Paige Bueckers is making $500,000 this season. Her sponsors are paying her roughly eighteen times that.
The Dallas Wings guard is on a base salary of $500,000 for 2026, per Spotrac, rising to $550,000 in 2027. Under the old collective bargaining agreement, the same season would have paid her $80,408. The difference is the seven-year, roughly $1 billion CBA the league and its players union signed in March 2026, which rewrote the entire WNBA pay grid. Forbes, meanwhile, put her total 2026 earnings at $9.1 million — about $0.1 million on the court and $9 million off it.
Where Does Paige Bueckers’ Money Actually Come From?
Overwhelmingly, from brands. Bueckers built a commercial portfolio in college that most professional athletes never assemble: Nike, Gatorade, Dunkin’, Verizon and Bose, anchored by a Nike partnership that has since expanded toward her own signature footwear. Forbes’ $9 million off-court estimate would place her among the highest-earning women in American team sports, and it was calculated before the new CBA raise landed.
Her second income stream is more unusual. Bueckers signed with Unrivaled, the domestic three-on-three winter league, while still at UConn, becoming the first NCAA athlete to receive equity in a league rather than a simple sponsorship check. She captains Breeze BC and made the All-Unrivaled First Team in 2026. Reporting at the time of the deal indicated her first Unrivaled season alone would out-earn the entire four-year rookie contract she later signed in Dallas — a sentence that says more about WNBA salary history than about Unrivaled’s generosity.
The third stream, the actual basketball salary, is the smallest. It is also the one that just changed the most.
How the New CBA Rewrote Her Paycheck
Before March 2026, the maximum any WNBA player could earn was about $249,000. The new agreement pushed the league minimum past $300,000, lifted the supermax to $1.4 million — claimed first by A’ja Wilson and Kelsey Mitchell — and expanded team salary caps from $1.5 million to roughly $7 million. Rookie-scale deals were reset wholesale: the No. 1 overall pick now starts at $500,000, and every first-round selection earns at least $289,133, a figure that already exceeds the old supermax.
Spotrac’s published raises tell the story in one column. Aliyah Boston went from $94,000 to $574,000. Caitlin Clark went from roughly $85,000 to $528,846. Bueckers went from $80,000 to $500,000. Angel Reese climbed to $350,692.
The gap with what the men earn remains the uncomfortable part of the story. Across town, the Mavericks’ own franchise cornerstone, Cooper Flagg, signed a $62.7 million rookie contract as the 2025 No. 1 pick. The distance is still enormous. It is simply no longer absurd.
What’s Next for Paige Bueckers’ Earnings?
A much bigger number, and probably soon. Bueckers is averaging 20.2 points, 4.1 rebounds and 5.8 assists across 32 games this season, form that has put her in the MVP conversation in only her second year. She led the entire league in All-Star fan voting with 1,045,051 ballots, and in August she dropped 34 points on the Toronto Tempo during a four-game Dallas winning streak.
The CBA also created a mechanism called EPIC — Exceptional Performance on Initial Contract — that lets players on rookie deals renegotiate their fourth year and sign a three-year extension. For a Rookie of the Year and All-WNBA selection playing at this level, that is the door to supermax territory. With the league now at 15 teams, a multibillion-dollar media rights package running, and Bueckers positioned as one of the two faces of its next decade, her on-court salary has room to multiply while the $9 million off-court figure keeps compounding.
The headline stays the same for now: $500,000 to play basketball, $9 million to be Paige Bueckers.
Do you think WNBA salaries have finally caught up with the league’s popularity — or is $500,000 for a franchise player still too low? Let us know in the comments.
