NBA Uniform Player Contract: Salary, Conduct, and Exhibits

The NBA Uniform Player Contract is the standardized employment agreement every player signs with an NBA team. Its required language is set by the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and the National Basketball Players Association, so the core terms are identical across all thirty franchises. What varies from deal to deal is bolted on through a set of numbered exhibits that cover salary guarantees, bonuses, signing payments, and a handful of personal exceptions. Everything else — reporting duties, conduct rules, payment cadence, termination procedures — is the same form language whether you are a two-way rookie or a max veteran.

What the Player Owes the Team

The service obligations are broad. A player has to report for training camp, play every exhibition, regular-season, and postseason game the team schedules, and attend every practice, meeting, and travel assignment that goes with them. Teams can also require up to twelve promotional appearances per season, from community events to league marketing work.¹

Paragraph 6 of the UPC requires the player to keep himself in top physical condition year-round and to follow the medical guidance of team-appointed physicians.² In return, the team has to give the player at least eighteen days off during the regular season when nothing team-related, including promotional work, can be required of him.¹

How and When Players Get Paid

Base salary under the UPC is paid in twenty-four equal semi-monthly installments. Payments start on November 1 and run on the first and fifteenth of each month until the full amount is paid, which spreads the money across a twelve-month cycle rather than only the playing season.³ Some contracts use alternative schedules, including thirty-six semi-monthly payments, but the November 1 start and the semi-monthly cadence do not change.

The number on the paycheck is smaller than the number in the contract. Federal and state income tax come out, and NBA players owe income tax in every state and city where they play a game. The informal “jock tax” means a player can file non-resident returns in a dozen or more jurisdictions in a single season, with the income apportioned by either a duty-days or games-played formula depending on the state.

The CBA also requires the league to withhold a slice of every player’s salary into an escrow account. The maximum withholding is ten percent of salaries and benefits, plus up to another one percent of league-wide Basketball Related Income if needed.¹ The escrow exists to keep total player compensation within the agreed share of BRI, which under the current CBA sits between 49 and 51 percent. If salaries come in under the designated share, escrow money is returned to the players.

Minimum and Maximum Salary

Not every deal is a supermax. The CBA sets minimum salaries that rise with years of service. For 2025-26, a player with zero years of experience earns at least $1,272,870, while a player with ten or more years is guaranteed at least $3,634,153. To keep teams from always choosing cheaper rookies over veterans, the league reimburses teams that sign experienced players to one-year minimum deals, so only the second-year minimum ($2,296,274 for 2025-26) counts against the salary cap.

At the top, individual maximum salaries are set as a percentage of the cap and also scale with service time. The 2025-26 salary cap is $154,647,000, and players eligible for Designated Veteran Extensions — the “supermax” category — can sign the largest contracts in the league.

Guaranteed vs. Non-Guaranteed Salary

The single most negotiated piece of any NBA contract is not the headline number but the guarantee structure in Exhibit 2. Salary protection decides whether the team still owes the money if it cuts the player, and it can be written to cover specific causes: lack of skill, injury, illness, death, or mental disability.¹ A fully guaranteed contract pays regardless of roster status. A partially guaranteed deal might protect only a portion, with the rest turning into dead money only if the player is still on the roster past a cutoff.

That cutoff is January 10. On that date, base salary in every contract becomes guaranteed for the rest of the season, so a team that wants to waive a player without owing the remaining salary has to clear waivers before then. Qualifying offers for restricted free agents are a separate category: they must be fully guaranteed for both lack of skill and injury or illness, and the team cannot bargain for less protection on those deals.¹

If a player is hurt during a basketball practice or game, the team must cover reasonable medical expenses using doctors and hospitals the team selects. If the injury keeps him off the court, the team keeps paying his salary through the end of that season, reduced by any workers’ compensation benefits or insurance payouts.² Whether he keeps getting paid in later seasons depends entirely on how Exhibit 2 is written.

On-Court and Off-Court Conduct Rules

The UPC includes a best-efforts clause requiring players to compete hard and behave professionally on and off the court. The behavioral expectations run through sportsmanship during games, conduct in the community, and cooperation with league-wide policies, and they give both the team and the Commissioner authority to discipline violations.

Drug Testing

Every player is covered by the NBA’s Anti-Drug Program, which includes random testing throughout the year. Penalties for performance-enhancing substances escalate quickly: a first positive triggers a 25-game suspension, a second brings 55 games, and a third ends in permanent expulsion from the league.¹

Gambling

The UPC flatly prohibits betting on league games. There are no graduated consequences built in. In 2024, the NBA banned Jontay Porter for life after finding he had disclosed confidential information to sports bettors and manipulated his own playing time to influence prop bets.⁴

Prohibited Off-Court Activities

The contract bars players from a specific list of activities the league considers too risky to the asset the team has paid for. Without written team consent, players cannot:⁵

Drive or ride a motorcycle or moped, or ride in any motorized vehicle during a race
Operate an aircraft of any kind
Skydive, hang glide, or take part in similar high-risk recreation
Play football, box, or wrestle professionally while under an NBA contract

Teams can grant written permission through a hazardous-activity waiver. Without one, an injury suffered doing a prohibited activity is a breach of contract and can cost the player his guaranteed salary.

The Exhibits Where Negotiation Happens

Beyond salary and guarantees, most of the real negotiation happens in the exhibits attached to the form contract.

Exhibit 1: Signing Bonus

Exhibit 1 records any lump-sum signing bonus. The CBA caps signing bonuses at 15 percent of total compensation, excluding incentive pay, and 10 percent for offer sheets signed with another team during restricted free agency.⁶ Minimum-salary contracts cannot include signing bonuses. The bonus is allocated across the covered seasons in proportion to each year’s protected salary, which affects how it hits the cap.

Exhibit 3: Performance Incentives

Exhibit 3 is where incentive bonuses live. Every bonus has to be classified as “likely” or “unlikely” to be earned based on the player’s performance the prior season. Likely bonuses count against the current cap; unlikely ones only hit the cap if the player actually earns them. Common triggers include making the All-Star team, winning a specific award, or hitting a games-played threshold, and every metric has to be objectively measurable.

Exhibit 5: Love of the Game

Exhibit 5 is the opt-out from the prohibited-activities list, most often used for the “Love of the Game” clause that lets a player participate in pickup basketball during the off-season. A player who wants that flexibility has to negotiate it in, and off-season basketball typically requires advance notice so insurance coverage stays intact.

Exhibit 6: Physical Examination

A signed contract is not binding until the player passes a physical. Exhibit 6 gives the player three business days to complete the exam, and the team has up to six days from signing to void the entire deal if the player fails. Until the physical clears, the contract is invalid, which is why a trade can collapse days after it was reportedly agreed to.

Options, Early Termination, and No-Trade Rights

Contracts can include options that let either side add a year. Both player options and team options follow the same rules: the option can only be exercised once, can only extend the deal by one year, and must pay at least 100 percent of the final guaranteed year’s salary. A player option lets the athlete pick between free agency and one more year; a team option gives the franchise the same choice. The deadline either way is 5:00 PM Eastern on June 29 before the season the option would cover, moved up to June 25 if the player would otherwise be a restricted free agent.⁷

Players can also negotiate an Early Termination Option that lets them end the contract before it expires. ETOs cannot take effect before the end of the fourth season of the deal and must be exercised by June 29. On a rookie-scale extension, an ETO can be added when the extension is signed, but the same fourth-season minimum applies to the extended term.

Most players can be traded without their consent. A no-trade clause is only available to a veteran who has at least eight years of NBA service and has spent at least four of them with the team signing the contract.⁸ The clause can be a full veto or a partial restriction, such as a list of teams the player cannot be sent to.

For players without a no-trade clause, a trade bonus (sometimes called a trade kicker) can pay a premium if the player is dealt. The CBA caps trade bonuses at 15 percent of the player’s remaining salary, and the bonus is reduced if paying it in full would push the player’s salary over his individual maximum.

Trades, Waivers, and Termination

When a player is traded, the UPC obligates him to report to the new team and honor the rest of the contract. Refusing to report is treated as conduct detrimental to the NBA and exposes the player to fines and suspensions from both the team and the Commissioner.¹ The new team inherits the full contract — financial obligations, guarantees, and incentive structures all carry over.

Ending a contract early runs through waivers. The team places the player on waivers, and any other team has 48 hours to claim him. A claiming team takes on the full remaining terms of the original deal. If no one claims him, he becomes a free agent, and the original team still owes whatever portion of the salary was guaranteed.

Teams can also terminate for cause if a player commits a material breach of the conduct or service provisions, which requires formal written notice to the player and the Players Association specifying what the player did. Contracts may also be terminated for failure to demonstrate sufficient skill, which usually happens in preseason as rosters are trimmed to the 15-player regular-season limit.

A Note on Two-Way Contracts

Not every player on an NBA roster is on a standard UPC. Two-way contracts cover players who split time between the NBA roster and the G League affiliate, and each team can carry up to three. For 2025-26, two-way players earn $636,435, equal to half the minimum salary for a player with zero years of experience, and can be active for up to 50 NBA games. Salary protection on a two-way deal is capped at $50,000 per season, and these contracts cannot carry the kind of full guarantees found in standard deals.¹

1
National Basketball Association. 2018-19 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement
2
IP Mall. NBA Uniform Player Contract
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National Basketball Association. 2023 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement
4
National Basketball Association. Jontay Porter Banned From NBA for Violating League’s Gaming Rules
5
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. National Basketball Association Collective Bargaining Agreement
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NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement. Article 2 Uniform Player Contract
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NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement. Article 12 Option Clauses
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NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement. Article 24 Prohibition of No-Trade Contracts