After the 2024 WNBA season concluded, the WNBPA (the league’s players’ union) opted out of the final two years of its collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The current CBA will expire at the end of the 2025 season, and negotiations have already started between the union and the WNBA.
Their current agreement was reached in January of 2020 — before the boom of women’s sports, before Caitlin Clark even went to college at Iowa, and before the WNBA signed an 11-year media rights deal valued at over $2.2 billion. So much has changed for the players and the league in this time, and the expectation is that the next CBA will be historic.
The 2024 WNBA season was the most-watched season of the league in history. The season attracted over 54 million viewers across their network platforms, not even including local broadcasts and League Pass numbers. They also broke single-game attendance records and had the highest total attendance in 22 years.
League Pass had a 366% increase in 2024, per the league, and games were viewed in 207 different countries.
Numbers like that mean that players have all the leverage this time around. They don’t have to dig very far to produce evidence of how much the product has grown in popularity and income over the past five years. Viewership numbers and ticket sales aside, there is also the fact that Unrivaled was just able to pay some of its players triple their WNBA salaries for a fraction of the work a WNBA season requires. Recently, it was announced that Paige Bueckers will get paid more for one 10-week season at Unrivaled than she will for all four years of her WNBA rookie deal.
On top of that, NIL expansion in the college universe has meant a lot of players entering the WNBA have already been making money for years before entering the league.
Women’s National Basketball Players Association executive director Terri Carmichael Jackson spoke at the ESPNW Summit this week, and followed up her engagement by speaking to reporters. The New York Post reported that Carmichael Jackson said the union is “committed to negotiating for as long as it takes.”
That could include a strike, as Madeline Kenney of The Post noted after being among a handful of reporters to speak with Carmichael Jackson:
CBA negotiations will continue to be a major storyline for the upcoming WNBA season, which opens May 17. A work stoppage is not out of the question if they can’t reach a deal before next season.
Kenney also reported that the WNBPA has already submitted multiple proposals to the league, and hopes to have most of the deal hammered out before the WNBA All-Star break in July. The current CBA expires on Oct. 31, and ideally, the new deal will be signed before then.
WNBA statement on CBA negotiations:
“We remain committed to working with the WNBPA on a new CBA that is fair for all parties and lays the foundation for growth and success for years to come.” https://t.co/rbHvbasdor
— Madeline Kenney (@madkenney) May 1, 2025
Amid hot topics in these negotiations are salary increases, reconfiguring the current salary cap system, more benefits for mothers and families, family planning support, as well as roster expansion. The previous CBA made significant progress on some of these points, but it was more bare minimum support back then — the players ultimately deserve more and know it.
The supermax salary for the 2025 season is $249,244, a number that a large majority of the league won’t reach. The league’s average salary for 2025 is instead $147,745. The hard salary cap for each team is $1,507,100, under half of the NWSL’s new cap of $3.3 million, not including revenue share from their league. In the WNBA, the salary cap cannot be exceeded, different from the NBA’s softer salary cap that allows teams to spend more money but potentially pay luxury taxes for exceeding the cap using specific exemptions.
Another big negotiation point in the last CBA was ensuring players who were pregnant were able to make their full season salary for the time they missed. Yet, that salary was counted towards the team’s salary cap despite the player not playing. With 12 roster spots and a tight cap, this made roster and salary negotiations more complicated for both teams and players.
Expansion of roster spots is also a big point of emphasis in these current negotiations. Most teams go into the season with 11 rostered players to help stay under the salary cap. In 2025, that means while there are 156 total roster spots, there will likely only be around 144 players on opening day rosters. This creates a problem when it comes to developing young talent, with many draft picks and younger players being cut from teams before they have a chance to find a solid place in the league.
There have been some change in conditions since the 2020 season, despite being on the outdated CBA still. Teams have invested in player practice facilities, more recovery tools, and more amid the rising concern for player treatment league-wide. There was also the issue of chartered flights, which was set to be a big point in these negotiations, even before the WNBA had to haphazardly restructure its travel policies on the fly last season due to concerns over player safety while using public commercial airlines to travel. The goal in this CBA is to have those travel policies inked permanently in contracts.
The players are not afraid to strike, as Carmichael Jackson noted in New York this week. They will do whatever it takes to improve their conditions, and know they have heightened leverage this time around. Count on them using it in whatever ways they have to secure what they’re worth.
