The WNBA's tentative new collective bargaining agreement — $7 million salary cap, $1.4 million supermax, roughly 20% revenue share over the deal's life — takes effect for the 30th-anniversary season tipping May 8, ten days from this edition [1]. Ratification followed eight days of March negotiation in a Manhattan hotel [2].
The labor share is the news. The new cap is a near-doubling of the prior structure; total salaries and benefits across the seven-year deal project to roughly $1 billion [3]. Roughly 80% of the league entered free agency under the agreement's transition rules, with the franchise tag eliminated and the rookie scale rewritten — the largest single labor share-shift in U.S. professional sport in 2026 [2].
What the agreement does not yet have is audited revenue. The 20% share is calibrated against projections that include the league's new media-rights cycle and the Toronto and Portland expansion fees. If the projections hold, the supermax becomes the league's first publicly-named eight-figure individual contract. If they do not, the cap formula compresses the wage bill back toward the prior structure within the deal's first three years.
The watch item is May 8 itself. A clean tip-off with rosters set under the new scale converts the negotiating story into an operating one. A delay or a salary-cap dispute on the eve of the schedule would tell a different one.
-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos