NBA 10-Day Contract: How It Works, Pay and the Limits

Bruce Bowen's first NBA contract lasted 10 days and produced one minute of basketball. The Miami Heat signed him in March 1997, sent him onto the floor for a single short shift, and let the deal run out. He was 25 and had been playing in France and in the minor leagues. Over the next 12 years he made eight All-Defensive teams and won three championships with San Antonio, and the Spurs retired his number.

The instrument that got him through the door still exists in nearly the same form. An NBA 10-day contract is a short standard contract, written into the collective bargaining agreement between the National Basketball Association and the players' union, that lasts 10 days or three of the team's games, whichever is longer. Teams can sign them from January 5 each season. A player can have two with the same club; after the second, the team must sign him for the rest of the season or release him. He is paid a prorated share of the minimum salary for his years of service and holds a full place on the 15-man roster for as long as the contract runs.

How an NBA 10-day contract works: 10 days or three games

The name undersells it slightly. The term is 10 days or three games, and the longer of the two governs.

In most stretches of the schedule the distinction never arises. NBA teams play roughly every other night, so a club gets through four or five games in 10 days and the contract ends on the calendar. The three-game provision matters when the schedule goes quiet. A player signed just before the All-Star break could otherwise spend most of his 10 days watching a week with no games in it. The clause guarantees that he appears on the active roster for at least three before the team has to decide about him.

The clock starts on the day of signing, not the day of the first game or the first practice. A player who signs on a Tuesday afternoon, flies that night and dresses on Wednesday has already used a day.

• 10Days the contract runs
• 3Games it must cover at a minimum
• 2Contracts one player can sign with one team in a season
• 5Day in January when signings open

Fixed terms under the NBA collective bargaining agreement. Pay is not shown here because it depends on the player's years of service and changes each season.

For the length of the deal he is an NBA player in every sense that matters on the floor. He can start. He can play 40 minutes. He counts as one of the players a team may dress on a game night, and nothing in the rules limits how he is used.

The window opens on January 5 and has no formal closing date, though the calendar supplies one. A 10-day cannot outlast the regular season, so once the final week arrives there is no room for a new one, and teams that want a player for the last few games sign him for the remainder of the year instead.

Why January 5? It lines up with the point in the winter when rosters loosen. Contracts that are not fully guaranteed lock in for the full season on January 10, and teams cut the players they do not intend to keep a few days ahead of that. The roster places this opens are the ones 10-day contracts fill.

The two-contract limit and the decision it forces

Twenty days is all a team gets. A club can sign a given player to one 10-day and then a second, and the second is the last.

When that second contract expires the team has two choices under the agreement. It can sign the player to a standard contract that runs at least to the end of the season. Or it can let him walk. There is no third 10-day, no extension, no informal arrangement to keep him around the practice facility on the same terms.

The limit protects players, and the reason is easy to see. Without it a team could keep its 15th roster place permanently staffed by one player on rolling short deals, paying him day to day, guaranteeing nothing and free to drop him the moment a better option appeared. Two contracts is enough to evaluate someone in real games. Past that point the agreement says the team has seen what it needs to see.

The limit is counted per team and per season. A player who finishes two 10-days in Cleveland can sign one in Denver the next week, and two there, and move on again. Journeymen have put together most of a winter this way. The count also resets every year, so the same club can bring the same player back for two more the following January.

What the "rest of the season" deal usually looks like

A promotion after two 10-days is rarely a simple one-year contract. Teams commonly offer a deal that covers the rest of the current season at the minimum and adds a second year, sometimes a third, that is not guaranteed. The player gets security through April and a possible spot in training camp. The team gets a cheap option on someone it has already tested. If he develops, it holds an inexpensive contract. If he does not, it waives him in the summer for nothing.

Players sign these willingly, and it is hard to fault them. The alternative is free agency in March with 20 days of NBA film.

Timing is part of the tactic. A team that likes a player but wants to stay flexible will often leave a few days between his first 10-day and his second, or between the second and the full contract. He is unsigned in the gap and any other club could take him. That risk is small for most players and the days saved are days of salary and luxury tax not paid.

How the pay is calculated: a prorated share of the minimum

A 10-day contract pays the minimum salary, cut down to 10 days' worth.

The NBA's minimum is a scale and not a single number. It starts with the figure for a rookie and steps up with each year of service until it levels off for players with 10 or more. The league divides a season's salary by the number of days in the regular season, which is about 174, and a 10-day contract pays 10 of those daily shares. That works out to a little under 6 percent of the full-season minimum for whatever rung of the scale the player is on.

Rookie, no prior service64thousand dollars

One year of service104thousand dollars

Two years of service116thousand dollars

Ten or more years of service184thousand dollars

Rounded to the nearest thousand dollars and worked out from the league's published 2023-24 minimum salary scale as a dated example. The scale rises each season, so current amounts are higher.

Show the numbers

What a 10-day contract paid in 2023-24, by years of service

Item	Value
Rookie, no prior service	64thousand dollars
One year of service	104thousand dollars
Two years of service	116thousand dollars
Ten or more years of service	184thousand dollars

So in 2023-24 a player with no NBA experience earned about $64,000 for 10 days. A ten-year veteran earned close to three times that for the same 10 days and the same seat on the bench. The figures move every summer, because the minimum scale is tied to the salary cap.

Set against a G League salary the money is large. A 10-day pays more than many players in the minor league earn for an entire season, which is one reason a call-up changes a player's year even if he never gets a second one.

What counts against the team's cap and tax

All of it, in principle. A 10-day is a standard contract and every dollar counts toward the salary cap and toward the luxury tax.

There is one adjustment, and it favors veterans. When a team signs a player with three or more years of service to a one-year minimum deal, the cap charge is held to the two-year veteran rate and the league office pays the rest of his salary out of a central fund. The same treatment extends to 10-day deals. In the 2023-24 example, the ten-year veteran received about $184,000 and his team was charged about $116,000. The rule was written so that clubs would not pass over experienced players for cheaper ones, and it means a team picking between a 22-year-old and a 34-year-old for a 10-day faces a much smaller difference in cost than their paychecks suggest.

For a team paying the luxury tax, the real price is higher than the salary. Each dollar added to the payroll brings tax with it, at rates that climb the further over the line a team sits, so a $116,000 charge can cost several times that. Taxpaying teams ration their 10-days accordingly. The cap system behind those calculations is set out in our explainer on how the NBA salary cap works.

A team that is hard-capped has a simpler problem. If the 10-day would take it over its ceiling by a dollar, it cannot sign the player.

The roster spot a 10-day needs

A 10-day player is not an extra. He takes one of the 15 standard roster places, and a team that already has 15 players under standard contracts cannot sign him until it has released somebody.

That requirement decides who signs 10-days and when. Clubs that expect to use them keep the 15th spot empty through the first half of the season, or fill it with a contract that is not guaranteed and can be cleared before January 10 at little cost. Clubs with 15 guaranteed deals mostly stay out of the market, because adding a 10-day would mean paying a released player's full remaining salary in order to audition someone else for a week and a half.

Players on two-way contracts do not count toward the 15. They occupy a separate set of three slots, which is why a team can have 18 players under contract in all. Our guide to how many players are on an NBA roster covers the full count, including the limit on how many can dress.

Using 10-days to stay above the minimum

The agreement sets a floor as well as a ceiling. A team is expected to carry at least 14 players on standard contracts. It may drop below that number, but only for a limited time: no more than two weeks at a stretch and no more than 28 days in all across a season.

Put the floor and the 10-day together and a pattern appears that taxpaying and hard-capped teams have used for years. Carry 14. Let the roster fall to 13 for as long as the rules allow. Sign someone to a 10-day to get back to 14. Let it lapse and start the clock again. Over the second half of a season the team has met the minimum while paying for a 14th player only part of the time, and has looked at three or four candidates along the way.

It is legal and a little cynical. The player on the 10-day in that scheme is being measured, but he is also a compliance device, and he usually knows it.

The same arithmetic applies after the February trade deadline, when a two-for-one or three-for-one trade leaves a club short. The fastest way back to 14 is a 10-day, and the days following the deadline are among the busiest of the year for them. The freeze itself is explained in our guide to how the NBA trade deadline works.

Hardship 10-days: the exception that allows a 16th player

Here the 15-man limit gives way.

A team can apply to the league for a hardship exception when it has at least four players who have each missed three or more consecutive games through injury or illness and who are expected to stay out for a further stretch. The league reviews the medical picture. If it agrees, the team is allowed to sign one player above the roster limit, a 16th man, and the contract he signs is a 10-day.

1. 1Four players are outAt least four players on the roster have each missed three or more consecutive games through injury or illness.
2. 2The absences will continueEach of the four is expected to remain sidelined for a further period, so the shortage is not about to resolve itself.
3. 3The team appliesThe front office asks the league office for a hardship exception and supplies the medical details.
4. 4The league rulesIf the application is approved, the team may carry one player above the 15-man limit.
5. 5A 10-day is signedThe extra player signs a 10-day contract. This can happen at any point in the season, including before January 5.
6. 6Expiry or returnWhen the 10 days are up the team must qualify again to sign another. Once injured players come back, the extra place goes.

The process for the injury hardship exception under the NBA collective bargaining agreement. The league decides each application on the medical information the team supplies.

Two features set a hardship deal apart from an ordinary one.

It can be signed before January 5. The exception is tied to injuries and has nothing to do with the calendar, so a team that loses four players in November can add a 10-day player in November. Every 10-day contract signed in the first two months of a season is a hardship deal for that reason.

And it does not require an open roster place, because creating a temporary extra place is the whole point.

The exception lasts only as long as the need. Each hardship contract is good for its 10 days, and the team has to show it still qualifies before signing another. A club with more than four long-term absentees can be granted more than one extra place. The 2023-24 Memphis Grizzlies, with a large part of their rotation unavailable for much of the year, signed one hardship player after another and ended up using 33 different players that season, the most by any team in league history to that point.

An ordinary hardship 10-day counts against the cap and the tax like any other. That is a detail teams near the tax line weigh before applying: the league may be willing to grant a 16th player, but the owner still pays for him.

Who gets a 10-day contract, and how a call-up happens

Three kinds of player sign most of them.

G League players. This is the largest group by a distance. Most players in the NBA's minor league are under contract to the G League itself and not to any NBA club, which makes them free agents as far as the NBA is concerned. Any of the 30 teams can sign any of them. An NBA team does not have to call up from its own affiliate, and often does not. The structure of the league and its contract types is laid out in our explainer on the NBA G League.

Veterans working their way back. A player in his thirties who missed a season with an injury, or who went unsigned in the summer, will sometimes take a 10-day to prove he can still play. Isaiah Thomas did it more than once late in his career. For the team it is a low-cost look at someone with a known track record.

Recently released players. Someone cut in training camp or waived in January to clear a guarantee is often back in the league within weeks on a 10-day with another club.

Late in the season a fourth group shows up: players whose seasons abroad have ended, back in the United States and available.

The mechanics of a call-up

1. 1The callThe NBA team's front office contacts the player's agent and agrees to a 10-day contract.
2. 2Release from the G League rosterHe leaves his G League team, which keeps his rights in that league in case he comes back.
3. 3Travel and physicalHe flies to wherever the NBA team is, often on the road, and is examined by its medical staff.
4. 4SigningHe signs the contract and the team files it with the league office. The 10 days begin.
5. 5First gameHe is eligible to play at once and is frequently in uniform within a day of the call.
6. 6DecisionWhen the contract ends the team offers a second 10-day, signs him for the season, or lets him return to the G League.

A typical sequence for a player on a G League contract who is signed to an NBA 10-day. Timings vary; the steps do not.

Speed is the striking part. A player can go to shootaround with a minor-league team in the morning and check into an NBA game the following evening in another time zone, wearing a number he was handed that afternoon and running sets he first saw on a tablet on the plane.

The scouting that precedes the call is slower. NBA front offices watch the G League all autumn, and they gather in December at the league's Winter Showcase, a multi-day event held shortly before the signing window opens. The timing is deliberate. The players they see there are the ones they call in the first week of January. Many of those players were first noticed months earlier, at NBA Summer League in July.

10-day vs. two-way vs. a rest-of-season minimum

Three contracts cover the bottom of an NBA roster, and they suit different players.

Question	10-day contract	Two-way contract	Rest-of-season minimum
Who can sign it	Any free agent, whatever his experience	Players with fewer than four years of NBA service	Any free agent
Roster place	One of the 15 standard spots	One of three separate two-way slots	One of the 15 standard spots
Pay	Ten days of the minimum for his years of service	Half the rookie minimum, whatever his service	The minimum for his service, prorated for the days left
NBA games allowed	Every game during the term	Up to 50 in the regular season	Every game
Counts against the cap	Yes	No	Yes
Playoff eligibility	Only if re-signed for the rest of the season	Only if converted to a standard contract	Yes
Commitment by the team	Ten days	The season, though it can be ended	Through the last game, often with a non-guaranteed year after

The two-way contract is the development deal. It is built for a young player who will split the year between the NBA team and its G League affiliate, and it comes with a ceiling on service time that shuts out anyone established. A 30-year-old with eight seasons behind him cannot sign one. Our explainer on NBA two-way contracts goes through the 50-game limit and the conversion rules.

The 10-day is the audition. It has no experience limit, pays far better per day than a two-way, and commits the team to almost nothing. It suits a player the team does not know well, or a veteran it is unsure about, or a gap in the rotation that will close when someone gets healthy.

The rest-of-season minimum is the commitment. A team uses it for a player it has decided it wants in April, including a veteran arriving from the buyout market, who would have no interest in a 10-day.

How each one treats the playoffs

A 10-day cannot reach the postseason, since the contract cannot extend past the regular season's final day. A two-way player is barred from the playoff roster by the terms of his deal. In both cases the fix is the same: a standard contract, signed before the regular season ends.

One point confuses people every March. The league's rule on playoff eligibility says a player waived after March 1 cannot appear in the postseason for another team. A player whose 10-day contract runs out has not been waived. His contract ended. He can finish a 10-day with one club on March 20, sign a rest-of-season deal with another on April 1 and play in the first round. How the postseason itself is structured is covered in our guide to the NBA playoff format.

What a 10-day player gets, and what he does not

For 10 days he is treated as a member of the team. He flies on the charter, stays in the team hotel, receives the same daily meal allowance on the road as the player with the maximum contract, and has the use of the training and medical staff.

He is paid for the full term. If the team decides after four days that it has seen enough and releases him early, the balance of the contract is still owed.

He also earns something less visible. Under the agreement a player is credited with a year of service for any season in which he spends at least one day on an NBA roster. A single 10-day contract is enough. That credit moves him up a rung on the minimum salary scale for every future contract, and it counts toward the minimum service the league's pension plan requires before a player qualifies. For someone on the margins, a handful of winters with a 10-day in each can mean a pension he would otherwise never have reached. It is the least discussed benefit of the contract and, for the long careers that never quite become NBA careers, possibly the most valuable.

What he does not get is any promise about the 11th day.

The team owes him nothing once the term ends. It has no obligation to offer a second contract, to explain itself, or to give notice. Players describe finishing a road trip without knowing whether they will be on the flight home.

The freedom runs both ways, though. The team holds no rights over him either. There is no option, no right of first refusal, no restriction on where he goes next. When the contract expires he is a free agent and can sign with any other NBA team that same day, or return to the G League, or go abroad. A player who performs well on a 10-day sometimes gets a better offer from a second club before the first has made up its mind, and nothing stops him from taking it.

December 2021: replacement contracts in the COVID outbreak

For three weeks at the end of 2021 the 10-day contract kept the league running.

The Omicron wave reached NBA locker rooms in the first half of December. Players entered the league's health and safety protocols by the dozen, then by the hundred. Several teams were missing half a roster at once, and games were postponed because clubs could not dress the required eight players.

The league and the union responded by rewriting the hardship rules on the fly. Under the temporary arrangement a team could sign one replacement player on a 10-day for every player it had in the protocols, and above a certain number of cases it was required to. The roster limit was effectively suspended. And these replacement contracts were left out of salary cap and luxury tax calculations, so that no owner had a financial reason to play short-handed.

What followed was the largest burst of short-term signings the league has seen. G League rosters were stripped. Players who had been out of the NBA for years were called back in the space of a few days.

Joe Johnson, 40 years old and three seasons removed from his last NBA game, signed with Boston, the team that had drafted him two decades earlier, and scored a basket. Isaiah Thomas played for the Lakers and then for Dallas. Lance Stephenson went back to Indiana, the club where he had made his name. Greg Monroe joined Minnesota on short notice.

By the end of the regular season more than 600 players had appeared in at least one game, the highest total in league history to that point and far above the usual number.

The episode showed how flexible the instrument is. Nothing new had to be invented. The 10-day already existed, already had a pay scale, already had a standard form. The league only had to remove the limits on how many could be signed and take the cost off the cap. It also left a mark on the players involved. Dozens of them earned a year of service credit, and with it a step toward a pension, for a week of work at Christmas.

Careers that started on a 10-day and lasted

Most 10-day contracts end without a second act. A few have opened careers that ran for a decade.

Player	First 10-day	What came after
Bruce Bowen	Miami, March 1997	Eight All-Defensive selections and three championships with San Antonio
Raja Bell	Philadelphia, April 2001	Played in that year's NBA Finals; later an All-Defensive First Team guard in Phoenix
Gerald Green	New Jersey, February 2012	Returned after spells abroad and in the minor league and played seven more NBA seasons
Langston Galloway	New York, January 2015	Kept for the season and named to the All-Rookie Second Team
Gary Payton II	10-days with Washington and then Golden State	A rotation defender on the Warriors' 2022 championship team

Bell's is the fastest rise on the list. He was playing in the minor leagues in the spring of 2001 when Philadelphia signed him in April with the regular season almost over. The 76ers kept him for the playoffs, and two months later he was playing in the NBA Finals against the Lakers. He went on to play more than a decade in the league.

Payton's took the longest. He went undrafted in 2016 and spent five years on the edge of the league, signed and released by several teams, before Golden State gave him a 10-day in April 2021 and then kept him for the remainder of that season. The following year he won the final place on the roster in training camp and by June was playing important minutes in a championship series.

Green's case shows a different use. He had already been in the NBA, a first-round pick who had washed out, gone abroad and then played his way back through the minor league. The 10-day was a way back for a player whose earlier reputation had made teams wary of a longer commitment.

What these players have in common is a skill a coach could use at once. Bowen, Bell and Payton defended. Galloway and Green shot. A 10-day leaves no time to learn an offense, and the players who survive it tend to be the ones whose contribution needs no installation.

That is also why teams keep using it. An executive can watch a player in the G League for months and still not know how his game will hold up against NBA size and speed, or how he will behave on a charter flight and in a film session. Ten days answers those questions at a price close to nothing, and no workout or interview supplies the same information.

Where the 10-day came from, and how the G League changed it

The contract is older than the league's own minor league by about two decades.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the NBA had a working arrangement with the Continental Basketball Association, an independent minor league with teams in mid-sized American cities. CBA players were available to NBA clubs, and the 10-day contract was the standard means of taking one. It began as an emergency patch. A team lost a guard to a sprained ankle, called a CBA club, and had a replacement in uniform two nights later. The exact year the 10-day first appeared in a labor agreement is harder to pin down than the practice itself, which was well established by the middle of the 1980s.

In that era the call-up was a transaction between strangers. The NBA team usually had no relationship with the minor-league club, no say in how the player had been coached, and limited film. It was hiring a body for a week.

The NBA opened its own developmental league in 2001 with eight teams in the Southeast. It was renamed the D-League in 2005 and became the G League in 2017 under a sponsorship deal. Over those years it grew from a handful of independently run clubs into a system in which every NBA franchise has an affiliate of its own, running the parent club's offense, staffed by coaches the parent club hired.

That changed what a 10-day is for. A team calling up a player from its own affiliate already knows his habits, has taught him its terminology and has had its medical staff look after him all winter. The 10-day stopped being a blind hire and became the last stage of an evaluation that started in training camp. Even when the call-up comes from another team's affiliate, the quality of the film and the data is far beyond anything a CBA club could offer.

The arrival of the two-way contract in 2017 took over part of the 10-day's old job. A promising 21-year-old who would once have waited in the minors for a 10-day now usually has a two-way deal instead. The 10-day has shifted toward the players that contract excludes or does not suit: veterans with too much service time, G League players without an NBA tie, and the short-term replacement.

It has outlasted every change around it because the need it meets has not changed. An 82-game season is long and players get hurt, a subject our guide to how many games are in an NBA season takes up. Somebody has to fill the uniform.

How to read a 10-day signing

A one-line transaction report carries more information than it seems to.

Look at the date. A signing before January 5 is a hardship deal by definition, which tells you the team has at least four players out for an extended spell. A cluster in the first week of January is the regular market opening. A signing in the days after the February trade deadline usually means a trade left the roster short. One in late March may be the first step toward a multi-year minimum deal signed on the season's final day.

Count the roster. If the team was at 14 before the signing, the 10-day is filling its open place and may be about staying above the roster minimum as much as about the player. If the team was at 15 and did not release anyone, it has been granted a hardship exception.

Check the tax position. A team well under the tax signs 10-days freely. A team just under it, or hard-capped, signs them late and lets them lapse, because each day counts. When a taxpaying team does commit to one, it has a specific need.

Note whether it is a first or a second. A second 10-day with the same team means the first went well enough, and it starts a countdown. Ten days later the club must either put him on a standard contract or lose him. A gap of several days between the two contracts suggests the team is managing its payroll. A gap of several weeks suggests it tried someone else in between and came back.

See who he is. A G League player from the team's own affiliate is the end of a long evaluation, and his chances of sticking are better. A veteran with eight years of service is cover for an injury and will probably be gone when the injured player returns.

Then watch what happens on day 11. Most of the time the answer is nothing: the contract expires, the name drops off the roster page, and a different one appears a week later. Now and then the team announces a deal for the rest of the season, and a player who was in the minor leagues at New Year has an NBA contract, a year of service and a place in the league. More of our guides to how the league works are collected on the basketball hub.