What’s Going On With The WNBA CBA Talks?

In collective bargaining, "things tend to get done at the 11th hour," Adam Silver said in February, answering questions about the status of the WNBA’s ongoing CBA negotiations. "We are awfully close to the 11th now." The NBA commissioner wasn’t then ready to set a "drop-dead date," but the WNBA has since told players and teams that an agreement should be in place by March 10 for the season to begin as scheduled on May 8. An unusually heavy slate of league business still needs to get done this offseason: Nearly every veteran player is a free agent, and the two expansion franchises in Toronto and Portland also have to draft teams. The 11th hour has indeed been busy: After a monthlong stretch of no communication between the sides, the WNBA and WNBPA began exchanging proposals and counterproposals again in early February. While there are other issues being bargained over—housing, for instance, has come up in recent proposals—the key issue remains salaries, which are expected to rise considerably now that the league has signed a new media rights deal valued at over $2 billion. Since opting out of the 2020 CBA in October of 2024, WNBA players have said they would like player salaries to be tied to the health of the business, calculated as a percentage of league revenue, similar to the NBA. Until now, the WNBA's salary cap has been a fixed and essentially arbitrary number; in 2022, base salaries amounted to less than 10 percent of league revenues. The union’s latest proposal reportedly asks that player salaries be on average 26 percent of gross revenue. (This would raise the 2026 salary cap to $9.5 million; in the old CBA, the 2026 cap was set to increase from $1.5 million to $1.55 million.) The league has offered players 70 percent of "net revenue" after expenses, a number that the union says would be less than 15 percent of gross revenue over the life of the deal.