NHL players are collecting the largest escrow rebate in league history this year, roughly $170 million, worth about 5.5% on top of whatever they were paid for the 2025-26 season. Leon Draisaitl, the league’s highest earner at $16.5 million, gets an extra $910,000. Every player earning $15 million or more collects at least $825,000. Read quickly, this looks like a bonus, the league sharing the spoils of a booming business. Read properly, it’s a refund. The NHL took that money out of player paychecks over the course of the season and is only now giving some of it back, which says less about the league’s generosity and more about how the system was built to work in the first place.
The mechanism: withhold first, true up later
The NHL and the NHLPA split hockey-related revenue 50-50, but that split can’t be calculated in real time, because nobody knows what the season’s total revenue will actually be until it’s over. So the league estimates a withholding percentage at the start of the year and takes that cut out of every player’s paycheck as it’s earned. If actual revenue comes in higher than projected, the league owes players the difference back. If it comes in lower, the players simply forfeit what was withheld, no refund, no negotiation.
That asymmetry is the whole point of escrow, and it’s also the part players have never liked. The cap keeps rising when the business grows, which reads as a players’ win, but the mechanism that reconciles the cap against real revenue puts the downside risk almost entirely on the player side of the ledger. Owners get their guaranteed 50% one way or another. Players get their 50% only after the accounting catches up, and only if the year goes well.
Why this year went well
League revenue for 2025-26 came in around $6.8 billion in U.S. dollars, or roughly $7.5 billion once other currencies are converted at local rates, a gap that itself hints at how much of the NHL’s growth is now coming from outside the U.S. market. Commissioner Gary Bettman’s framing was simple: “every platform, every source of revenue is growing.” That’s the generic explanation leagues give whenever a rebate check needs a headline, but it happens to be checkable against how bad the alternative has looked in years the business didn’t grow.
What the downside actually looks like
Escrow rebates have swung wildly depending on the year. Players got a 4.6% rebate in 2005-06, the first season under the salary cap system, then just 0.66% in 2007-08, essentially nothing. The real damage came during the pandemic: the league withheld 20% of player salaries in 2020-21 to recoup roughly $1.5 billion in lost revenue, then kept withholding at elevated rates for years afterward, 17% in 2021-22, 10% in 2022-23, still 6% as recently as 2024-25 before that withholding was finally halted mid-season. Players spent the better part of half a decade paying down a debt that had nothing to do with their own performance and everything to do with arenas being empty. This year’s $170 million looks less like an outlier and more like the first real payback after that stretch.
Why this matters
Escrow exists because a 50-50 revenue split sounds fair on a press release and is actually very hard to administer honestly in real time, so leagues default to taking the money first and settling the argument later, on terms that favor whoever’s holding the cash. The Wage Bill has made a version of this point before, when a $76 billion U.S. television rights deal took years to actually show up in NBA players’ paychecks: the headline number and the number that lands in a bank account are rarely the same figure, and the gap between them is usually where the real financial story sits. A record rebate is a good news story for the NHL to tell this month. It’s also a reminder that the players spent five years financing that good news before they ever saw a cent of it back.
The Wage Bill