How Women's Basketball Salaries Compare to the Men's Game
Why the gap exists
The headline gap between WNBA and NBA player pay is enormous and well reported, but it is not the result of employers deciding to pay women less for the same work. It is the downstream effect of two very different revenue engines. The NBA is a roughly ten-billion-dollar global media and sponsorship business, and roughly half of basketball-related income is shared with players under the league's collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The WNBA is much smaller — newer, with a smaller media deal, smaller average attendance, and an audience that is still being built — and its CBA caps salaries accordingly.
Salaries in a North American major league are set almost entirely by two things: the salary cap (derived from league revenue) and the CBA's percentage split of that revenue. The NBA's CBA sends around 50 percent of basketball-related income to players. The WNBA's most recent CBA, signed in 2020, raised the percentage of league revenue shared with players but the underlying revenue pool is many times smaller, so the cap that comes out the other side is a fraction of the NBA's.
Approximate top and average pay (rounded, and shifting fast):
| League | Approximate maximum salary | Approximate average salary |
|---|---|---|
| NBA | ~$50-60 million | ~$11 million |
| WNBA (pre-2026 CBA) | ~$240,000 | ~$150,000 |
| WNBA (post-CBA targets) | ~$300,000+ | rising |
The WNBA table is in flux. The league's next collective bargaining agreement and its expanded media rights agreements are expected to push the salary cap and Supermax figures meaningfully higher.
What is changing: media rights and the next CBA
The single biggest driver of player pay in any professional league is the media rights deal — how much broadcasters and streamers pay to air games over a multi-year term. The NBA's national media deals run into the tens of billions of dollars across multiple partners. The WNBA, historically bundled into broader media packages or sold cheaply, recently renegotiated its own rights as a standalone and more valuable property. Rising viewership, expansion teams, and the arrival of high-profile rookies have all pushed the market value of WNBA inventory up sharply.
The next WNBA CBA is being negotiated against that backdrop. The players' union opted out of the prior agreement specifically to capture a larger share of new revenue. League and union discussions have centered on lifting the salary cap, raising the maximum individual salary, expanding benefits, and improving conditions such as charter flights and family travel. The targets that have been publicly floated would more than double top salaries over the life of the deal, though they would still leave WNBA pay well below the NBA's.
The CBA also matters because floor pay matters. Raising the league minimum is arguably more important to rank-and-file players than raising the Supermax, because most players are not stars. Travel, maternity protections, and off-season benefits are part of total compensation too, and they have historically been weaker on the women's side.
What overseas leagues pay — and the two-job problem
Because the WNBA season runs roughly May through September, many of the best women's players have historically spent the rest of the year in overseas leagues — Russia, Turkey, Spain, China, and elsewhere — where salaries for elite imports were, for years, often higher than the WNBA's maximum. The best-known women's players could earn more abroad for four months than they earned in the United States for the full season, which is a major reason the headline domestic numbers understate the real income of top players.
That arrangement creates real costs. Players burn out from year-round basketball. Injuries and political risk fall on overseas contracts. Detention of an American star in Russia drew public attention to the unelected risks players accept to earn a living. The WNBA's push to grow domestic compensation is partly aimed at making it possible for the best players to play only in the United States.
The men's side has no comparable two-job structure. NBA players earn enough from their league contract that off-season play is purely optional (or done, as with the Olympics, for national team honor rather than salary). That asymmetry is itself part of the gap: the headline WNBA salary is not the player's whole basketball income, but it is the part controlled by the American league's economics.
What closing the gap actually requires
Salaries in professional sports are not a moral choice teams make. They are a function of league revenue and the bargaining agreement that splits it. The WNBA's pay gap with the NBA will narrow as — and only as — the WNBA's revenue grows and the next CBA captures a larger share of that revenue for players.
The pieces are in motion: viewership is up, franchises are selling for record valuations, national media rights have been re-bundled, and the next CBA is designed around a larger pie. Whether that produces a meaningful convergence in player pay, or merely a smaller gap, depends on whether the sport turns audience growth into durable revenue, and on whether the deal gives players the percentage of that revenue they bargained for.