The 2025 W.N.B.A. season has set records for attendance, both in total and per game, even before the playoffs. More than three million fans have flocked to see stars like A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces and Alyssa Thomas of the Phoenix Mercury, whose teams are facing each other in the league championship series starting on Friday. By many measures, it’s been the most successful season in league history. But the players aren’t fully sharing in that success.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx, the vice president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, tore into the league leadership for refusing to pay their athletes fairly. “The league believes it succeeds despite its players, not because of them,” she complained. She also said that the W.N.B.A.’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, had told her that notoriously low-paid stars like Caitlin Clark should just be grateful the league has given them a platform that enables them to earn money from sponsorships. Many other players chimed in on social media to echo Collier’s complaints.
The players have a simple ask when it comes to salaries: They want to be paid like the men in the N.B.A. The N.B.A. is bigger and richer than the W.N.B.A.; it brings in 50 times as much in revenue. But the more important difference is how that money is divvied up. Contractually, N.B.A. players get paid roughly 50 percent of what’s called “basketball-related income,” which includes most of the league’s revenue. The current W.N.B.A.’s collective bargaining agreement does not guarantee that a percentage of league revenue will go to the players. And so even as the W.N.B.A. takes in more money, the league isn’t required to share that wealth.
The W.N.B.A. agreement expires on Oct. 31 — and the players want a raise. While the average wage grew from a bit less than $110,000 in 2021 to about $120,000 in 2025, by my estimation the percentage of revenues paid to W.N.B.A. players fell, from 11 percent four years ago to less than 7 percent this season.
This inequity gets more marked at the star level. The top players in the W.N.B.A. make close to $250,000 a year. The N.B.A. pays its top players around 200 times as much.
Players get a tiny cut of the W.N.B.A.’s revenue, even as the league has grown significantly
Some of this is educated guesswork. The W.N.B.A. doesn’t release official revenue data — Nneka Ogwumike, the head of the players association, has said that even her union doesn’t have exact numbers. But we can piece together an estimate of how much the league makes based on the numbers that have been reported. Here I’m estimating total revenue, not basketball-related income. The big difference between the two is luxury-suite revenue, which isn’t as relevant for the W.N.B.A. So, this is still essentially an apples-to-apples comparison.
For example, Bloomberg reported two years ago that W.N.B.A. revenue had increased from $100 million in 2019 to up to $200 million in 2023. In 2025, Forbes reported the revenue for each of the 12 teams that played in the 2024 season, which totaled $226 million. And Sportico reported that the W.N.B.A.’s newest team and biggest draw, the Golden State Valkyries, are on pace to earn more than $70 million in revenue in 2025. If we assume that the other teams are still just earning $226 million (a conservative estimate, since W.N.B.A. attendance made another leap in 2025), the addition of the Valkyries’ revenue means total league revenue is now approaching at least $300 million.
But the rapid increase in revenue hasn’t been matched by what the players get paid.
While the players’ salaries remain static, the franchises they belong to are skyrocketing in value. In 2019, Joe Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, bought the New York Liberty for less than $15 million. Today the Liberty is valued at $450 million, 30 times the sale price six years ago. This summer, investment groups paid $250 million each for expansion teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. The average franchise value is up 180 percent in the last year alone.
The W.N.B.A. has long claimed it can’t give its players the same deal as the men of the N.B.A. because it operates at a loss. In 2024 — while the W.N.B.A. was setting records for revenue and attendance — it was reported that W.N.B.A. losses had risen to $50 million. The W.N.B.A. is a private entity, so it doesn’t have to, and hasn’t, released its financial statements. But given the rapid growth in revenues and franchise values, it’s increasingly difficult to believe it when the W.N.B.A. cries poverty.
The N.B.A. itself owns 42 percent of the W.N.B.A., with many of its owners operating teams in both leagues. And the N.B.A. has a long history of claiming it doesn’t make any money when it’s convenient. Back in the early 1970s the N.B.A. needed a justification for its merger with the American Basketball Association. Its claim was that having two leagues bidding for the same players was making professional basketball unprofitable.
The Senate investigated the merger, and two economists, Roger Noll and Benjamin Okner, were asked to evaluate the N.B.A.’s finances. Noll and Okner acknowledged that from one perspective, the N.B.A.’s financial statements indicated that the average team was losing $400,000 per year. But they also noted that if one included items like player depreciation and deferred interest payments, the apparent profitability could completely flip. The N.B.A. could, as they claimed, be losing more than $13 million a year in total — or it could be making more than $4 million. In today’s dollars, that’s the difference between a $100 million loss and a $30 million profit. It just depended on how one chose to crunch the numbers.
At the same time as they were arguing in court that it couldn’t turn a profit, the N.B.A. managed to pay its players a large fraction of its total revenue. In the late 1960s, just before the merger and when the league was a little bit younger than the W.N.B.A. is today, it spent up to 41 percent of revenue on players; by the end of the 1970s the players got at least half. Even in the 1950s, when the N.B.A. was earning one-tenth (in 2025 dollars) what the women’s league makes today, it still paid players 40 percent of total revenue, a startling contrast to the 7 percent W.N.B.A. players get.
The gender wage gap in professional basketball is so large that N.B.A. legends like Walt Frazier and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar received more dollars in the early 1970s than top W.N.B.A. stars get today.
The W.N.B.A. makes more money than the N.B.A. did at the same point in its history
The gender wage gap is hardly unique to basketball. In the early 1970s, when women’s tennis was taking off, stars like Billie Jean King were not paid comparably to their male counterparts at Grand Slam events like the U.S. Open. More recently, the women of U.S. Soccer found that winning World Cups wasn’t enough to be paid like men who had accomplished far less. In both of these sports — after extensive protests and strikes or legal action – the gender wage gap was substantially closed.
Perhaps the same will happen with the next W.N.B.A. collective bargaining agreement. If that is the case, what will the W.N.B.A.’s top talent be paid if its players finally get a deal similar to that given the N.B.A.’s players? Assuming that the players as a whole are splitting 50 percent of the league’s revenue, we can estimate how much individual players would be worth based on how many wins they produced. By my calculations, stars like Napheesa Collier, A’ja Wilson and Alyssa Thomas should each be earning more than $3 million per year.
What the top 10 W.N.B.A. players should have earned this year
Players were ranked by how much their box score statistics, like points and rebounds, affected wins.
What about Caitlin Clark? She missed most of the season with a groin injury. But during her magical rookie season in 2024, she would have, by my math, been paid upwards of $3 million according to her on-court productivity. Instead, she got just $76,535.
With this new round of contract negotiations, will we finally see W.N.B.A. players paid millions of dollars? The explosion in attendance and franchise values says there has never been a better time for the gender wage gap in professional basketball to be closed.
Methodology
To calculate the estimated salary ranges under a 50 percent revenue-sharing agreement, we first found the average wage for each year by dividing the available revenue by the number of active players. The minimum salary is estimated as 10 percent of that average, modeled after the N.B.A.’s minimum salary for the 2024-25 season. The maximum salary is also determined following the N.B.A.’s methodology.
To determine what top players are individually worth, we take the minimum salary and allocate additional money in proportion to how many wins they produced for their team. Players who shoot efficiently, rebound and avoid turnovers tend to help a team win, so these players score highly on the wins-produced measure. We took the top 10 players by this metric, then further filtered to show only players who had scored at least 10 points per game; the academic literature shows that top scorers are paid better than players who rank higher in win productivity but make fewer baskets.
