All that’s left is the Super Bowl, and then football, the greatest sport, ends. That means the second-greatest sport begins:
Waiting for football to start.
And part of waiting is anticipating the 2026 salary cap. The San Francisco 49ers could be a lot more active in 2026 free agency. For 2025, they tried to address the salary cap, which led to departures, trades, and a younger team than we may have been used to. 2026 could be a different beast depending on when the Brandon Aiyuk money shakes out, the Nick
Bosa insurance, and other things.
This should help, too: a salary cap upwards of $305.7 million. Tom Pelissero reports that the league informed clubs of a projection in the neighborhood of $301.2 million to $305.7 million.
The cap in 2025 was $279.2 million.
Considering that the 49ers will be active in free agency this year (well, at least more active than last year), having a higher ceiling will certainly help them. The 49ers typically play their contracts into expected salary cap increases. That obviously led to problems during COVID and post-COVID, but things are back to normal.
Per OverTheCap, the 49ers currently have $23,327,521 in salary cap space. That number isn’t factoring in all those escalations mentioned above, so looking at it at the end of January could be a bit misleading. The numbers are based on an OverTheCap estimate of $295.5 million. So, if the actuals go above $305 million, that gives them another $10 million to play with, be it a year’s salary for a veteran, more guarantees, or just having something available for in-season transactions when they need to bring players in.
The actual salary cap is announced at the latest in early March, before the start of the new league year. We’ll know for sure how much money the 49ers can play with around then.
