Over the previous 17 months, WNBA followers have been properly justified in worrying that the league is in massive hassle. Because the WNBA and its gamers have tried to hash out a brand new collective-bargaining settlement—which, amongst many issues, dictates participant compensation—negotiations have at occasions appeared irreparably contentious. Whereas warming up earlier than final 12 months’s WNBA All-Star recreation, gamers wore Pay Us What You Owe Us T-shirtsand when the WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, introduced Napheesa Collier with the sport’s MVP trophy, followers might be heard screaming, “Pay them!” Not lengthy after, Collier publicly accused the league of exhibiting “the worst management on this planet.” If the 2 sides couldn’t come collectively in time for the brand new season, which usually begins in Could, then the league’s great momentum over the previous few years could be erased—possibly for good.
However final Wednesday, following per week’s price of marathon negotiations, the 2 sides verbally agreed on a deal. Yesterday, WNBA gamers introduced that that they had ratified the phrases of a seven-year settlement, with greater than 90 p.c of gamers taking part. Below the phrases of the deal, WNBA gamers are in line for a big wage increase and can obtain a share of the league’s income that’s almost double the earlier quantity. Different noteworthy particulars of the settlement embody a rise in bonus quantities for gamers who win the WNBA championship and postseason awards, and onetime bonuses to WNBA veterans and retired gamers based mostly on years of service.
Briefly: The following era of WNBA gamers is ready to be the richest in historical past. The typical wage will improve to $583,000, up from $120,000 final 12 months; probably the most elite gamers will make greater than $1 million a season. It took 30 years, six collective-bargaining negotiations, and plenty of horror tales about shoddy lodginghowever the brand new settlement represents a historic second for the league—and helps additional the narrative that ladies’s athletes, together with these not simply within the WNBA, deserve higher monetary circumstances.
Though gamers pre-authorized a strike, going the nuclear route would have dealt the league a devastating blow at a vital second. In 2024, the WNBA welcomed its most transformative draft class, headlined by the school rivals Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese; that very same 12 months, the WNBA signed a document $2.2 billion media-rights deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon. Final season, data had been set for attendance and tv viewership.
The league’s explosive recognition went past extra eyeballs; it translated into precise funding from homeowners. Final 12 months, the WNBA welcomed the Golden State Valkyries, its first new franchise since 2008; it additionally gave new WNBA franchises to Toronto, Portland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland that will probably be added from now by 2030. In keeping with Entrance Workplace Sports activitiesthis has allowed the league to generate $1 billion in growth charges since 2023. With all of that in thoughts, the gamers got here to the negotiating desk this time with extra leverage than previously, when curiosity within the WNBA wasn’t as steady.
And due to that development, the gamers have new methods to receives a commission. Traditionally, many WNBA athletes have performed abroad throughout the offseason as a result of their American compensation is so insufficient. (Famously, the WNBA participant Brittney Grinner wound up detained in a Russian jail after touring to the nation to play for the membership group UMMC Ekaterinburg, which reportedly paid her greater than $1 million yearly.) Taking part in so removed from dwelling isn’t one thing many athletes sit up for—and in 2023, the WNBA stars Collier and Breanna Stewart created the three-on-three league Unmatched, based mostly in the US, which was capable of entice gamers by providing a mean wage of $220,000 for 10 weeks of play. Paige Bueckers signed a three-year take care of Unmatched; the wage she made throughout her first 12 months was greater than her complete four-year WNBA rookie contract.
On prime of that, a world ladies’s league that may supposedly supply gamers seven-figure salaries is seeking to begin later this 12 months. Due to these rising rivals, WNBA officers and homeowners had been confronted with a alternative: Both get severe or threat eroding the muse of a product that has slowly constructed up over the previous three many years. Given the general growth in ladies’s sports activities, there was elevated strain on the WNBA to fulfill the second. In keeping with a 2025 researchladies’s sports activities grew 4 and a half occasions sooner than males’s sports activities from 2022 to 2024. Top-of-the-line present examples is the meteoric rise of the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League, which has doubled the variety of groups since 2013 and noticed a 61 p.c viewership improve on ESPN in 2025. The Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the husband of the tennis legend Serena Williams, began the ladies’s observe enterprise Athlos, which for the previous two years has held a star-studded meet in New York Metropolis. Final 12 months’s competitors drew thousands and thousands of viewers throughout a number of platforms; the $663,000 prize purse was the most important ever provided for a ladies’s-only observe occasion.
Though it’s acceptable to characterize the WNBA’s new settlement as a landmark deal, the gamers are nonetheless working at an obstacle. It’s simple for the league to appear like a hero when salaries had been so low for such a very long time. And if the league’s recognition continues on the identical trajectory, the deal will rapidly wind up being an absolute discount for the homeowners.
However for all of its rising pains, the WNBA remains to be probably the most seen ladies’s professional-sports league in America. The progress that the league has made previously 30 years has been removed from linear, and a big hole stays between males’s and girls’s sports activities in nearly each class: income, funding, wage, consideration. Contemplating the top begin that males’s sports activities have, closing that hole will take years (for perspective: It took the NBA a number of many years to turn out to be worthwhile).
For now, either side can share credit score for putting a deal and pushing ladies’s sports activities in the fitting course. As WNBA Gamers Affiliation President Nneka Ogwumike wrote on social media“We at all times instructed you we had been going to face on enterprise, and that’s what this appears to be like like.”
