As the 2026 WNBA season fast approaches, collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiations are coming down to the wire. Last Tuesday, the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association (WNBPA) released their latest proposal: 27.5 percent of gross revenue, down from their original goal of 40 percent. For context, the expired CBA granted players about 9 percent of gross revenue. NBA players, in comparison, receive 51 percent.
Since October, the WNBPA has proposed two alternative revenue sharing scenarios to the league: the first, 30 percent, came in December, and the second, 27.5 percent, came last week. Instead of giving players a sense of what revenue split might be economically feasible, the league has instead critiqued player proposals for being unrealistic and detrimental to league growth, prodding players to drop the percentage even further.
In December, the league told ESPN that granting the players 30 percent of gross revenue would lead to $700 million in losses, exceeding the losses tallied from the first 29 years of the league’s existence. In response to the players’ latest proposal, someone affiliated with the league told The Athletic, “The Players Association’s latest proposal remains unrealistic and would cause hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for our teams.” Another source told CBS news that granting players 27.5 percent of gross revenue would lead to $460 million in losses over the course of the agreement.
What the WNBA hasn't said out loud
On paper, the league has repeatedly offered the players just shy of 15 percent revenue. In December, ESPN reported that the league offered an average salary of $530,000 that would rise each year of the deal, capping around $780,000. In the 2026 season, there will be 15 teams — the additions of the Toronto Tempo and the Portland Fire — that each have 12 roster spots. This is a total of 180 roster spots. By multiplying the number of roster spots by the average salary, then the added salaries total to $95.4 million. That $95.4 million represents roughly 14 to15 percent of revenue, signifying that the league’s own framework projects revenue for the upcoming season to be between about $635 million and $680 million.
Sports economist David Berri uses this logic to estimate that, under the league’s salary projections, gross revenue will reach around $1.2 billion in 2030. Moreover, from 2026 to 2030, assuming linear growth, the WNBA as a league will generate a total of $4.7 billion in revenue. With such massive projections, it is hard to believe the league cannot afford to allocate players more than 15 percent of gross revenue.
Nonetheless, Reddit suggests that we can estimate that the league may settle for around 22 percent. As stated earlier, the league claimed they would lose $700 million at 30 percent and $460 million at 27.5 percent. The $240 million difference between these figures corresponds to a difference of 2.5 percentage points in revenue share. As extracted from these projections, 1 percentage point of gross revenue would be worth around $96 million.
Using this figure, we can estimate the point of breaking even for the league’s resources. The loss figure of $460 million, when divided by the $96 million of additive salaries, amounts to 4.79 percentage points. Although the league argues for a 15 point percentage, subtracting the 27.5 percent from 4.79 reveals that the WNBA could actually allocate 22.7 percent of gross revenue to players without incurring a loss. As these negotiations endure, it becomes clear that for the WNBA, something is not adding up.