The median reality
- Median value of a single NIL deal: about $60 (NCAA NIL Assist dashboard data, 2025)
- Median total annual earnings for an athlete with any NIL income: about $1,031
- Median transaction in year one of NIL (INFLCR platform data): $53
- Average annual NIL compensation by division, year one: Division I $471, Division II $81, Division III $47
- Power-5 average per transaction ($2,144) ran roughly four times the rest of Division I ($558)
Against that: football and men's basketball players at top-25 programs average roughly $294,000 and $349,000 per year (Opendorse, 2025). Both sets of numbers are real. They describe different populations — a small number of stars at elite programs versus everyone else. That gap is the NIL market: the sentence worth remembering is that the median deal is $60, not $60,000.
Where the money goes
- Football takes roughly two-thirds of all NIL dollars ($1.1B of $1.67B in year four, per Opendorse)
- Collectives — donor-funded groups, now banned at the high school level in most permitting states — accounted for roughly 80% of all NIL compensation before the House settlement began restructuring them
- The gender story is more interesting than the usual framing: women receive under 3.5% of collective money but over 15% of commercial (brand) money — and in year-one platform data, women's gymnastics out-earned football per transaction ($7,054 vs $3,396). In the brand channel, social following beats sport.
Valuations are not earnings
The dollar figures attached to famous athletes' names — "$3.3 million valuation" and similar — are algorithmic estimates of market value, not reported income. On3's own methodology page says its valuation reflects estimates and insider-sourced negotiation figures, not verified earnings, except where a deal is specifically confirmed. Media routinely reports these projections as pay. When we cite a number, we tell you who measured it and how; a number without a methodology is a rumor with digits.
Where the market numbers come from
Nearly every headline market-size figure ($917M in year one, growing to a projected $2.5B+) traces to one vendor — Opendorse — whose reports are built from its own platform's transactions and republished by trade press as if independently measured. The NCAA publishes no market-size figure at all. The most independent numbers available are IRS Form 990 filings from individual collectives (e.g., one Texas collective reported ~$13.3M spent in 2023) and the clearinghouse's own totals (~$355M in deals cleared vs ~$90M rejected in NIL Go's first year — with the average rejected deal, ~$51,600, more than three times the average cleared one, ~$14,800).
High school: the honest answer is that nobody knows
There is no reliable published data on high school NIL earnings — no aggregate estimate, no participation rate, from any source. The college platforms' reports are explicitly college-only. Widely repeated high school figures trace to single unverified news stories. Anyone quoting you a "typical high school NIL deal" number is quoting something that does not exist. That absence is itself the finding — and it is why a family's NIL plan should be built on eligibility protection and real deliverables, not projected earnings.
What this means for a family
- Plan around the median ($60 a deal), not the outliers.
- A local deal with real deliverables that protects eligibility beats a big number that risks it.
- In the commercial channel, audience drives value more than sport does.
- Treat every valuation you read as an estimate until someone shows you the methodology.