Hottest name in women’s game gets a $76,535 salary
Clark’s WNBA pay is low by comparison, but she can make more on, off court.
Caitlin Clark is worth millions. She will make a fraction of that as a WNBA rookie.
Clark, the Iowa phenomenon who set the NCAA career scoring record and helped the women’s tournament reach highs in TV ratings, was the No. 1 overall pick for the Indiana Fever in Monday’s WNBA draft.
Her jersey sales already are through the roof. The WNBA scheduled the Fever to play 36 nationally televised games, more than any other team, several days before Clark became a member of the team. Likewise, tickets for opposing teams’ home games against Indiana saw a spike in interest (and price) long before draft night.
Clark will make $76,535 in base salary as a WNBA rookie, part of a four-year contract worth $338,056. It’s the same contract received by the other players drafted in the top four — No. 2 Cameron Brink of Stanford (Sparks), No. 3 Kamilla Cardoso of national champion South Carolina (Chicago Sky) and No. 4 Rickea Jackson of Tennessee (Sparks) — in a class loaded with “household names,” as WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert put it before the draft.
Those salaries are the maximum allowed for rookies, as laid out in the collective bargaining agreement between the WNBA and its players association. That CBA runs through the 2027 season, although the players can opt out of the deal following the 2025 season, if they do so by Nov. 1 of this year.
As the WNBA pointed out in a statement emailed to The Times on Tuesday night, Clark will have the opportunity to make much more money on top of her base salary.
“Caitlin Clark stands to make a half-million dollars or more in WNBA earnings this coming season,” the statement read, “in addition to what she will receive through endorsements and other partnerships, which has been reported to already exceed $3 million.”
According to the CBA, select players can earn up to $250,000 a year by entering into a marketing and promotional agreement with the league and a maximum $150,000 a year through a similar agreement with their teams. The CBA also provides merit bonuses for a number of team and individual achievements, including advancement in the playoffs, making the All-WNBA and All-Star teams, and earning such awards as most valuable player and rookie of the year.
In addition to the endorsement deals she already has secured, Clark undoubtedly will have a stream of other lucrative opportunities. BIG3 co-founder Ice Cube offered Clark $5 million to become the first female player in his three-on-three league.
Still, it might come as a bit of a shock to learn how relatively little Clark and other WNBA rookies make in base salary, especially compared with their counterparts in other leagues. Like Clark, Victor Wembanyama was seen as a generational talent when he was selected No. 1 overall by the San Antonio Spurs in last year’s NBA draft. His four-year rookie contract is worth $55.2 million.
Bryce Young, who was drafted No. 1 overall by the NFL’s Carolina Panthers last year, is under a fouryear, $38-million contract. Top NHL draft pick Connor Bedard received a three-year, $13.35-million contract from the Chicago Blackhawks. Paul Skenes received a $9.2million signing bonus from the Pittsburgh Pirates after being selected as the top pick in last year’s Major League Baseball draft.
On the women’s side, Angel City FC’s Alyssa Thompson secured a three-year contract worth $1 million after being selected as the No. 1 overall pick last year for the thriving National Women’s Soccer League.
That league, which has grown from eight teams in 2012 to 14, recently announced a four-year, $240-million broadcast deal with CBS, Amazon, ESPN and Scripps, which is worth 40 times the value of its previous media-rights contract.
The WNBA might be in a position for similar growth. The league will expand to 13 teams next season with the addition of a franchise affiliated with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, and Engelbert told reporters Monday she was “pretty confident” the league would expand to 16 teams by 2028. Engelbert said last week that she expected the WNBA could “at least double” its current media-rights deal with ESPN, Ion and Amazon, which is worth a reported $60 million a season.
The addition of someone such as Clark can only help the WNBA in that. Clark helped ESPN set viewership records in each of her last three games with Iowa. An average of 12.3 million viewers watched the Hawkeyes’ Elite Eight win over Louisiana State, 14.2 million watched their Final Four win over Connecticut, and 18.7 million watched their loss to South Carolina in the championship game.
The women’s championship game had more viewers than the men’s — Connecticut’s win over Purdue averaged 14.8 million viewers on TNT and TBS — for the first time and was the highest-rated basketball game, college or pro, since 2019.
The WNBA already appears to have experienced a similar viewership bump.
An average of 2.45 million people tuned in for ESPN’s coverage Monday, making it the mostwatched WNBA draft and the most-viewed WNBA event on any ESPN platform. “Women’s sportsrights fees have been undervalued for too long, so we have this enormous opportunity at a time where the media landscape is changing so much,” Engelbert told CNBC last week.