WNBA salaries set to top $1M: How new CBA transforms player pay
When the WNBA was in its infancy, the league’s mere existence was remarkable. No salary cap was in place during the first seven seasons, and salaries were as low as $15,000. Players have incrementally demanded more and more since the league’s inaugural season in 1997, culminating in Wednesday’s historic windfall .
For the first time, professional women’s basketball players in the U. S. can make more than $1 million, and the average salary will be nearly $600,000 after the players’ union and the league agreed to a new CBA.
The spike in players’ salaries has never looked so sharp. Think of it this way: Incoming rookie Azzi Fudd’s minimum WNBA salary in 2026 will be more than eight-year veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell made on a super-maximum salary in 2025. The upcoming season’s maximum salary of $1.
4 million, expected to be earned by stars like A’ja Wilson, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, will individually be only $100,000 less than any WNBA team’s entire salary cap last season and more than any cap before 2023. The WNBA first adopted a salary cap in 2003, when each team was given $622,000 to pay players. Even as the cap increased modestly, sometimes even failing to keep up with inflation, the business of the WNBA didn’t always support a reimagination of the salary structure.
That all changed in the last few years as the WNBA gained popularity and built its audience through a bubble season and the super-team era led by Wilson and Stewart. It reached a crescendo in 2024 with incoming college superstars. Suddenly, the idea that Cailtin Clark was making less than $80,000 to play in the WNBA became an absurdity and a point of national debate.
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