SportsHockey

How much money NHL players make in playoffs and for winning Stanley Cup

Adam Laskaris
Adam Laskaris
|
May 22 2025, 10:00 am
How much money NHL players make in playoffs and for winning Stanley Cup
Sam Navarro/Imagn Images

One of the most widespread myths about the NHL playoffs is that players are purely doing it for the love of the game, with no financial incentive on top of it.

But while it is true that NHL players don’t get an additional salary for how far they go into the playoffs, they aren’t technically working for free either on their run to the Stanley Cup..

In the 2024-25 season, the NHL playoff pool is set for US$23 million, as detailed in the NHL’s CBA. Since 2012 (at least) when the new CBA was put into place, the playoff pool has seen US$1 million added across the NHL each season, with the money being divided between the NHL’s 16 playoff teams.

The CBA prohibits players from receiving added playoff bonuses outside of the league-sanctioned pool. Such bonuses are usually tied to things like scoring milestones or games played totals. Playoff bonuses from the NHL pool do not count against the salary cap.

It is tough to pin down exact details for this season, though we can infer based on past seasons approximately what the payments per round will look like.

Per The Hockey Writers, here were the 2024 totals per team throughout the playoffs, though they would’ve increased over the past season with US$1 million more spread across the league since that year.

  • First-round losers – US$429k per team
  • Second-round losers – US$859k per team
  • Conference final losers – US$2.06 million per team
  • Stanley Cup Finalist – US$3.7 million per team
  • Stanley Cup Champion -US $6.5 million per team

That doles out about US$282k for each player on the Stanley Cup champion, spread out over the course of four rounds. NHL teams are free to pick how they dole out the money, though it’s usually tiered based on games played.

One catch for the NHL’s compensation structure is that bonuses do not go up for teams that use more players throughout the postseason. So if a team is forced to ice, let’s say, 30 players over the course of the playoffs due to injury, they’ll either have to reduce their cost per player or give the players with the lowest games played total a smaller piece of the pie.

For comparison’s sake, Grey Cup winners take home C$16,000, Super Bowl winners take home US$171,000, NBA champions take home around a combined pool of US$8.8 million (around US$500,000 per player), and World Series winners in the MLB took home US$477,000 in 2024 from a pool of US$46 million.

The Stanley Cup Final this year is likely to begin in early June, with the last possible day it could be awarded being June 23.

(A previous version of this story erroneously credited 2013 numbers as 2023 numbers. We regret the error.)

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