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- Winning Super Bowl 60 players earn $178,000, while losers receive $103,000.
- Postseason payouts for both teams increased by $7,000 compared to 2025.
- Players on the first-ever Super Bowl-winning team earned only $15,000.
- The maximum total playoff bonus a single player can earn is $376,000.
- Postseason pay comes from a league pool rather than individual team budgets.
Super Bowl LX is the biggest sporting event on the calendar, so it won’t come as a surprise that it pays to play in the big game. Winners from this year’s game will take home their share of prize money, some USD$178,000 (approx. AUD$255,750) for winning the game. However, it’s the losers that have benefited the most from this year’s Super Bowl prize money updates.
This is the first time in history that players on a losing team will earn their share of a six-figure check, USD$103,000 to be exact. That’s an increase of USD$7,000 over Super Bowl LIX, but it’s still only a small amount for millionaire players who gave it their all and came home short.
Because NFL contracts are incentive-based, star players can receive large bonuses on top of their guaranteed salaries based on their regular-season performance and postseason success. This can inflate their contracts by millions of dollars. But when we focus on the postseason, there’s a clearer structure in place under the league’s collective bargaining agreement. On the low end, division winners get USD$54,500, and on the high end, the Super Bowl winner gets that elusive USD$178,000 on top of the money they’ve already earned.
When you consider that an NFL team has a 53-man active roster during the regular season (46 or 48 players typically active on game day), the USD$178,000 split for the Super Bowl winner is substantial.
The payday pales in comparison to what the highest-paid players in the league earn per game, including the likes of top quarterback Dak Prescott, who signed a 4-year, $240 million contract extension in 2024 with the Dallas Cowboys that pays him USD$3.5 million per game. However, it will make a big difference to someone on a minimum contract like Seattle Seahawks Left Tackle Mason Richman, who has a base salary of USD$840,000.
Payouts for winning the Super Bowl will continue to rise under the collective bargaining agreement. Rising by another USD$10,000 for both teams at Super Bowl LXI.
That’s a 1,000% increase from the first payouts at Super Bowl I (1967), when the winning team walked away with USD$15,000 and the losers got half that. Even when we account for inflation, today’s players are better off, as the winning share at Super Bowl I would be worth about USD$147,744 today.
No matter which way you slice the Super Bowl prize money up, it pays to play sport at the highest level.
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