Highest-Paid NHL Players: Cap Hit vs Salary

Ask who the highest-paid NHL player is and the answer depends entirely on which number you mean. By total value and cap hit it is Kirill Kaprizov, whose eight-year, $136 million deal at a $17 million cap hit is the richest in league history. By cap hit actually in effect for the 2025-26 season it is Leon Draisaitl at $14 million, even though his base salary that year is only $1 million. Cap hit, actual salary and signing bonus are three separate figures, and conflating them is the single most common error on lists like this.

The three numbers, defined

Get these straight and everything else follows.

Cap hit is the average annual value of the contract: total dollars divided by the number of years. It is the figure that counts against the salary cap, and it stays the same every season no matter how the actual pay is structured.

Actual salary is the cash a player is paid in a specific season. Contracts can be front-loaded or back-loaded, so the salary in year one can be very different from year eight while the cap hit never moves.

Signing bonus is money paid as a guaranteed lump sum, usually on 1 July, owed even if a lockout cancels games. It is part of the total contract value, so it feeds the cap hit, but it changes what “salary” means in any single year.

The reason this matters is that a headline like “$14 million player” can describe a man whose base salary is $1 million. That is not a trick; it is how elite NHL contracts are built.

The worked example: cap hit is not salary

Take the highest cap hit in force for 2025-26.

Player	Team	Cap hit (AAV)	2025-26 base salary
Leon Draisaitl	Edmonton	$14.0m	~$1.0m
Auston Matthews	Toronto	$13.25m	varies by season
Connor McDavid	Edmonton	$12.5m	varies by season

Draisaitl’s eight-year, $112 million extension carries a $14 million cap hit, yet his base salary in 2025-26 is about $1 million, with roughly $13 million paid as a signing bonus, per PuckPedia’s contract data. The cap hit and the salary describe the same contract and disagree by more than tenfold in that season. Anyone who reports Draisaitl’s “salary” as $14 million has quietly swapped cap hit for salary, and that is the mistake to watch for everywhere these numbers appear.

The current salary cap

For 2025-26 the NHL’s upper limit is $95.5 million per team, a hard cap with no luxury-tax escape: unlike baseball, no NHL club can exceed the ceiling by paying a penalty. It is scheduled to rise to $104 million in 2026-27 as league revenue grows, per PuckPedia’s cap tracking.

That $95.5 million ceiling is why a single $17 million cap hit is so significant. Kaprizov’s deal will consume nearly 18 percent of a team’s entire cap for one player, a share that shapes how the Minnesota Wild can build the rest of the roster. The cap is smaller in absolute terms than the NBA’s or NFL’s, a reflection of hockey’s smaller revenue base; for the basketball comparison, our guide to the richest NBA players and how their money is built shows how differently a soft-cap league operates.

The biggest contracts

Three names define the top of the market, and each is “highest paid” by a different measure.

Kirill Kaprizov signed the richest contract in NHL history on 30 September 2025: eight years, $136 million, a $17 million cap hit, beginning in 2026-27, per NHL.com. It leads on both total value and AAV. Its structure is bonus-heavy, a $1 million base salary each year alongside signing bonuses that start around $18.1 million, per CapWages, which is what makes the deal both cap-record and lockout-proof.

Leon Draisaitl holds the highest cap hit actually in effect for 2025-26 at $14 million, the average of his eight-year, $112 million Edmonton deal.

Connor McDavid, widely regarded as the best player in the world, is the instructive outlier. His two-year, $25 million extension announced in October 2025 carries a $12.5 million cap hit, below several teammates and rivals and well under his market value, per ESPN’s analysis. He took a shorter, cheaper deal to give Edmonton room to build a contender, which is why the highest-paid player and the best player are not the same person.

My read: if “highest paid” means the biggest commitment a team has ever made, it is Kaprizov without argument. If it means the largest amount hitting a cap sheet right now, it is Draisaitl. And the McDavid deal is the reminder that in a hard-cap league, the best player will sometimes deliberately not be the highest paid.

There is a second reason a short, below-market deal can be shrewd: with the cap jumping to $104 million in 2026-27 and beyond, a player who signs for only two years bets that the next contract, negotiated against a much higher ceiling, will be larger than anything on offer today. McDavid can reach free agency in 2028 as the cap climbs, which turns his current restraint into leverage rather than a discount, a calculation only a hard-cap, guaranteed-contract league produces.

The contrast worth knowing

The single biggest difference between NHL money and NFL money is guarantees. NHL contracts are largely guaranteed and signing bonuses survive a lockout, so the total value is close to real money owed. That is the opposite of the NFL, where headline contract totals are famously non-guaranteed, a distinction our guide to the highest-paid NFL players and guaranteed money breaks down in full.

The number to carry around

For 2025-26, use $95.5 million as the cap, $14 million (Draisaitl) as the highest cap hit in effect, and $17 million (Kaprizov) as the highest cap hit and total-value record, kicking in for 2026-27. Whenever you see a player’s “salary” quoted, check whether it is really the cap hit, because for bonus-loaded stars those two numbers can differ by ten times in a given season. Re-check when the cap resets to $104 million in 2026-27, since new deals will be written against the higher ceiling.