The 2026 NFL season is on the horizon, and fans could not be more excited to see how their team performs on the gridiron. However, there is a second scoreboard that has already come into play at the start of training camp – the tax bill. What fans may not realize is that the NFL Draft, free agency, and even the prior year’s outcomes formulaically determine a player’s tax liabilities since their state and local income tax liabilities are based on where players incur their duty days.
The “jock tax” is the everyday term for how states apply nonresident income tax rules to athletes who perform across numerous jurisdictions. While the majority of their days are spent working in the jurisdiction where their team is located, players must apply a complicated formula to determine what they owe in taxes in other jurisdictions where they also earn taxable income.
As teams continue to host training camp in unusual locations, and as the NFL continues to schedule games over seas, this year’s jock tax has numerous intricacies that affect a player’s after-tax salary income.
What Is The Jock Tax?
For most American taxpayers, they live in, work in, and pay taxes in a single state with little regard for how other states levy taxes. However, NFL players play games in many different states and, due to their large salaries, must adhere to the tax laws in these other states.
To compute this, players must source a share of their salary and bonus income to the state based on the time that was worked there. This notion creates the duty-day formula. A player should total every duty day – practice, travel, and games – across the year and then apply the fraction spent in each state to their compensation. Whatever share belongs to a state becomes taxable income in that state.
As players incur most of their duty days in their team’s home state, players on teams that play in low or no-income tax rate states tend to have the lowest jock tax. However, players do not necessarily get to pick this team. The NFL draft determines most players’ initial teams, and if that team is located in a state like Nevada, which was the case for the 2026 NFL Draft, then players can effectively avoid significant state income tax liabilities, relative to being drafted by a team in New York, New Jersey, or California.
Furthermore, the NFL applies a formula to the following year’s schedule that is comprised of games against the other team’s in their division, a rotation of teams in the same conference in a different division, teams in the other conference, and teams that finished in a similar place in the standings. This schedule creates the possibility to estimate players’ jock taxes for the 2026 NFL season.
Estimating The 2026 NFL Jock Tax
The actual jock tax a player must pay is based on numerous player-specific factors that cannot be obtained. However, the amount can be reasonably estimated for all 32 teams using many simplifying assumptions:
- 20 duty days at each team’s training camp site.
- 4 duty days for practice in the team’s home state for every week from the preseason and regular season.
- 2 duty days at the location of every road game.
- 40 flat duty days in the home state, covering other business and community obligations.
- A special rule for the nine 2026 International Series games: since the duty day formula does not consider international activity, duty days related to internation games are credited back to their own home state rather than an opponent’s.
The publicly available training camp sites, NFL schedule, and the simplifying assumptions above create an estimate of the 2026 jock tax by team the player plays on:
As shown above, no players will face a zero percent jock tax. This is because of the jock tax formula, which assigns duty days to taxable jurisdictions even for players who play for teams in no-income-tax-rate states like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Nevada. Similarly, players who play for team’s located in California will get reprieve from the jock tax formula for their games played outside of the state.
However, the 2026 jock tax continues to provide tax benefits for players on teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, and Houston Texans who, not only play, practice, and train in states that do not levy an income tax, but they also have more road games against each other and do not owe state income taxes on those duty days either.
On the flip side, players on teams in California, New York, and New Jersey incur the majority of their duty days in high-income-tax rate states, and their after-tax income is significantly lower.
To help illustrate, consider Josh Allen (Buffalo Bills) and Trevor Lawrence (Jacksonville Jaguars). Both players are the starting quarterback for their team and they both have an estimated 2026 contract value of $55 million, according to Over The Cap. In 2026, Allen will have an estimated jock tax of approximately $5.65 million while Lawrence will have an estimated jock tax of approximately $0.22 million. Thus, due to the jock tax, Lawrence takes home over $5 million more in after-tax compensation.
The Jock Tax Bottom Line
The jock tax continues to be a complexity that NFL players must face each year. For instance, just last year, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold faced net cash outflows after winning the Super Bowl in California because the jock tax left him with more tax liability than he was paid for the game. The issues about the jock tax persist across all professional leagues whether it be the NBA or the PGA Tour.
For 2026, California’s teams keep paying the league’s steepest jock tax bill, no-tax-state teams keep their structural edge, and a record slate of international games quietly redirects millions in tax liability toward some teams’ home states and away from others’, regardless of who wins on the field.
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