NIL deals are almost never public. Student-athletes have to report their agreements to their schools, and the businesses paying them have to report the money to the IRS, but the actual terms — who pays what, for what, and for how long — stay out of public view. Federal privacy law, state open-records exemptions, and confidentiality clauses written into the contracts themselves all push in the same direction. Compliance officers and tax authorities see the numbers. Fans, journalists, and rival programs generally do not.
What Athletes Report to Their School
Division I athletes must report any NIL agreement worth $600 or more to their school’s compliance office within 30 days of signing. Prospective student-athletes who signed deals before arriving on campus have 30 days from enrollment to disclose.1NCAA.org. Division I Council Approves NIL Disclosure and Transparency Rules The disclosure covers contact information for everyone involved, the services the athlete will provide, the length of the deal, and the total compensation and payment structure.
Schools use that information for two internal checks: whether the compensation reflects genuine market value for what the athlete is actually doing, and whether the deal conflicts with an existing university sponsorship. If a payment looks inflated against the services performed, compliance flags it as a possible pay-for-play arrangement. The NCAA has drawn a hard line between paying athletes for their personal brand and paying them as an inducement to attend or stay at a school.2NCAA. NCAA Adopts Interim Name, Image and Likeness Policy
Failing to disclose can cost an athlete their eligibility. But filing with a compliance office is not the same as filing something into the public record. The office is an internal enforcement tool, not a transparency mechanism, and the next layer of protection is what keeps those filings from leaking out.
Why Records Requests to Public Universities Fail
State open-records laws in theory let anyone request documents held by a government institution, and a state university’s compliance office is one. Journalists and fans have tried to use that opening to pry NIL contracts loose. The attempts have mostly gone nowhere.
FERPA
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act blocks schools from disclosing “education records” without the student’s consent, with federal funding at stake if they do. Courts read “education records” broadly: any record directly related to a student and maintained by the institution qualifies. That reading has been applied to NIL disclosures. A Georgia court held that the UGA Athletic Association’s NIL records fit the definition because they related to individual students and were maintained by the association. A Louisiana court reached the same conclusion for LSU, treating FERPA as a defense against disclosure under the state’s public records law.
The reasoning tracks the statute cleanly. The athlete submitted the contract, the school keeps it on file, and it relates to that specific student. Releasing it without consent puts federal funding at risk.
State NIL Shield Laws
A growing number of states have gone further and passed laws that explicitly exempt NIL contracts from open-records requests. Colorado, for example, enacted legislation in 2025 making NIL contracts between public universities and student-athletes confidential. These laws partly exist to level the field with private universities, which are not subject to open-records requirements at all. Without a shield law, a state school could watch every one of its athletes’ deals end up in the newspaper while private competitors kept theirs sealed.
Even in states without a specific NIL shield, the argument for forced disclosure is weak. The money comes from private third parties, not public funds. Courts weighing a records request balance the public interest in government transparency against individual privacy, and when no tax dollars are involved in the transaction, the public-interest side carries much less weight.
Confidentiality Clauses in the Contracts
Separate from anything schools or courts do, the contracts themselves usually prohibit disclosure. Brands treat compensation figures and marketing strategies as proprietary. If a company pays a quarterback $50,000 for a run of social media posts, it does not want competitors to learn the going rate. Athletes have their own reasons to stay quiet: public knowledge of their earnings invites scrutiny from teammates, creates leverage problems in later negotiations, and attracts attention they may not want.
Breaching a confidentiality clause exposes the breaching party to a lawsuit for damages and a possible court order against further disclosure. The athlete is a private citizen and the brand is a private company, so keeping the terms between them is a basic feature of contract law rather than anything particular to sports. This is the simplest and often the strongest barrier between NIL deal terms and the public.
What the IRS Sees and Why It Stays Sealed
NIL income is fully taxable, and the IRS has a clear line of sight into it even when no one else does. For 2026, a business must file a Form 1099-NEC reporting non-employee compensation when payments to an individual reach $2,000 or more in a calendar year.3Internal Revenue Service. 2026 Publication 1099 That threshold was $600 through the end of 2025. Whether or not a 1099 gets filed, the athlete still has to report the income on their return.
None of this is accessible to the public. Tax returns are confidential between the taxpayer and the government. The IRS holds a complete record of what an athlete earned, and that record stays sealed.
NIL Collectives: The One Partial Window
Collectives are where some financial information does reach the public, in aggregate rather than per athlete. Many collectives organized as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofits, which requires an annual Form 990. Those filings are public records, and they show total expenditures, compensation paid to officers, and general program spending. They do not reveal what any individual athlete received, but they give a rough sense of how much money a collective is channeling to athletes at a given school.
The IRS has grown skeptical of the model. A 2023 Chief Counsel memo concluded that a collective developing paid NIL opportunities for student-athletes would, in many cases, be operating for a substantial nonexempt purpose by serving the private interests of those athletes.4Taxpayer Advocate Service. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) Collectives In late 2024, the IRS formally denied tax-exempt status to a collective that paid athletes to perform charitable work, finding that the payments outweighed the charitable purposes. The agency has identified tax-exempt NIL collectives as a priority enforcement area.
For donors, the stakes are real: contributions to a collective that loses its exemption are not deductible, and the IRS can look back at prior years. For athletes, a collective losing its status does not change the taxability of money already received. They owe income and self-employment tax on it either way.
Fair Market Value Review After the House Settlement
The settlement in House v. NCAA added another set of eyes on NIL deals without adding any public visibility. Under the settlement framework, a third-party entity reviews NIL agreements to decide whether the compensation exceeds fair market value. If it does, the entity can declare the athlete ineligible to compete. The athlete can renegotiate or challenge the ruling through expedited arbitration, and the university is allowed to fund the proceedings.
Deal terms are now evaluated by more than just a school’s compliance office. An outside body sees the contracts and has the authority to act on them. But those evaluations happen behind closed doors. The findings are not published, and there is no mechanism for fans or journalists to access them. Enforcement expanded. Public visibility did not.
No uniform standard exists for calculating fair market value in the NIL context. Valuation turns on the athlete’s social media following, on-field performance, market size, and the specific deliverables. Some platforms estimate athlete valuations using performance, influence, and exposure metrics, but those are approximations rather than binding standards.
Where These Rules Do Not Reach
Two groups of athletes sit outside the ordinary college NIL disclosure framework. High school NIL is permitted in roughly 45 states plus Washington, D.C., but Alabama, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi, and Texas prohibit it entirely. Disclosure requirements at the high school level are not standardized the way the NCAA’s 30-day rule is: some states set a reporting window, others have no formal process. High school NIL is even less visible than college NIL as a result.
International athletes on F-1 student visas face a different problem. Performing NIL work inside the United States — filming a commercial, posting sponsored content, appearing at an event — is likely to be treated as unauthorized employment, because the F-1 does not cover endorsement activity.5USCIS. Employment The consequences include termination of visa status, removal, and a five-year bar on re-entry.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 8 U.S. Code 1182 – Inadmissible Aliens Some universities have identified a narrow workaround in which all deliverables and payments occur in the athlete’s home country, but the margin for error is thin.
No Federal NIL Law Yet
Every layer described above runs on a patchwork of NCAA rules, state laws, and existing federal statutes like FERPA and the tax code. Congress has not passed legislation specifically governing NIL disclosure. The most prominent attempt, the SCORE Act, was pulled from a final vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2025 after bipartisan opposition over athlete-rights concerns. Until a federal law passes, what gets disclosed, to whom, and under what circumstances will keep varying by state, by institution, and by the terms of each contract.