If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the rest of their teammates will have bragging rights as the National Football League (NFL)’s first three-peat winners. They’ll also bag a cool $171,000 for the game, each.
Before Philadelphia fans accuse the Chiefs of getting special treatment, yes, Eagles players will earn the same amount if they win. And whichever team leaves New Orleans without the Lombardi Trophy will still get a decent consolation prize: A $96,000 paycheck per player.
Super Bowl contenders are receiving a better pay raise than most Americans did this year; the game paycheck is about 4.3% higher for the winners than in 2024 and about 7.9% higher for the losers.
Still, those paychecks mean that many players, not just the stars, may take a pay cut to get knocked around on the field. And the amounts start to look downright paltry, especially considering how much money is shelled out for all-things Super Bowl each February. The price of entry is steep, no matter how you participate.
While ticket sales plummeted in the week leading up to the Chiefs-Eagles matchup, the cheapest seats still cost more than $3,000. Meanwhile, some companies have reportedly spent $8 million or more for 30-second spots that will be among a broad variety of ads playing during breaks in the action. And Americans are projected to legally wager a record nearly $1.4 billion on the big game this year.
How Postseason Paychecks are set
Even as more money will be shelled out ahead of Sunday’s game—from beer to snacks to new TVs to jerseys—the paychecks for the players won’t budge. Rather, the compensation rates for the winning and losing teams were set back in March 2020 as part of the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is effective through the 2030 season.
The way players are compensated for postseason action is one of a few key differences from the regular season. Players are generally paid their annual salary on a weekly basis over the course of the regular 18-game season, but those paychecks stop once the postseason begins.
Instead, the league specifies how much players are compensated for each of the playoff games—win or lose—which ranged from $49,500 to $54,500 for this year’s wild card and division playoff games, then bumped up to $77,000 for the conference championship games. The league has up to 15 days to pay players for each postseason game.
All told, the postseason amounts to more than $350,000 in additional compensation for players on this year’s winning Super Bowl team and $275,000-plus for those players on the losing team. And even players on the teams who don’t see any playing time are due a paycheck, so long as they are on the official 53-player roster, active/inactive list or reserve/injured list.
The league’s billion-dollar enterprise
Meanwhile, the NFL is on the hook to pay some $75 million-plus to the hundreds of players across the 14 teams that were in the playoffs this season, including more than $14 million to the Chiefs and Eagles players after Sunday’s Super Bowl game alone.
That may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a small droplet in one of those massive Gatorade coolers. The NFL now generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue and is on track to achieve the $25 billion revenue goal that Commissioner Roger Gooddell targeted by 2027.
With so much money flying around, the league’s current crop of stars are also cashing in. Mahomes, the Chiefs quarterback, signed a 10-year, $450 million contract back in 2020, which means he earns an average annual salary of $45 million. Jalen Hurts, quarterback for the Eagles, signed a five-year, $255 million contract extension back in 2023, which sees him earning an even higher average-annual salary of $51 million.
Thanks to their contracts, the quarterbacks could earn more than $2.5 million each week of the regular season—and that doesn’t include lucrative endorsement deals.
Losers losing out less
Of course, for every Mahomes and Hurts, there are dozens of players who don’t share the limelight, nor those lucrative paychecks. The league minimum is currently $795,000, so the postseason paychecks represent a pretty considerable bonus for these players.
While Super Bowl winners get even more perks, including the famously blingy ring, there’s an interesting quirk to the Collective Bargaining Agreement: Super Bowl losers are actually earning a higher share of the winner’s paycheck as time goes on. When the Chiefs lost the 2021 Super Bowl, those players took home exactly 50% of the pay of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers players. By 2031, the losing team will earn about 67% of the winning team’s payout.
Turns out, even the losers get lucky sometimes.