On March 20, 2026, the WNBA and the players' union (the WNBPA) announced a tentative agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement — reached in the final hours before a deadline that had real lockout risk attached to it. Both sides had spent the prior week in around-the-clock negotiating sessions, at points publicly accusing each other of not engaging seriously. The deal that came out of it is a seven-year agreement running from 2026 through 2032, and by most accounts it's the most significant labor deal in the league's history.
The 2026 team salary cap was set at $7 million — roughly four times the $1.5 million cap that had been in place the prior season — with room to grow past $11 million by the time the deal expires in 2032. The league's maximum individual salary jumps to around $1.4 million this year, projected to clear $2.4 million by 2032. Even the salary floor moves: minimum salaries start in the $270,000–$300,000 range in 2026 and are set to climb to $340,000–$380,000 by the end of the deal. League-wide, the WNBA is projecting more than $1 billion in total player salaries and benefits over the life of the agreement.
The bigger structural change isn't the raw dollar figure, it's how that figure gets set going forward. The new CBA ties the salary cap directly to league revenue: the cap is calculated as a fixed 20% share of "Shared Basketball Revenue" — the combined league and team revenue from the prior year. That's a revenue-sharing model, the first of its kind in women's professional sports, and it means player pay is now built to rise automatically as the league's media deals, attendance, and sponsorships grow, instead of being renegotiated from scratch every few years.
The agreement also locks in a set of off-court standards that had been informal or team-by-team before: league-wide charter air travel, first-class accommodations on the road, and continued investment in team practice facilities. Performance bonuses for award winners and playoff participants were also increased as part of the deal.
Getting here wasn't smooth. In the weeks before the deadline, several players — including some of the league's biggest names — publicly floated the possibility of a lockout if the league didn't move on revenue sharing, and the two sides spent a tense stretch trading blame in public. That the deal came together in time meant the 2026 season could open as scheduled, on May 8, without the disruption a work stoppage would have caused. It also lands at a pointed moment for the league: expansion into new markets and rising franchise values only work long-term if the players driving that growth are paid like it, and a revenue-sharing formula is the mechanism that ties those two things together going forward rather than leaving pay as a fight the union has to relitigate every few years.