College Football Roster Spending & Team Pages 2026
Every Power 4 program plus Notre Dame: what the roster actually costs this season (the school's revenue-share money under the $20.5M cap plus the collective and NIL layer stacked on top), built from public federal filings and reported deals. Ranges on purpose, because anyone quoting an exact NIL payroll is guessing. Every team links to its own page with every player's Model Price, the portal ledger and the money behind the program.
The model puts Texas at the top around $45M, with Ohio State, Notre Dame and Tennessee in the high-$30Ms. Revenue-share capacity is public record; the NIL layer is our estimate, and the math is all here. Disagree with a number? Good. That is the point.
AllSECBig TenBig 12ACC
How these numbers are built
Estimated roster spend = revenue-share layer + third-party NIL layer. Every input is public or derived from published reporting.
Revenue-share layer: the House settlement lets each opted-in school share up to $20.5M with athletes in 2025-26. We estimate football's share of that pool for each program.
Third-party NIL layer: scaled from each school's athletics revenue in its federal EADA filing (2024-25, the most recent published year), then calibrated so the league-wide total and the top rosters land where credible published benchmarks put them. As verified deal reports accumulate in our ledger, this calibration re-fits automatically.
The band: collective money is not public, so the NIL layer carries an uncertainty range. Precision beyond that would be theater.
Portal columns: real 2026 transfer portal moves (players in, players out, and the net star rating of that traffic) from CollegeFootballData.
Top Model Price: the highest-priced player on each roster from our player-level model; where a real deal has been credibly reported, the reported number shows on the team page, labeled and sourced.
Our transparency deal: we show you every input and every source, and we grade our own misses in public as real numbers surface. The exact weights are ours. What we never do: republish other outlets' valuations or claim to know any locker room's actual payroll. Athletics revenue is fact; roster spend is an estimate you can argue with.