NBA salary cap

The NBA salary cap is the limit to the total amount of money that National Basketball Association (NBA) teams are allowed to pay their players. Like the other major professional sports leagues in North America, the NBA has a salary cap to control costs and benefit parity, defined by the league's collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This limit is subject to a complex system of rules and exceptions and is calculated as a percentage of the league's revenue from the previous season. Under the CBA ratified in July 2017, the cap will continue to vary in future seasons based on league revenues. For the 2024–25 season, the cap is set at $140.588 million.

Half of major American leagues (NFL, NHL) have hard caps while the NBA and MLB have soft salary caps. Hard salary caps forbid teams from going above the salary cap. Soft salary caps allow teams to go above the salary cap, but will subject such teams to reduced privileges in free agency. Teams that go above the luxury tax cap are subject to the luxury tax (a tax on every dollar spent over the luxury tax cap).

The NBA had a salary cap in the mid-1940s, but it was abolished after only one season. The league continued to operate without such a cap until the 1984–85 season, when one was instituted in an attempt to level the playing field among all of the NBA's teams and ensure competitive balance for the League in the future. Before the cap was reinstated, teams could spend whatever amount of money they wanted on players, but in the first season under the new cap, they were each limited to $4.6 million in total payroll.

Under the 2005 CBA, salaries were capped at 57 percent of basketball-related income (BRI) and lasted for six years until June 30, 2011. The next CBA, which took effect in 2011, set the cap at 51.2 percent of BRI in 2011–12, with a 49-to-51 band in subsequent years.

To ensure the players get their share of the BRI, teams are required to spend 90 percent of the salary cap each year. The salary cap for the 2022–23 season is $123.655 million (minimum team salary, which is set at 90 percent of the Salary Cap, is $111.290 million). The league's newest CBA, which took effect with the 2023–24 season, requires teams to meet the 90% salary floor at the start of preseason training camp.

In December 2016, the league and the players' union reached a tentative agreement on a new CBA, with both sides ratifying it by the end of that month. This agreement was set to run through the 2023–24 season, with either side able to opt out after the 2022–23 season. The league and union reached agreement on a new CBA that took effect in 2023–24.

Unlike the NFL and NHL, the NBA features a so-called soft cap, meaning that there are several significant exceptions that allow teams to exceed the salary cap to sign players. This is done to allow teams to keep their own players, which, in theory, fosters fan support in each individual city. By contrast, the NFL and NHL salary caps are considered hard, meaning that they offer relatively few (if any) circumstances under which teams can exceed the salary cap. The NBA and MLS version of the "soft" cap does, however, offer less leeway to teams than that of Major League Baseball. MLB allows teams to spend as much as they want on salary, but it penalizes them a percentage of the amount by which they exceed the soft cap. The percentage increases as the number of consecutive years a team exceeds the cap grows, resetting only when a team falls under the cap.

While the soft cap allows teams to exceed the salary cap indefinitely by re-signing their own players using the "Larry Bird" family of exceptions, there are consequences for exceeding the cap by large amounts. A luxury tax payment is required of teams whose payroll exceeds a certain "tax level", determined by a complicated formula, and teams exceeding it are punished by being forced to pay bracket-based amounts for each dollar by which their payroll exceeds the tax level.