The Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) players live in a strange paradox. They are among the best athletes in the world, performing on national television and representing their sport globally. Yet, financially, they are treated as an afterthought compared to their male counterparts in the NBA.
This reality may finally begin to change.
Negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Player’s Association (WNBPA) could become one of the most consequential labor deals in the history of women’s sports. The negotiations have yet to culminate in a final agreement due to continuing disagreements over league revenue sharing amongst teams and players. Still, the very fact that the talks have advanced this far signals a new era. WNBA players now have more leverage, stemming from the league’s increase in popularity, to demand a much larger share of the revenue derived from their efforts and abilities.
To understand why this negotiation holdup matters, it helps to look at salaries. In 2025, the average WNBA salary was about $102,249, with the highest base salaries capped at $249,244. Rookie players earned even less, with the lowest base salary sitting at $66,079.
Compare that to the NBA, where the average player salary is roughly $13 million per year.
This disparity is ridiculous. The average NBA player earns over 100 times more than the average WNBA player. An NBA player can earn in a few days what many WNBA athletes make over the course of an entire season.
The disparity is not explained by the league’s popularity. Despite league critics repeatedly attributing the wage gap to low viewership, the emergence of stars like Caitlin Clark has buoyed WNBA ratings to post season averages of 1.33 million, almost 85 percent of the NBA’s total.
The salary differences stem from restrictions the league imposes on teams. WNBA teams operate under a salary cap of about $1.5 million, meaning an entire roster costs less than what most individual NBA bench players make annually.
For decades, this financial reality has forced many WNBA players to spend their offseasons playing overseas in Europe or Asia to supplement their income. For elite athletes competing at the highest level of professional basketball, simply earning a stable living requires leaving their home country for half the year.
The new CBA negotiations aim to fundamentally reshape that system.
Under proposals currently being discussed, the WNBA salary cap could increase fourfold, from $1.5 million to around $6.2 million per team beginning in 2026.
At the same time, the average player salary could rise tenfold to more than $500,000, while the league’s maximum salary could potentially reach $1.3 million with revenue sharing.
If player demands were fully implemented, these changes would represent one of the largest salary increases ever seen in professional sports labor negotiations. More importantly, they would move the WNBA closer to a system in which player compensation grows alongside league revenue. This is similar to the structure used in the NBA, where player empowerment is paramount in the modern era of free agency and load management.
Currently, WNBA players receive only about 9.3 percent of their league’s basketball-related revenue, while NBA players receive roughly 49 to 51 percent of league revenue through their own collective bargaining agreement. The WNBA continues to refuse to increase this percentage, despite concessions to almost all of the other WNBPA demands.
This imbalance also explains why the CBA negotiations have become so contentious. Players are not simply asking for higher salaries; they are asking to reassemble the entire league structure around a system that ties those salaries to the long-term growth of the league itself, a right that NBA players earned over 40 years ago.
The WNBA has reached record audiences, with 54 million viewers tuning in to WNBA games during the 2025 season. Attendance has climbed to its highest level in more than two decades. The league recently secured a $2.2 billion media rights deal beginning in 2026, an enormous jump from previous broadcast agreements.
In other words, the business of women’s basketball is expanding rapidly. The issue now centers around how the higher-ups believe profits from that growth should be distributed.
To benefit from this newfound success, the players cannot afford to sacrifice greater revenue sharing, even if it means a players’ strike, which an overwhelming 98 percent of voting players voted to authorize a strike. It is about more than simply income at this point.
The WNBA is entering a new era. Superstars like Clark and Angel Reese have captured the attention of fans around the globe, who increasingly tune in to their games along with those of the 11 other teams whose arenas sell out more and more each year.
Thus, urging players to accept a CBA that simply increases salaries alone is not enough. If the league keeps growing, those salaries will just fall behind again without greater revenue sharing — something that all the women who came before them fought.
The new CBA is a huge step, but in order for WNBA players to fully exercise the agency they have long deserved, they need to continue to hold strong and demand the revenue sharing they have earned. WNBA players and those to come should enjoy salaries that fully reflect the successes of a league they create.
Talbott Chesley PO ’28 is an economics and history major, a basketball fanatic and loves everything Seattle sports, most specifically the WNBA’s Storm. He waits patiently for an NBA expansion team to arrive in the city next.
Facebook Comments