Why haven’t the WNBA and players union reached a deal?

With only nine days until the Oct. 31 deadline to reach a new collective bargaining agreement, the tension between the WNBA and its players union grows tighter.

The union outlined a series of priorities in its decision to opt out of the current CBA last year, including retirement benefits, family planning and pregnancy benefits, and minimum professional standards. Throughout the season, the WNBPA and the league have also discussed roster size, health insurance, prioritization, and the number of regular-season games.

But as the league and players barrel toward the deadline, the discord primarily stems from one issue: revenue sharing.

“If me and you aren’t set on going to the correct restaurant, who cares what we’re ordering as an appetizer?” WNBPA first vice president Kelsey Plum said. “First, second, third is rev share (and) salary. So when I say that we continue to propose and the counter proposals that are coming back are further away from where we thought we would be, that to me is — and I think a lot of the players are in agreement as a union — this is literally the meat and potatoes.”

On Tuesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver (to whom WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert reports) weighed in on the negotiations. He was asked if WNBA players deserved a larger share of revenue in the new CBA. Silver said yes before reframing the question.

“Share isn’t the right way to look at it because there’s so much more revenue in the NBA,” he said. “I think you should look at it in absolute numbers in terms of what they’re making. And they are going to get a big increase in this cycle of collective bargaining, and they deserve it.”

Engelbert has said the league has offered a “significant” salary increase, with the league’s maximum salary proposal coming in at $850,000, compared to about $250,000 in the current agreement.

For players, it’s not just what’s in their paycheck. They want a commitment from the WNBA to financially recognize players’ contributions to the league’s growth.

The union’s goal is to raise salaries as the WNBA’s business grows. That is the basis of revenue sharing: As the league makes more money, so do the players. On the other side, Engelbert and the WNBA’s public messaging has been that the league needs to ensure its future sustainability by reserving a larger portion of revenues to league owners and investors.

“We all agree we’re trying to return every dollar we possibly can to the players,” Engelbert said, “but we also want to incentivize investment from owners. We want owners to have a viable business.”

Why won’t our commissioner talk about the fact that a transformational CBA requires a salary system that actually values the players and the revenue they drive in a meaningful way? The system we have now was designed to intentionally undervalue the players and has for decades.…

— Isabelle Harrison (@OMG_itsizzyb) October 3, 2025

Since its inception in 1996, the WNBA has yet to achieve profitability. But revenue isn’t profit, and with the influx of expansion fees ($250 million each for Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia), a new media rights deal ($2.2 billion over 11 years) and increased corporate interest in the league, its financial outlook is dramatically different from the era when the previous CBA was signed.

Signed in 2020, the current WNBA CBA has a revenue-sharing provision that potentially gives players 17.5 percent of surplus revenue, but that surplus rate has never been achieved.

How does surplus revenue work? In the 2020 CBA, the revenue-sharing agreement is an incremental model that requires the WNBA to hit certain revenue targets before it is put into effect. Essentially, the league has to increase revenue by 20 percent each season, and any overage gets added to the revenue-sharing pie. These targets are cumulative, so the total revenue in any season would have to exceed the targets in all of the prior seasons applicable under the CBA before the players get their piece.

Assuming the league exceeded that combined target in any single season, revenue sharing kicks in. The only revenue eligible for sharing is the excess above the target. Within that amount, 30 percent is immediately removed as “the cost of revenue,” which is nominally meant to help the league cover expenses. The remaining 70 percent is considered the “shared revenue” and is split equally between the players and the league. The players’ portion is then divided between direct payments to the players and increases to the WNBA marketing agreement fund. 

The model made some sense at a time when revenues like media deals, ticket sales and sponsorships were lower and the league needed to cover its costs before sharing money with the players. In hindsight, the pandemic eliminated any hope of triggering the revenue-sharing provision. The pandemic-impacted seasons in 2020 and 2021 put the league in a hole on its revenue targets that it was never able to overcome, even as TV money, sponsorships and ticket sales surged over the past few years. As it stands, players receive less than 10 percent of WNBA revenue, a figure that has been decreasing as salaries stagnated and revenue increased.

Tamika Tremaglio, the former executive director of the NBPA who helped negotiate the NBA’s most recent CBA, said the WNBA’s economics support the players’ current position.

“Revenue share should really extend beyond what it did back in 2020,” Tremaglio said. “I don’t think that it should be subject to a particular threshold. … In general, I think it can be a little more straightforward like the (NBA).”

However, per a source with knowledge of the negotiations, the league is proposing a revenue-sharing system similar in structure to the current model with a fixed salary cap and additional revenue sharing, which is triggered at certain targets. The source said the target is more attainable than what is in the present CBA.

Although the WNBA told The Athletic in a statement that player compensation would increase “without any cap on the upside” in its plan, WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson called the proposal “bad math” in a statement Wednesday. She added: “Adam Silver said it himself on behalf of the WNBA. ‘Share isn’t the word.’ It’s not in their vocabulary.”

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The players aren’t looking far for a preferable model: The NBA salary cap is determined by the league’s basketball-related income (BRI). The league is mandated to pay between 49 and 51 percent of BRI to the players. That number becomes the salary cap, so players automatically partake in NBA revenue. When league revenues spike — which has been the case whenever a new media rights deal is enacted — salaries do so correspondingly.

The NFL and NHL have similar arrangements where the salary cap represents about 50 percent of the league’s total revenue. MLB doesn’t have a salary floor, which makes it harder to tie revenue to salary. Even so, the players earn about 47 percent of revenue, though that number has been decreasing, which could lead to labor uncertainty.

Women’s pro leagues haven’t yet reached those levels of revenue sharing. The NWSL’s first season was in 2013, but its finances are more comparable to the WNBA. Its collectively bargained salary cap is now linked to revenue sharing for the first time. Each season, the team salary cap is increased by “team revenue share,” which is 10 percent of the sum of NWSL media revenue and sponsorship revenue divided by the number of teams in the league. The PWHL, entering its third season, doesn’t have a revenue-sharing provision.

“(WNBA players) have to work their way up to that 50/50 deal,” said Dr. Daniel Kelly II, Associate Dean and Clinical Professor at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport. “Can they get a model that grows with the league’s growth? That I think they can get. They may not get 50 percent. They may get 20 percent. But with a growth escalator, as the revenues are increasing then their number’s going to increase, then that sets them up for future deals to be able to negotiate with more leverage.”

Under the current CBA, the WNBA’s revenue structure doesn’t impact salaries and contains no mechanism of changing the salary cap, regardless of the economic state of the league.

The salary cap rose by three percent in every year of the present CBA. In a league that was struggling to stay afloat at the time it was signed, that consistent increase was to the benefit of the players, an insurance policy that would make sense for a different era of the WNBA — as recently as 2020 and 2021, this mechanism was player-friendly. However, in a league that is now growing rapidly, that structure, players argue, leaves them behind.

Let’s say the league increased revenue by “only” 20 percent each season. Over five years (from 2020-2025), salaries would have increased by 16 percent even as revenue increased by 149 percent, and the players wouldn’t share in any of that growth, because revenue sharing still wouldn’t kick in due to the provision around “excess revenue.” Thus, a key priority outlined by the WNBPA in this negotiation is “introducing an equity-based model that grows and evolves in step with the league’s business success,” more directly tied to total revenue than pegged to revenue accessible only after clearing a high hurdle of revenue growth.

In its prior, modest growth stage, it is understandable why the league would have included conservative guardrails in the CBA to secure day-to-day operational funding before sharing more revenue to the players. As the WNBA experiences continued growth, however, the business structure will have to evolve to meet the needs of a new iteration of the league.

Once a revenue-sharing structure is agreed upon, other issues remain vital to striking a deal.

Throughout the 2025 season, players said the increased cadence of games was too taxing on their bodies. The WNBA played 44 regular-season games, its most ever, though the season still spanned from May through October. Players have said the league wants to continue to add games with the addition of expansion teams, which they said could compromise the quality of their performance.

The number of games component is tied to professional standards, meaning codifying travel charter and ensuring that players have appropriate facilities and personnel to support their training, particularly during a longer season. It also relates to roster spots. If the schedule becomes more onerous, players said rosters should be bigger so teams don’t have to rely on hardship contracts when there’s an injury or international competitions. The compromise is that larger rosters would theoretically require the players to sacrifice individual salary under the team salary cap.

That calculation once again relies upon the league’s overall salary structure. At the heart of it, the CBA negotiation remains a give-and-take between the players and the owners: how much the owners are willing to financially invest in the WNBA product, and how much both the owners and players will be able to benefit from the overall growth.

— The Athletic‘s Ben Pickman contributed to this report.