How Often Do NBA Players Get Paid? Twice a Month, Not Per Game

Paragraph 3(a) of the Uniform Player Contract, the form every NBA contract is built on, sets the default. Unless the player's own contract says otherwise, the compensation is paid in twenty-four equal semi-monthly payments. The first payment is on November 1 of each year the contract covers, and the rest follow on the first and fifteenth of each month until the compensation is paid in full.

Counted from November 1, the 24 dates are the first and fifteenth of every month from November to October, so the last standard payment falls on October 15 of the following year. That is why an NBA player is paid across the whole year and not only during the months when games are played. The regular season runs for part of the year, and the salary is spread over all of it.

The payments are equal, so each one is one twenty-fourth of the compensation for the year, before anything is withheld. A contract that pays a player $1,000,000 for a season would pay 24 installments of about $41,667 on this schedule. That is an illustration of the arithmetic, not a figure from the agreement, and the real amount is reduced by the taxes and other amounts the agreement and the law require to be withheld. The contract itself says the pay is "less all amounts required to be withheld by any governmental authority."

A common version of the question is how much an NBA player gets for each game. The agreement does not work that way. The salary for the season is one number in the contract, and it is paid on the calendar above, whether the team plays on a given date or not.

The Uniform Player Contract goes further. In paragraph 3(c) the team agrees not to pay, and the player agrees not to accept, any bonus or anything of value on account of the team winning any particular NBA game or series of games, or on account of the player's or team's performance in any particular game or series. The same paragraph then makes an exception for the bonuses that are otherwise allowed under the agreement for the team qualifying for or winning a playoff series, and for the player's or team's performance in a playoff series.

So a player's pay for one game is not a number the contract produces. Dividing a season's salary by the number of games played gives an average for the player, and that is a calculation, not a payment. Pay for a game that the team does not play is not skipped: the next installment arrives on the next pay date.

The 24-payment schedule is the default, and the agreement lets a contract replace it. In the section on the form of the contract, the agreement allows a player's compensation to be paid in either twelve equal semi-monthly payments or thirty-six equal semi-monthly payments, again starting on November 1 and continuing on the first and fifteenth of each month until the compensation is paid in full. The 12-payment version ends on April 15, and the 36-payment version ends on April 15 of the second year after it starts, so 36 payments cover 18 months. The permission applies to contracts above the minimum player salary; for a player on the minimum, the agreement limits the changes a contract may make.

The agreement also sets a floor on how much of the salary must be paid on the regular schedule. Every contract must provide that, for each season, the player is paid at least ten percent of his salary for that season in current base compensation, either under the payment schedule in paragraph 3 of the contract or in twelve equal semi-monthly payments beginning on November 1. Likely bonuses and any part of the salary attributable to a trade bonus are not counted toward that ten percent.

Because the first regular payment is on November 1, the agreement describes a few cases where a player may be paid earlier, and it limits all of them.

A contract that is protected for lack of skill and injury or illness may provide for the player to be paid a part of the compensation before November 1. The cap on that advance is the lesser of 80 percent of the protected compensation for the season and 50 percent of the base compensation, and no more than 25 percent of the base compensation may be paid before the October 1 that comes before the first day of the regular season.

For a player on the minimum salary, whose contract is protected in the same way, the advance is limited to the lesser of 80 percent of the protected amount and 7.5 percent of the base compensation. An advance of that kind is deducted in full from the November 1 installment and, if that is not enough, from the November 15 installment.

Training camp has its own rule. A team pays a player $4,500 per week, pro rata, for each week before its first regular season game that the player attends training camp or exhibition games, up to four weeks for veterans and five weeks for first-year players. No such payment is made if the player has already been paid $10,000 or more for the season that follows the camp. The money is an advance, and each of the first two scheduled payments is reduced by half of the amount advanced.

The compensation described in the contract does not include amounts that come from the league's prize pools. Paragraph 3(a) of the contract says the compensation is exclusive of any amount the player is entitled to receive from the In-Season Tournament Prize Pool and the Player Playoff Pool. Those are separate payments governed by the agreement, and they do not change the 24 installments.

The contract also states that no player may assign his right to receive compensation from the team to a third party, and no contract may provide for payment to an agent or attorney for representing the player. A team may send a player's regular paycheck to his agent, attorney or representative only if the player instructs it to in writing.

One more date limit protects the system around the pay. A contract may not provide for any compensation earned for a season to be paid before the first semi-monthly payment date that falls at least seven days after the audit report for the prior season's salary cap year is complete.

When a team waives a player, it still owes the guaranteed money, and the agreement sets out how it is paid. If the base compensation still owed is $500,000 or less, it is paid on the same semi-monthly installments in the contract, each equal to the amount that was due per pay period before the player left, until the total is paid.

If the amount owed is more than $500,000, the agreement splits it. The compensation owed for the current season, which it defines as the period from September 1 through June 30, is paid on the contract's own schedule. Any remaining guaranteed compensation is added up and paid in equal amounts per year over a period equal to twice the number of seasons remaining on the contract, plus one season. The rescheduled payments are again semi-monthly, on the pay dates in paragraph 3(a).

The agreement gives an example: a player with four seasons left, protected at $4 million, $4.3 million, $4.7 million and $5 million, who is waived on December 1 of the first season. He receives the rest of the first-year money as scheduled, and the $14 million for the later three seasons is spread over seven seasons under the rule above. The agreement itself says the $14 million would be paid at $2 million per season for seven seasons. The example shows that a waived player's pay can continue for years after he leaves the team, still in semi-monthly payments.

The agreement also limits what a team may pay in. The only form of compensation a team may pay under the Uniform Player Contract is cash, by a check made payable to the player or by a direct deposit to the player's bank account. Compensation of any other kind is prohibited.

The ten percent in the salary cap system is a different thing from the ten percent payment floor above. In Article VII, section 12, the agreement defines a "Withholding Percentage" of ten percent for a salary cap year within its designated share arrangement, and that section is separate from the pay schedule described here.

The schedule comes from the 2023 NBA-NBPA collective bargaining agreement published by the players' association, effective July 1, 2023. The paragraphs used are Exhibit A, paragraph 3 of the Uniform Player Contract for the 24 payments and the ban on per-game bonuses; Article II, section 3(d) for the 12-payment and 36-payment options and for advances; Article II, section 13 for the 10 percent floor, the form of payment, the ban on payments to agents and the audit-report date; Article II, section 4(k) for the schedule after a waiver; and Article II, section 6(g) for advances to players on the minimum salary. The dollar example of $41,667 is arithmetic on a round number, and it is the only figure on this page that is not in the agreement.

The agreement is replaced from time to time, and the page will be checked again when a new one takes effect. More basketball pages are collected on the NBA hub, and the page on how long an NBA season lasts covers the calendar the pay is spread across. The page on the average NBA career length shows how many seasons a player is typically paid for.