Division I Athletes Took Home $1.8 Billion in Revenue Sharing in 2025-26

Last Updated on October 2, 2026

The College Sports Commission has completed its review of the first year of revenue sharing and has announced $1.8 billion was shared between universities and athletes in 2025-26. Schools were required to submit their numbers this summer, and the data shows 34,915 student athletes at 307 schools across 33 conferences and 45 sports received revenue sharing funds.

For the 2025-26 school year, the first year of revenue sharing, each participating school could share up to $20.5 million with its athletes. Each school could individually decide how much to share and which athletes to share with, at their own discretion.

The CSC says $1,975,973,365 in payments was entered into its College Athlete Payment System, which included $1,770,453,776 in revenue-sharing payments, $42,034,090 in Alston Awards and $163,485,499 in new and incremental scholarship spending.

Of the 319 schools that opted into revenue sharing, 307 ended up compensated student-athletes directly in 2025-26.

Here are some other interesting facts from the full anonymized report filed with the court in the House case:

• 63 schools reached the cap
• 5 schools came within 5% of the cap
• 10 schools spent $0 on revenue sharing, although they did engage in Alston payments or increased scholarships
• 14 schools spent less than $100,000 on revenue sharing, with the lowest at $15,000
• 72 schools reported no increased spending on scholarships
• 31 schools spent $2.5 million or more on new scholarships ($2.5M was the max that counted against a school’s revenue sharing cap)
• 122 schools reported they made no Alston payments

“The implementation of the House Settlement has resulted in $1.8 billion in direct payments from schools to student-athletes across college athletics, on top of billions in scholarship benefits. The College Sports Commission operated the system that facilitated these payments, allowing student-athletes to benefit from the new system while ensuring compliance with the rules,” said Bryan Seeley, CEO of the College Sports Commission.

The cap for the 2026-27 year is $21.58 million.