Spring football has never been where the money conversation happens. The XFL’s final season in 2023, and the league that replaced it in 2024, both ran on pay scales closer to a solid day job than an NFL contract. The figures are public, and together they trace a story of slow, negotiated raises. They also show how a headline number can hide what a player actually takes home.
Quarterback megadeals and what esports teams pay their rosters get charted in exhaustive detail, while a backup linebacker’s spring season goes unexamined. That’s backwards. The gap between a stated salary and a practical package is where the economics of this tier of football actually live, and both leagues, the dead one and the living one, prove it.
How the Final Season Paid Its Players
Salaries that season ran on a standard form contract, which made the arithmetic simple. The same sheet applied in every locker room, with nothing individual to negotiate. Training camp paid $800 a week. Once games began, an active player earned $5,000 per game week and an inactive player $1,500, a gap wide enough that a single roster decision could swing a season’s income by thousands. Winning was worth $1,000 to everyone on the victorious roster, inactives included, a small piece of shared fortune the NFL has never bothered to copy.
Stretched across a full season, an active player averaged $59,000. Sporting News, working from the same structure, estimated total earnings between $60,000 and $70,000 once bonuses were counted. The postseason paid on top of that: $8,000 per player for a conference championship and $12,500 for the league title. The bonuses are why the estimates run higher than the weekly arithmetic alone.
Beyond the weekly rates sat a benefits package. The league provided health insurance with vision and dental, plus room and board at its hub in Arlington, Texas, and valued the whole arrangement at roughly $20,000. ESPN’s coverage of that season described housing and two meals a day on top of the cash. A bed and two meals a day do not appear in a salary table, but they appear in a player’s budget. Comparing that average against a later league’s salary figure without stacking the benefits on top flatters the later league, every time.
What the UFL Pays Now
The UFL arrived when the XFL and USFL merged ahead of its first season. The listed structure paid $5,500 a week to active players, $2,500 to inactive, and $850 a week in training camp, with contracts running from January 1 through August 24. That January-to-August span meant the contract covered far more than game weeks. Around the cash sat a $400 weekly housing stipend, $150 a week toward a 401(k), and a $55 daily travel per diem, all inside an overall league player budget listed at $24 million. The stipend and the per diem were cash all the same, just labeled differently.
The first-year headline number is messy. ESPN reported a $50,000 salary plus a weekly housing payment running at least ten weeks, with extra housing money for playoff teams as they advanced. The agreed minimum for that season was $55,000. The two figures measure different things, one a reported salary with housing attached and the other a negotiated floor, and the later number is the baseline that stuck.
Then came the union. The UFL negotiated a two-year collective bargaining agreement with the United Football Players Association ahead of the 2025 season, retroactive to the start of training camp on March 2 and running through 2026, so the new terms counted from the first day of camp. USA Today put the new minimum at $62,005, a raise of $7,005 that worked out to a 12.7 percent jump from the year before. That minimum applies only to players who participate in every regular-season game, so availability shapes the paycheck as much as any rate on the sheet.
In the agreement’s second season, the active-roster minimum climbed to $64,000 across the regular season, with per-game pay of $6,200 rising to $6,400 under the union terms. The CBA also made every player eligible for year-round health care, with the league covering seven months and subsidized COBRA handling the other five, which leaves no month uncovered. Accolades still pay separately, from $1,000 for a Player of the Week honor up to $7,500 for the league’s MVP, the same incentive logic as the old league’s winner’s share.
No salary for 2027 has been established. The two-year CBA reached its end, and nothing confirmed has replaced it, so the league’s next calendar item is administrative: a supplemental draft for 2027, announced for November 18. Whenever the next number arrives, it will be the fourth data point in a series that has moved in only one direction. Across the whole span, the minimum climbed three straight seasons, negotiated rather than granted, and an XFL package that was better than its headline suggested. Both things are true at once, which is the whole point of reading the fine print.
