The economics of getting drafted first in the NBA have rarely looked better. The No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 draft is in line for a four-year rookie-scale contract worth roughly $67 million to $69 million, with first-year pay of about $14.8 million, according to Sportico and the salary-tracking site Spotrac. That is up sharply from a year earlier, when 2025 top pick Cooper Flagg signed for about $62.7 million over four years.
The Washington Wizards selected AJ Dybantsa with the top pick, and his deal is reported at about $67.1 million. The widely cited "nearly $70 million" figure reflects the maximum slot value for the No. 1 position rather than any single signed number, which can vary by source.
How the rookie scale works
Unlike free agents, first-round picks cannot freely negotiate. The NBA's collective bargaining agreement (CBA) fixes a "rookie scale" salary for each of the 30 first-round slots. Every first-rounder signs a four-year contract, with the first two seasons guaranteed and the final two as team options, Yahoo Sports reported. Teams may pay between 80% and 120% of the listed slot amount, and in practice nearly all pay the full 120%.
Crucially, those slot values are pegged to the league's salary cap — the leaguewide limit on team payrolls. As the cap rises, so does every rookie's pay, automatically. The cap for the 2026-27 season is projected near $165 million, about a 7% increase.
The TV money behind the jump
The broader driver is television. In July 2024 the NBA announced 11-year media agreements with Disney (ABC/ESPN), NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video, running from the 2025-26 season through 2035-36 for a combined sum widely reported at about $76 billion, per NPR and CBS Sports. The deals end the league's decades-long relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery's TNT and average close to $7 billion a year — a steep increase over the prior package.
That money flows to players through a formula. Under the CBA, players collectively receive roughly 51% of "basketball-related income," the pool used to set the salary cap. When the first year of the new TV deals landed for 2025-26, the cap rose 10% — the maximum single-year increase the CBA permits. That 10% "smoothing" cap is designed to avoid a sudden spike like the one in 2016 that handed teams unusual spending power. The league projected total revenue of about $14.3 billion for 2025-26, Sportico reported.
The business takeaway
For a teenager, the result is a guaranteed multimillion-dollar income before playing a professional minute. For the league, it is evidence that live sports remains one of the few products that can command premium fees as traditional pay-TV erodes and streamers like Amazon bid aggressively. Rising national TV money lifts the cap, the cap lifts the rookie scale, and the scale lifts the first pick's check — a direct line from the broadcast bidding war to a draftee's bank account.
