The NHL and NHLPA have agreed to expedite a playoff salary cap and changes to long-term injured reserve rules for the 2025-26 season, multiple NHL sources told ESPN on Tuesday.
The playoff salary cap rule is one of several changes in the league’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement that will be fast-tracked for this season. The current CBA ends on Sept. 15, 2026. The new agreement, which the NHL and NHLPA announced in July, has a four-year term.
NHL general managers will be briefed on the CBA rules for this season at their meetings in Detroit this week, a source told ESPN. The salary cap rules for the playoffs address an ongoing concern for some players and general managers: teams using long-term injured reserve (LTIR) rules to ice rosters that would have been well over the regular-season upper salary cap limit.
Previously, there was no salary cap in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, allowing teams to bring back players who were on LTIR at the end of the regular season for Game 1 of the playoffs after already using their open salary cap space to add more talent at the trade deadline.
“I think overall it’s a good thing because it’s a competitive advantage. I mean, that’s how most people view it, especially if you’re able to use it in the proper way,” Calgary Flames center Nazem Kadri told ESPN recently. “You never want to see injuries and you never want to see guys get hurt, but the fact of the matter is [teams] could take advantage of that. And with the new CBA, I think we’ve kind of tightened the rules up a little bit to make it a little more difficult.”
The cap compliance is only for the players participating in a given postseason game. As one NHL player agent told ESPN: “You can have $130 million in salaries on your total roster once the playoffs start, but the 18 players and two goalies that are on the ice must be cap-compliant.”
By 3 p.m. local time or five hours before a playoff game — whatever is earlier — teams will submit a roster of 18 players and two goaltenders to NHL Central Registry. There will be a “playoff playing roster averaged club salary” calculated for that roster that must be under the “upper limit” of the salary cap for that team. The “averaged club salary” is the sum of the face value averaged amounts of the player salary and bonuses for that season for each player on the roster, and all amounts charged to the team’s salary cap.
Along with that postseason salary cap, the NHL and NHLPA have agreed to expedite changes to long-term injured reserve rules for the 2025-26 season. The total salary and bonuses for “a player or players” that have replaced a player on LTIR may not exceed the amount of total salary and bonuses of the player they are replacing. The new LTIR rule also states that “the average amounts of such replacement player(s) may not exceed the prior season’s average league salary.”
There is an exception to the LTIR rule changes: Teams can exceed these “average amounts,” but the injured player would be ineligible to return that season or in the postseason. That exception needs approval from both the NHL and the NHLPA.
Other CBA changes that are fast-tracked for the 2025-26 season:
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The outlawing of deferred compensation in player contracts, which will go into effect on Oct. 7.
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The relaxation of player dress codes.
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The ability for players to endorse “wine and spirits.”
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The prohibition of “double salary retention” in trades. Double retention had become commonplace at the NHL trade deadline, with teams retaining part of a player’s salary between trading him to another team that retained another percentage of the contract before that player was then sent to his new club.
According to PuckPedia, which first reported the expedited rules for this season, the rest of the CBA’s changes will have “rolling implementation” for the next year, including an increase in minimum player salary next March. Other significant rule changes like contract value variance and term-limits on contract — seven years if he’s re-signing with the same club and down to just six years (from the current seven) if he signs with a new team — won’t go into effect until after the entire CBA does on Sept. 16, 2026.
The NHL’s shift to an 84-game regular season will also be implemented in 2026-27.
