2025 NFL Cap Texture
Or How NFL Teams Spread their Money. Data Courtesy of Over The Cap as of Fri, Aug 29, 2025 | 07:46 AM EDT.
Table by mrcaseb.com
Table by mrcaseb.com
2025 NFL Salary Cap Texture
Or How NFL Teams Spread their Money in the 2025 Season
The NFL salary cap is a science in its own right. But don’t worry, this post isn’t about explaining the mechanics of the cap in detail1. Let’s just start with the actual outcome of this post and then explain a few points about it.
The following figure shows the percentage of contract classes in each NFL team’s total salary cap. Data courtesy of Over The Cap.
So How Do you Read this?
Let’s take a look at the NFL averages. These are marked on the Y-axis with the NFL logo.
On average, rookie contracts will account for 18.4% of the salary cap in 2025. Low figure contracts (see next section for definition) account for 14.0% of the salary cap, high figure contracts for 21.4% and so on. On average, teams have about 8.1% cap space and 13.6% of the cap is occupied by dead money.
The teams are sorted vertically according to available cap space. If you want to sort by another class, please scroll down further.
Don’t worry if the numbers don’t add up to exactly 100. This is only due to rounding, so that it remains readable.
Please keep in mind that we are only looking at the cap numbers for the 2025 season here. Cap numbers can vary greatly from year to year. I recommend viewing cap texture in cycles. This is just a snapshot of a cycle of, let’s say 4 years(?), and this will most likely look very differently in a year from now because high cap numbers hit every roster at some point (please refer to section Section 4 to view previous years). It is also more or less impossible to include future commitments, e.g. Ja’Marr Chase’s $41M cap number in 2028. We can only show one year, esp. because it’s relative to team salary caps which changes year over year as well.
How are Contract Classes Defined?
As I mentioned above, the data comes from Over the Cap. And at Over The Cap, player contracts are classified as follows depending on the cap number in the coming season:
| Contract Class | Definition |
|---|---|
| Elite | Top 32 cap number |
| High | #33 - #160 cap number |
| Middle | #161 - #320 cap number |
| Low | Cap number of $5,831,765 and lower |
| Rookie Contracts | Three or fewer accrued seasons |
I Would Like to Sort by Another Class
Sure, why not. Here is a sortable table.
NFL Cap Textures of Previous Seasons
I plan to update this post every year. This will help to better track a team’s cycle. That’s why I’m also posting the charts from previous seasons here, starting with the 2024 season.
Footnotes
For this post, it is only important that you know that we are only interested in the regular season salary cap here. During the offseason, or more precisely from the start of the new NFL league year in early March until the first week of the regular NFL season in September, only the 51 most expensive contracts actually count against a team’s salary cap. This is usually referred to as the “top-51 rule”. But when the season starts, all 53 players on the active roster count toward the salary cap. And this is what we are looking at in this post.↩︎