What Is Dead Cap in the NFL? Bonus Proration Explained

Dead cap is money a team still owes against its salary cap for a player it has already released, traded, or lost to retirement. It comes almost entirely from signing-bonus proration, the accounting trick that lets a team spread a lump-sum bonus across a contract. When the player leaves early, whatever proration has not yet been charged accelerates onto the cap all at once. That is dead money.

Why signing bonuses create dead cap

A signing bonus is paid up front in cash, but for cap purposes it is spread evenly across the contract, up to five years. That spreading is what keeps early cap hits low. It is also the source of every dead-cap problem, because the money is fully guaranteed the day it is paid, whether or not the player finishes the deal.

If you are shaky on how proration works in the first place, our NFL salary cap explainer walks through the whole system. The short version: the cap treats bonus money as a loan the team pays down year by year, and cutting a player early calls the rest of that loan due.

A worked example

Take a player who signs a five-year deal with a $20 million signing bonus. For the cap, that bonus becomes $4 million a year for five years. Now the team cuts him after two seasons.

Item	Amount
Signing bonus	$20M
Annual proration ($20M ÷ 5)	$4M
Proration already charged (years 1–2)	$8M
Proration remaining (years 3–5)	$12M
Dead cap if cut after year 2	$12M

That $12 million of unspent proration does not disappear when he is released. It accelerates straight onto the cap as dead money. The team is paying $12 million for a player who is no longer on the roster, which is the entire reason dead cap catches fans off guard.

The June 1 rule

There is one release valve, and it is all about timing. Cut a player after June 1, or tag the move with a post-June-1 designation, and the dead money splits across two seasons instead of crashing into one.

Using the example above, a standard cut lands the full $12 million in the current year. A post-June-1 cut charges only that season’s $4 million now and pushes the remaining $8 million into next year. Each team gets two post-June-1 designations per season, which lets it clear salary in the present while deferring the pain. The trade-off is real: you are borrowing against next year’s cap, and next year’s sheet inherits a charge for a player long gone. Trackers like Over The Cap’s dead money page and Spotrac’s dead cap tracker show how heavily contending teams lean on this.

Void years, the modern twist

The newest wrinkle is void years, and they are pure cap engineering. A team tacks fake seasons onto the end of a contract, years no one expects the player to actually play, purely so the signing bonus can be prorated across more years and shrink the near-term cap hit. When those years void, every dollar of proration parked in them accelerates into dead cap at once.

That is how a team ends up with millions in dead money for a player who signed elsewhere two offseasons ago. Void years are not cheating; they are a legal way to trade present flexibility for future dead-cap exposure, and heavy users of the tactic carry large blocks of dead money as a permanent cost of doing business.

When keeping a player is cheaper than cutting him

The counterintuitive part: dead cap can exceed what a player would cost to keep. If releasing a fading veteran triggers $15 million in dead money but keeping him costs $10 million in salary, the team saves $5 million by holding on. This is why rosters carry players who are visibly past their best; the accountant, not the coach, is making the call.

Once proration and acceleration click, most confusing offseason moves explain themselves, like why a team designates a cut as post-June-1, or attaches a draft pick to trade away a contract nobody wants. For the flip side of managing money against the cap, our guide to the franchise tag in the NFL covers the one-year mechanism teams use to keep a star without a long-term dead-cap commitment. Every figure here is illustrative; actual proration is capped at five years and the June 1 rules are set by the current CBA, so verify specifics against a live cap sheet.