The league says the 2026 team salary cap will be $5.75 million. The league says the average player salary will jump to $540,000. WNBA rules dictate a minimum of 11 players per roster.
$540,000 multiplied by 11 is $5.94 million.
These numbers cannot mathematically coexist. Before a franchise even considers signing a 12th player to fill out a maximum roster, paying an average of $540,000 across the bare minimum of 11 players places a team $190,000 over the league’s own proposed hard cap. That is not a difference of opinion between the union and the owners; it is a structural impossibility.
When you stress-test the league's proposal with their other publicized figures, the arithmetic breaks down even further. The WNBA's offer features a new maximum salary of $1.3 million, designed to fast-track max deals for young stars like Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston. If a team signs just one franchise player to a $1.3 million max deal, they are left with $4.45 million to pay the remaining 10 players on an 11-player roster. That drops the average for the rest of the roster to $445,000 per player. To genuinely hit the league-touted $540,000 overall average, teams would have to consistently and aggressively violate the $5.75 million salary cap.
So where is the $540,000 figure actually coming from?
Analysts and forum observers were the first to identify the discrepancy, noting that because revenue sharing is dispersed after the season concludes, it is entirely excluded from team salary cap calculations. We stress-tested the finding against the league's own publicized figures, and the math confirms it. The WNBA is artificially inflating its "average salary" public talking point by including anticipated, conditional revenue-share bonuses.
By blending hard, guaranteed base salaries with projected, un-guaranteed revenue-sharing kickbacks, the league can market a historic $540,000 average salary to the press. However, because the WNBA's proposal refuses to budge on its actual revenue-sharing percentages by offering players less than 15% of gross revenue (which the league markets as over 70% of net revenue) rather than the union's requested 26% of gross revenue, that extra money is not guaranteed.
This arithmetic contradiction gets to the very heart of the players' and agents' frustrations as the March 10th deadline looms. The league is utilizing a headline-friendly $540,000 average salary to win the public relations battle, while offering a $5.75 million salary cap that makes the guaranteed realization of those numbers impossible. For the union, and the agents currently demanding to see the league's confidential financials subject to NDAs, the proposal appears to be a PR strategy rather than a mathematical reality. We’ll let you do the math again yourself.