketball, where picks are the main currency, a deadline deal can be nothing but salaries and future first-rounders, as our guide to how the NBA trade deadline works shows. Hockey's version, with its retained salary and conditional picks, is set out in the guide to NHL trade deadline rules. Baseball's general managers have to pay in people.

Player to be named later rules: six months and a list

The player to be named later sounds like a placeholder for laziness. It is a tool, and a carefully regulated one.

The rule is brief. When a trade includes a player to be named later, the clubs have six months to settle who he is. In practice they agree on a list of minor leaguers at the time of the deal, and the receiving club picks one after it has had time to scout them. If the clubs never agree, or the list goes bad through injury, the obligation is converted to cash.

Clubs reach for it in two situations. The first is time: a deal has to be finished by the deadline and one side wants another month of looks at the other's low-minors pitchers before choosing from the list. The second is uncertainty about need: the receiving club may not yet know which position it most wants to fill, and the open slot lets it decide after the deadline. A third use is now closed. Until 2015 clubs could name a player who was not yet allowed to be traded and send him over once he was; since then the player named must have been eligible to be traded at the time of the deal.

The cases people remember

That closed route produced the strangest summer of any recent prospect's career. Trea Turner was drafted by San Diego in June 2014. That December the Padres agreed to send him to Washington in a three-team trade, but the rule at the time barred a drafted player from being traded until a year after he was drafted. So Turner became a player to be named later whose name everyone knew, and he spent the first months of 2015 playing in the Padres' system for an employer that had already dealt him. MLB changed the rule in 2015. A drafted player can now be traded once the World Series following his draft is over, and a player who is not yet eligible to be traded can no longer be the player to be named.

David Ortiz was a player to be named later, sent from Seattle to Minnesota in 1996 to complete a trade for Dave Hollins. Harry Chiti, a catcher, was acquired by the 1962 Mets from Cleveland for a player to be named and was himself returned to Cleveland as that player a couple of months later, traded in effect for himself. Minnesota sent Dave Winfield to Cleveland for a player to be named during the 1994 strike. The season never resumed and no player was ever chosen; the story, repeated by executives on both sides, is that Cleveland settled the account by buying dinner.

Players who can say no: no-trade clauses and 10-and-5 rights

Most players have no say in where they are sent. A minority do, by one of two routes.

A no-trade clause is negotiated into a contract. A full clause lets the player veto any trade. A partial or limited clause lets him name a list of clubs, sometimes a handful and sometimes twenty, to which he cannot be sent without consent, and the list can usually be revised each offseason. Justin Upton used a limited clause to block a trade from Arizona to Seattle in January 2013. Agents treat the clause as currency: a player who agrees to waive it will often ask for something in return, such as an option year picked up or a bonus paid.

Ten-and-five rights need no negotiation. A player with ten years of major-league service, the last five consecutive with his current club, cannot be traded without his written consent. The right has been in the Basic Agreement since 1973 and is sometimes called the Curt Flood rule, after the Cardinals outfielder who refused a trade to Philadelphia in 1969 and took his challenge to the reserve system as far as the Supreme Court, where he lost in 1972. Flood never benefited. Ron Santo did, within months of the rule's adoption, turning down a move from the Cubs to the California Angels and then accepting one across town to the White Sox.

Salary arbitration eligibility3years

Free agency6years

Ten-and-five trade veto10years

Years of major-league service at which each status is normally reached under the Basic Agreement. Ten-and-five rights also require the last five years to be with the same club; the Super Two exception to arbitration is not shown.

Show the numbers

Service-time thresholds that shape a deadline trade

Item	Value
Salary arbitration eligibility	3years
Free agency	6years
Ten-and-five trade veto	10years

Verlander's 2017 trade turned on this. He had been a Tiger since 2005, he held ten-and-five rights, and the deal existed only once he agreed to it.

A veto is leverage and is used as such. The player with a full no-trade right decides which contenders may bid, which can cut a selling club's market from a dozen teams to two and its return accordingly. Front offices know this when they hand out the clause. They hand it out anyway because a no-trade clause costs nothing in the year a contract is signed.

How a deal becomes official before 6 p.m.

A handshake between general managers is not a trade. Several things have to happen first, and at the deadline they happen at speed.

1. 1Agreement in principleThe two front offices settle the players, any cash and any player to be named later.
2. 2ConsentA player with a no-trade clause or ten-and-five rights must agree in writing before anything else can proceed.
3. 3Medical reviewEach club's doctors examine the other side's medical files. A club may walk away at this stage.
4. 4SubmissionThe deal is filed with the Commissioner's Office. It must be submitted before the deadline to count.
5. 5League approvalThe league checks rosters, contracts and any cash against the rules and approves or rejects the trade.
6. 6Roster movesEach club clears the 40-man and active roster places its new players require.
7. 7ReportingA traded player has 72 hours to report to his new club.

The usual order of events for a trade involving players on 40-man rosters. Steps can overlap, and the league's review may continue after the deadline has passed so long as the deal was submitted in time.

The medical review is where deals die. On July 29, 2015, the New York Mets agreed to send Zack Wheeler and Wilmer Flores to Milwaukee for the outfielder Carlos Gomez. Word reached the stands at Citi Field during that night's game, and Flores, still at shortstop, was in tears on the field. Then the Mets backed out, citing concern over Gomez's hip. Flores stayed, hit a walk-off home run two nights later, and the Mets used the last minutes before the deadline to get Yoenis Cespedes from Detroit instead. They won the pennant.

The clock and the roster

A trade agreed at 5:58 and announced at 6:40 is legal if the paperwork was submitted in time. That is why news of deals keeps arriving for an hour after the deadline every year. What cannot happen is a renegotiation after the bell, so a deal that fails its medicals at 6:15 is simply dead.

Every incoming player who is on a 40-man roster needs a place on the acquiring club's 40-man, and anyone joining the big-league club needs one of the 26 active places as well. A buyer that adds three players at the deadline has to remove three, by option, by designation for assignment or by a 60-day injured list placement. Late July is the one week of the season when the bottom of a 40-man roster is watched as closely as the top.

Buyers and sellers: rentals, control years and the tax line

By the second half of July the league has sorted itself into clubs that think they can win this year and clubs that have accepted they cannot. The first group buys present value. The second sells it for future value. Nearly every deadline trade is a version of that exchange.

What the seller is offering comes in two grades. A rental is a player whose contract expires at the end of the season; the buyer gets two months and whatever October brings. A player with years of club control, meaning he cannot become a free agent for several seasons, is worth far more. The mechanics of that clock are in our explainer on MLB service time.

The Yankees sold one of each in the same week of July 2016. Aroldis Chapman, a free agent that fall, went to the Cubs for a package headed by the shortstop prospect Gleyber Torres. Andrew Miller, signed for two further seasons, went to Cleveland for four prospects including Clint Frazier and Justus Sheffield. Both buyers reached the World Series that October and played each other. Chapman pitched the biggest late innings of the Cubs' first championship since 1908 and then re-signed with the Yankees in the winter, which made Torres the cost of roughly three months of a closer. Few in Chicago have complained about the price.

Why prospects are the currency

With draft picks unavailable, the only future asset a contender can spend is a young player already in its system. That gives baseball deadlines their particular texture: a general manager has to judge how good a 20-year-old at Double-A will be in 2030, with far less information than he has about the veteran coming the other way. Sellers win these trades more often than the attention paid to them suggests, because the attention goes to the star and the value hides in the names nobody has heard yet. Bagwell for Andersen is the standing warning.

The luxury-tax arithmetic in brief

Payroll for Competitive Balance Tax purposes is counted on a prorated basis. A player acquired with a third of the season left adds roughly a third of his contract's average annual value to the buyer's tax payroll, less any cash the seller sends along. For clubs sitting just under a threshold, that fraction decides whether a deal is possible, and it explains why some trades include oddly precise sums of money. The thresholds and surcharges are set out in our guide to how the MLB luxury tax works.

The qualifying offer a traded player can no longer receive

A less visible rule shapes the price of every rental. A club can make a departing free agent a qualifying offer, a one-year contract at a figure set by formula, and if he declines and signs elsewhere the club receives a compensatory draft pick. The offer is only available for a player who spent the entire season with that club.

So a player traded in July cannot be given one. The restriction arrived with the agreement that took effect in 2012, which replaced an older ranking system under which a club could acquire a pending free agent in midseason and still collect draft picks when he left. The consequences run in both directions.

For the buyer, a rental is a pure two-month purchase. When Chapman left the Cubs after 2016 there was no pick coming back, because he had arrived in July. The buyer has to be content with what the player does between August and the last out.

For the seller, the rule sets a floor under the asking price. A club holding a good player in his walk year has two options: keep him, make the qualifying offer in November and collect a draft pick if he leaves, or trade him in July. The prospects on offer therefore have to be worth more than the pick the club would get by doing nothing. For a star, they nearly always are. For a solid regular, it can be close, and a few each summer stay put for exactly that reason.

There is a twist that favors the player. Arriving on the market with no qualifying offer attached means no club has to surrender a draft pick to sign him, which widens his set of bidders. A midseason trade can therefore raise what a player is worth on the market that winter. The full workings, including the rule that a player can receive the offer only once in his career, are in our guide to the MLB qualifying offer, and what happens next is covered in how MLB free agency works.

How the deadline date moved from June 15 to a flexible window

In July 1922 the two New York clubs, both leading their leagues, bought help from Boston. The Yankees got third baseman Joe Dugan from the Red Sox; a week later the Giants got pitcher Hugh McQuillan from the Braves. The St. Louis clubs chasing them were furious, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis agreed that pennants should not be purchased in midsummer. For 1923 both leagues adopted a common deadline of June 15, after which a player could change clubs only by passing through waivers.

June 15 lasted more than sixty years, and it was a deadline with some force to it. Lou Brock went from the Cubs to the Cardinals for Ernie Broglio on June 15, 1964. Tom Seaver was traded by the Mets to Cincinnati on June 15, 1977, the night New York's papers called the Midnight Massacre. Finley's voided fire sale was a June 15 event too.

• 7Days in the window the deadline can fall in
• 6Months allowed to name a player to be named later
• 72Hours a traded player has to report
• 10Years of service for a ten-and-five veto

Fixed figures from the Basic Agreement and the Major League Rules as they stood through the 2026 season.

The date was too early. By the middle of June most clubs had played about sixty games and few were ready to concede anything, so the market was thin and the waiver-governed months that followed did most of the work. In 1986 the deadline moved to July 31, late enough that the standings meant something, and the August waiver period became the recognized second market that Smoltz, Bagwell and Verlander passed through.

The date wobbled only at the margins after that. It slid to August 1 in 2016 because July 31 was a Sunday. It went to August 31 in the 60-game season of 2020. Then came the two structural changes inside four years: the end of trade waivers in 2019, which made the deadline a hard stop for the first time, and the flexible window of 2022, which made its date a scheduling decision.

Read in sequence, each move has pushed the same way. Landis wanted to stop contenders buying pennants late, and a century on, the rule is stricter about that than his was. What has changed is the reasoning. In 1923 the worry was rich clubs. In 2019 it was clubs that waited too long to decide what they were.

More on the league's roster and season rules is collected on the United States guides hub, and the draft held each December for players left off 40-man rosters has its own page in our guide to the Rule 5 draft.