Updated Saturday, September 5, 2026. Covers the settlement terms in force for the 2026 to 27 academic year.
Every dollar figure in college football this season traces back to one court case. House v. NCAA, approved by Judge Claudia Wilken on June 6, 2025, ended the NCAA’s amateurism model and replaced it with a system that looks a lot like a professional league with a salary cap, a compliance office and no players’ union. Here is what it did, in plain terms.
| Back damages | $2.8 billion paid over 10 years to athletes who competed from 2016 to 2024 and were denied NIL money |
| Revenue share cap | $20.5 million per school in 2025 to 26; $21.3 million in 2026 to 27. Set at 22 percent of average Power conference athletic revenue, rising about 4 percent a year with periodic recalculation, projected near $33 million by 2035 |
| Who can share | Any Division I school that opts in. As of mid 2026, 328 of 365 Division I schools had opted in |
| How it is split | Entirely up to each school. Most Power Four programs send the large majority to football and men’s basketball |
| Roster limits | Scholarship limits replaced by roster limits; football is capped at 105, with every spot eligible for a scholarship |
| Third party NIL | Still allowed and uncapped, but every deal of $600 or more must be reported to NIL Go within five business days for a fair market value review |
| Enforcement | The College Sports Commission, created by the Power conferences, not the NCAA |
The Three Pieces of the Deal
1. Back pay. The NCAA and the Power conferences agreed to pay $2.8 billion in damages to roughly 14,000 former athletes for the years before NIL was legal. That money comes out of future NCAA distributions to schools, which is why every athletic department is feeling it.
2. Revenue sharing going forward. Schools can now pay athletes directly, up to the cap, on top of scholarships, NIL earnings and the existing academic (Alston) award. The first payments went out July 1, 2025. The cap is not a floor; a school can share less or nothing, and 37 Division I schools chose not to opt in at all.
3. The rules that came with it. Roster limits, the NIL Go clearinghouse and a new enforcement body. The settlement runs 10 years and the terms get renegotiated along the way.
The College Sports Commission and NIL Go
The College Sports Commission (CSC) is the enforcement arm the Power conferences built to run the settlement. It does three things: it tracks each school’s revenue share payments through a system called CAPS, built with LBi Software; it monitors roster limits; and it reviews third party NIL deals through NIL Go, a Deloitte built platform.
NIL Go is where most of the friction is. Any athlete’s third party deal worth $600 or more, on its own or in aggregate, has to be reported within five business days. Deloitte compares it against a database of real endorsement deals to judge whether the payment is within a reasonable range for the athlete and whether it serves a valid business purpose. Deals can be cleared, sent back for revision, denied, or taken to arbitration. The CSC said in July 2026 that NIL Go had approved $228 million in deals in the first six months of the year.
The CSC’s early attempt to declare that collectives could not meet the valid business purpose test was reversed within weeks, and collectives remain the main vehicle for money above the cap. In January 2026 the commission sent schools a warning letter about promising athletes third party money before it had been cleared, saying it left players exposed to deals falling through and eligibility risk.
Why $40 Million Rosters Exist Under a $21 Million Cap
The cap covers only what the school pays directly. Collective and brand money sits outside it. That is the loophole, and it is not really a loophole so much as the design: the settlement regulates third party NIL rather than capping it. It is why seven rosters are at $40 million or more this season. The Protect College Sports Act pending in Congress would, among other things, raise the direct cap to nearly $49 million; our explainer on that bill is here.
What It Did Not Settle
The settlement did not make athletes employees, did not create a union or collective bargaining, and did not stop the lawsuits. Eligibility cases (the NFL returnee fights, the class of 2022 loophole, Trinidad Chambliss at Ole Miss) are being decided in state and federal courts one injunction at a time, and Title IX questions about how revenue is split were explicitly left for later. The NCAA continues to lobby for a federal law that would lock the settlement in and grant antitrust protection.
Related explainers: how revenue sharing works, Alston money, the 105 roster era and NIL collectives.
The Bottom Line
House v. NCAA pays $2.8 billion for the past and lets schools pay athletes up to $21.3 million a year in 2026 to 27 for the present, with the College Sports Commission and its NIL Go clearinghouse reviewing every outside deal over $600. Third party NIL is regulated, not capped, which is why the real money in college football now sits well above the number in the settlement.