The NBA has provided teams with an updated salary cap projection for the 2025/26 season, reports Bobby Marks of ESPN (Twitter link).
According to Marks, the NBA’s latest projection remains exactly in line with its estimate from last summer. The league is still calling for a 10% cap increase for ’25/26, which is the maximum increase permitted in any single season under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement.
This season’s salary cap line is $140,588,000, so the projection for next season remains at $154,647,000. That’s the figure we’ve used to project minimum salaries, maximum salaries, and mid-level and bi-annual amounts for 2025/26.
As Marks details, a 10% cap increase would also cause the luxury tax line and the first and second tax aprons to rise by the same amount. They would be as follows:
Luxury tax: $187.9MM
First apron: $195.9MM
Second apron: $207.8MM
The 2024/25 season represents the first year in which all of the new apron-related restrictions have been in place. Navigating those aprons has proven to be a challenge for many teams, in large part because the cap only rose by about 3.4% last offseason, as Marks observes (via Twitter).
A 10% increase in 2025 – and perhaps in the next couple seasons after that, aided by the league’s lucrative new media rights deal – will help push those apron numbers higher, creating a more manageable landscape for teams going forward.