Money

Four lines sort every team. By default (the 2025-26 pro basketball numbers) the salary cap is $154.6M, the luxury tax line $187.9M, the first apron $195.9M and the second apron $207.8M, which works as a hard cap. The salary floor is 90% of the cap and the league minimum salary is $1.27M. Your commissioner can change every one of these, so the Cap Dossier and Financials pages always show your league's real numbers.

Your tier is simply the highest line you have reached: under the cap, over the cap, luxury tax, first apron, second apron. Reaching a line counts: a payroll exactly on the tax line is a taxpayer.

Every rule in the game reads one number: your total committed money. It is this season's salary on every active contract, plus your cap holds, plus this season's dead money. Free-agent offers, trades, the tiers and the tax bill all use it, and it is the payroll the Financials page shows.

Once the playoffs end, the books turn over to next season: from the offseason through training camp every contract shows next season's salary, and the dead money counted is next season's too. Last season's dead money is paid and gone.

A cap hold is money that is spoken for but not yet a contract. In HoopSim there are three kinds, all from restricted free agency: a qualifying offer you have issued (the QO amount), a qualifying-offer decision still open on a player whose deal just ended (the QO amount, instead of their old salary), and an offer sheet you sent that is waiting on the other team (its first-year salary). Nothing else is a hold: Bird rights on your other free agents cost no cap room.

Once you are over the cap, exceptions are how you add real salary in free agency. You pick one on the offer when you bid. Each works once per team per league year: they open when free agency does and last through the season that follows.

• Mid-level (MLE): $14.1M by default, up to 4 years, for teams below the tax line.
• Taxpayer MLE: $5.69M by default, up to 4 years, for teams at or above the tax line (it replaces the full MLE).
• Low-level (LLE): $5.13M by default, up to 2 years, for any team below the second apron.

No exception signing can take your payroll past the hard cap. There is no room exception or bi-annual exception in HoopSim.

Every season a player spends on your roster banks one season of Bird rights with your team, counted when the season ends. The rights follow the player: they stay with you while the player sits in the free-agent pool, travel with them in a trade, and end only when they sign somewhere else, you cut them, or you renounce them.

• One season: Non-Bird. You can go over the cap to pay up to 120% of their last salary.
• Two seasons: Early Bird. Up to 175% of their last salary.
• Three or more: Full Bird. Up to their maximum salary.

Every kind of Bird rights lets you go over the cap, never over the hard cap. Re-signing with Bird rights keeps the player's tenure with you.

During the regular season you can offer an extension to anyone in the last year of their deal. The new years start at the salary you agree, sit on top of this season (which keeps its salary), and the whole deal runs at most five years.

An extension follows the same limits as re-signing your own free agent. The new salary is measured in place of what the player earns now: it has to fit inside your cap room, or inside your Bird rights (Non-Bird up to 120% of their current salary, Early Bird up to 175%, Full Bird up to their max), and it can never take your payroll past the hard cap. A minimum deal is always allowed. AI teams extend under the same rules.

A player's maximum salary depends on their years in the league: by default 25% of the cap with 0-6 years, 30% with 7-9 and 35% with 10 or more. Every deal rises each year, never above that max: 8% a year when you keep your own player (re-sign or extension), 5% when a player signs with a new team.

An option is a year inside the deal, usually the last one, decided in the offseason before free agency opens. You can put a team option or a player option on the final year of any free-agent offer of two years or more. First-round picks sign four-year rookie deals where year three is a team option (decided after year two) and year four is another (decided after year three).

A team option is your call: pick it up and the deal simply continues; decline it and the player becomes a free agent, with your Bird rights still attached. A player option is the player's call, from their own read of the market; you get an inbox note and word from your capologist. Any team option you haven't decided when free agency opens is decided for you by the AI's rule.

An option year still undecided isn't guaranteed: cut the player before it's picked up and that year leaves no dead money.

When a deal ends for a player with three or fewer years in the league, or a first-round rookie deal ends, you decide whether to issue a qualifying offer. The QO is 135% of their last salary (at least the minimum plus $200K, never more than their max). Issue it and the player is a restricted free agent: the QO sits on your books as a cap hold and you keep the right to match. Decline and they're an unrestricted free agent with no hold.

Other teams, human or AI, can send a restricted free agent an offer sheet of two to five years, paid from cap room or the MLE; that money counts on their books right away. You get a push and a card and have 3 days (real time) to Match or Let them walk. Matching needs no cap room, only room under the hard cap. If the clock runs out, your capologist makes the call. A restricted free agent nobody signs by the end of free agency takes the QO for one year.

Every team in a trade has to pass the salary rule for its own payroll, checked when the trade is proposed and again when it goes through. How much you can take back depends on what you send:

• Under the cap: your cap room, or the over-the-cap amount below, whichever is more.
• Over the cap: sending up to $7.5M, 175% of it plus $100K; sending $7.5M to $29M, what you send plus $7.5M; sending more, 125% plus $250K.
• Over the first apron: 110% of what you send plus $100K, and your single biggest outgoing contract has to make the match on its own (no combining contracts).
• At the second apron: no more than you send plus $100K.

Over the cap you can't take in salary without sending some back. No trade that adds salary can finish above the hard cap. Picks carry no salary.

• Tax line: the full MLE becomes the taxpayer MLE, and a coach can only be hired directly at the coach minimum.
• First apron: in trades you can take back at most 110% of what you send plus $100K, and you can't combine contracts to match.
• Second apron, the hard cap: no trade can take you over it, and once you're there you can't take back more than you send (plus $100K). The LLE is off, and no signing (cap room, exception or Bird rights) can push you past it. Minimum deals still go through, but past the hard cap only while you have fewer than 15 players.

There are no sign-and-trades, no cash in trades and no frozen draft picks in HoopSim.

The tax is measured once, on the last day of the regular season. If your total committed money is over the tax line that day, you owe the amount you're over times the league's tax rate (1.5 by default; your commissioner can change it, and 0 turns the tax off). Get under the line by that day and there is no bill.

The bill is paid out of next season's coaching budget: 12.5% of it comes off the top (never more than half the league's coaching budget). Before the last day, Financials shows what you'd owe if the season ended today.

Repeat taxpayers pay more: the third straight season over the line, and every straight one after it, also costs your least valuable second-round pick, and the league hears about it. One season under the line resets the count.

Cut a player on a guaranteed deal and every guaranteed year stays on your books as dead money, each in the season it was due. It counts toward the cap, the aprons and the tax, exactly like salary. A non-guaranteed deal leaves nothing, and an option year not yet picked up leaves nothing. The cut screen shows the exact hit before you confirm.

A cut after the playoffs end (offseason through training camp) bills its first year to the season about to start, the one the contract already shows, and each later year to the season after it.

In the offseason, staff free agency and preseason you can stretch a cut with more than one year left. This season still takes its full amount; the later years are added up and spread evenly over twice as many seasons plus one, smaller each year but longer. There's no stretch in the draft, free agency, training camp or once the regular season starts.

Guardrails: a roster floor (8 in the season, training camp and preseason; none in the offseason), a limit on cuts per hour, a ceiling on one season's dead money, and commissioner approval to cut a star.

Free agency doesn't close for good when the season starts. Once games count, an offer to a free agent follows the same cap rules as in the summer (cap room, an exception, Bird rights or a minimum deal, never past the hard cap) and waits: after each day's games the player takes the best offer they like that still fits the team's cap. Every team that bid hears the result, and an exception you offered with comes back if the player went elsewhere.

Players asking for the minimum (tagged Min on the free-agent page) sign right away on a minimum deal. Anyone else can be offered a minimum deal too; the longer a free agent sits unsigned, the more likely they are to take one. Rosters top out at 15 once games count (20 in the offseason and preseason). Restricted free agents only sign through offer sheets.