The House v. NCAA settlement is a $2.78 billion antitrust agreement, approved by Judge Claudia Wilken on June 6, 2025, that pays back damages to Division I athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024 without name, image, and likeness compensation, and, for the first time, lets schools pay their athletes directly. The forward-looking piece began July 1, 2025, with a per-school spending cap of roughly $20.5 million in the first year. The back-pay checks have not gone out yet: a Title IX appeal filed days after approval froze the damages payments while the Ninth Circuit reviews the case.
The agreement resolves three consolidated lawsuits — House, Hubbard, and Carter — brought on behalf of current and former Division I athletes, with named class representatives including Arizona State swimmer Grant House, basketball player Sedona Prince, football players Tymir Oliver and DeWayne Carter, and Nya Harrison.
How the Back-Pay Fund Is Divided
The damages total $2.576 billion, paid over ten years, split into $1.976 billion for NIL-related claims and $600 million for “additional compensation claims” covering athletic services schools were previously barred from paying for.
The money follows the sports that generate broadcast and licensing revenue. Roughly 75% of the damages fund goes to football players and 20% to men’s basketball players, with the remaining 5% split between women’s basketball and every other Division I sport. A Temple Law School analysis puts the broader picture at about 90% for football and men’s basketball at Power Five schools, 5% for women’s basketball, and 5% for everyone else.
Individual amounts vary widely by claim type. Broadcast NIL payments to football and men’s basketball players average about $91,000, with a range from $15,000 to $280,000. Pay-for-play averages around $40,000. Video game NIL payments run from roughly $300 to $4,000. Athletes outside football and basketball see far less: the average pay-for-play figure for non-football, non-basketball athletes is around $80, though players at top programs in sports like Big East men’s basketball average closer to $6,700.
Who Qualifies and How to File a Claim
The settlement defines three damages classes covering the June 2016 to September 2024 window. The first is full-scholarship men’s basketball and FBS football players at Power Five schools. The second is full-scholarship women’s basketball players at Power Five institutions. The third is any athlete who competed on a Division I team during that period. Service academy members are ineligible.
Some athletes will be paid automatically, without filing anything. That group is primarily Power Five football and basketball players whose contact information is already on file. Everyone else has to submit a claim form by October 1, 2025 through the settlement administrator’s portal. That includes non-Power Five athletes seeking pay-for-play compensation and athletes whose NIL deals weren’t previously reported to plaintiffs’ counsel.
The settlement administrator can be reached at 1-877-514-1777. Lead class counsel are Steve Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Jeffrey Kessler of Winston & Strawn.
Why the Back-Pay Checks Haven’t Gone Out
Payments were scheduled to begin July 1, 2025. They didn’t. On June 11, 2025, eight female athletes — including Kacie Breeding of Vanderbilt, Kate Johnson of the University of Virginia, and six athletes from the College of Charleston — filed a Ninth Circuit appeal arguing that the 90/5/5 allocation violates Title IX. The appeal triggered an automatic stay on the back-pay damages, and the money remains frozen.
Judge Wilken had overruled similar objections during approval, reasoning that House is an antitrust case, not a Title IX case, and that the damages track which sports actually produced the broadcast and licensing revenue at issue. She also noted that class members can still bring separate Title IX lawsuits, because those claims were not released by the settlement.
As of early 2026, three consolidated Title IX appeals are pending before the Ninth Circuit. Opening briefs were filed in late October 2025, with reply briefs due in January 2026. Oral argument follows, and the overall timeline is estimated at nine to twelve months from the initial filing. The revenue-sharing side of the settlement is not affected by the stay and has continued on schedule.
Direct Pay From Schools: The New Revenue-Sharing System
Beginning July 1, 2025, Division I schools that opt into the settlement may pay athletes directly from institutional revenue. The NCAA had prohibited that for more than a century.
The annual spending cap is set at 22% of the average athletic department revenue among Power Five schools. For 2025–26 that comes to about $20.5 million per institution. The cap rises roughly 4% per year, with projections putting it between $32 million and $33 million by 2034–35.
Participation is voluntary. Schools must opt in each year, with a March 1 deadline for each academic year after the first. Non-defendant schools had until mid-June 2025 to commit for the inaugural year. Once a school opts in, it has to follow the settlement’s roster limits, reporting rules, and compensation cap.
The NCAA labels these payments “revenue sharing” and “educational benefits” rather than wages. The framing is deliberate: it is meant to keep the payments outside employment law, which would otherwise pull in minimum wage, overtime, and collective bargaining obligations.
Sport-specific scholarship limits are gone. Opted-in schools may offer scholarships to any athlete on the roster, subject to new roster caps — football, for example, is capped at 105 athletes. Current athletes who were rostered or recruited by April 7, 2025 don’t count against the new limits for the rest of their eligibility, and their scholarships can’t be revoked if they lose a roster spot during the transition.
Reporting Third-Party NIL Deals to NIL Go
Enforcement runs through the College Sports Commission, an independent body headed by Bryan Seeley, previously the head of investigations at Major League Baseball. Its main tool is NIL Go, an online portal built with Deloitte that launched June 11, 2025.
Any third-party NIL deal worth $600 or more must be reported to NIL Go within five business days. The system checks whether the deal serves a “valid business purpose” and whether the compensation is within a “reasonable range” of fair market value. Deals that don’t clear can be revised and resubmitted, canceled, or appealed through neutral arbitration. Moving forward with a deal the system hasn’t cleared can cost an athlete eligibility. The Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Pac-12 have agreed to operate under the commission’s authority.
Are College Athletes Now Employees?
No — not under this settlement. The House agreement explicitly avoids classifying athletes as employees, which is why the payments are called revenue sharing and educational benefits rather than wages.
A separate case is testing that boundary. In Johnson v. NCAA, lead plaintiff Ralph “Trey” Johnson and other Division I athletes argue under the Fair Labor Standards Act that they are employees owed minimum wage for athletic labor dating back to 2016. The Third Circuit ruled in 2024 that the case could proceed, adopting a four-part “economic realities” test that asks whether athletes perform services for another party, whether those services primarily benefit that party, whether the party controls the work, and whether the athletes receive compensation or in-kind benefits. Legal analysts have suggested Division I football and men’s basketball players are the most likely to satisfy the test.
As of early February 2026, U.S. District Judge John Padova ordered both sides to report on settlement negotiations. If Johnson proceeds and athletes prevail, the NCAA and its schools could face billions in unpaid wage liability. NCAA President Charlie Baker has warned that outcome could lead to the “extinction” of many collegiate sports programs.
Legislation That Could Change the Picture
Congress has responded, so far without passing anything. Representatives Brett Guthrie and Gus Bilirakis introduced the SCORE Act, which would codify the settlement’s core terms, declare that college athletes are not employees, and give the NCAA and conferences authority over transfers and compensation. It cleared a subcommittee 12–11 in July 2025, was pulled from the House floor twice, and as of May 2026 appears effectively dead for the 119th Congress.
On May 27, 2026, Senators Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell, Eric Schmitt, and Chris Coons introduced the Protect College Sports Act of 2026. It would set a national NIL standard preempting state laws, grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, codify the roughly $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap, limit athletes to one unrestricted transfer, cap agent fees at 5%, prohibit conference mega-mergers, and create a $60 million annual trust fund for athlete medical coverage. The Senate bill does not address employment status, an omission Cruz had previously called “absolutely critical.”
State law is uneven. At least 35 states have passed NIL legislation since 2019, and by mid-2026, ten states had modified their laws specifically to align with the settlement’s revenue-sharing framework. Tensions remain: Judge Wilken suggested the NCAA should remove schools that refuse to follow the settlement, while conference officials have circulated contracts asking universities to waive protections under state NIL laws.