Highest-Paid NHL Players 2026-27

Seventeen million dollars a year. That is what Kirill Kaprizov will earn starting in 2026-27, the largest annual cap hit in NHL history, and it resets the entire top of the pay scale. But here is the twist that makes the highest-paid NHL players list worth a real read this year: the best player on the planet, Connor McDavid, is not even in the top five. He took a discount on purpose. This is the 2026-27 salary ladder, ranked by cap hit, with the gaps that actually tell the story.

The numbers below are AAV (average annual value), the figure that counts against the $104 million salary cap. Every one is verified against Spotrac and PuckPedia.

1. The top 10, ranked by cap hit

2. The $17M Ceiling: how Kaprizov reset the top

3. The discount: why the best player is not No. 1

4. What everyone else makes: average and minimum

5. How the $104M cap stretched the list

6. Who is chasing the ceiling next

The gap between the highest-paid skater and the best skater is $4.5M, and that gap is the whole story of this list.

Key Takeaways

• New record: Kirill Kaprizov's $17M cap hit is the highest AAV in NHL history, on an eight-year, $136M extension.

• The $17M Ceiling: Kaprizov's deal reset the top rung, and the next four stars all land between $12.6M and $14M.

• The discount: Connor McDavid took a two-year deal at $12.5M, leaving him sixth despite being the league's best player.

• The $12M club: three more stars (Marner, Connor, Rantanen) sit tied at exactly $12M after the 2025 free-agent reset.

• Context: the league minimum is just $850K and the average is around $3.8M, so the top 10 earn many times the median NHLer.

The Top 10 Highest-Paid NHL Players, Ranked by Cap Hit

Here is the 2026-27 order by AAV, per Spotrac's cap-hit rankings and PuckPedia. The three names tied at $12M are listed by contract length and signing date.

Nine of the ten are forwards, and the lone surprise is who is missing. No goalie cracks the list, and no defenseman either, which says plenty about how the league pays the people who put the puck in the net. Cale Makar, the best defenseman alive at $9M, would not sniff the top ten. Notice the geography too: Edmonton has two of the top six in Draisaitl and McDavid, and Vegas has two in Eichel and Marner, which is exactly the kind of top-heavy spending our War Chest Index flags as a championship-or-bust bet. Spread your cap across two $13M-plus stars and the margin for error on the rest of the roster gets thin in a hurry.

The $17M Ceiling: How Kaprizov Reset the Top

For three years the top of the NHL pay scale was stuck around $12.6M, where MacKinnon and Matthews-tier deals lived. Then Minnesota blew the roof off. Kaprizov signed an eight-year extension worth $136M, an AAV of $17M, and suddenly the ceiling jumped almost 35% in a single signature. Wild GM Bill Guerin did not flinch about the size of it.

"The biggest one in franchise history." — Bill Guerin, Minnesota Wild GM, on the Kaprizov extension, via Minnesota Sports Fan (2025)

Guerin reportedly opened at $16M, and Kaprizov's camp pushed it to $17M. That extra million matters beyond Minnesota, because every elite winger who signs next will point at Kaprizov's number as the new comp. The deal does not just pay Kaprizov, it moves the floor for the next negotiation. Consider how fast the top moved: as recently as 2024-25, no NHL player carried a cap hit above $12.6M, so Kaprizov did not nudge the ceiling, he kicked it up almost 35% in one signature. Agents across the league spent the following week recalculating, and the ripple is exactly the kind of spending-power shift our Need-Fit Map tracks team by team.

The Discount: Why the Best Player Is Not No. 1

And this is where the list stops being a rich list and starts being interesting. Connor McDavid, the player nobody argues against as the best alive, signed a two-year extension at $12.5M, which slots him sixth. He could have asked for more than Kaprizov and gotten it. He chose not to.

"I put everything I have into this and deserve to be paid what I feel is fair... my only desire is to win." — Connor McDavid, on his extension, via ESPN (2025)

The two-year term is the tell, because McDavid did not just take less money, he also took less security, betting on himself and keeping Edmonton's window open while the cap climbs. His teammate Leon Draisaitl actually out-earns him by $1.5M, which is the kind of thing that would start a fight in most dressing rooms. With McDavid, it reads as a deliberate call. He is following a path Sidney Crosby paved more than a decade ago, when Crosby signed for $8.7M a year in Pittsburgh and held that number through 2025 to leave his team room to build a contender. The best players keep proving that the cap hit and the trophy case do not always point the same way. Whether the Oilers reward McDavid's faith depends on what they build around him, the same roster math our 2026 free-agent board tracks.

What Everyone Else Makes: Average and Minimum

The top ten warps your sense of NHL money, so here is the real spread. The league minimum salary climbs to $850,000 for 2026-27, up from $775,000, and the average salary sits around $3.8M, a number dragged upward by exactly the contracts in the table above. The maximum any one player can earn is capped at 20% of the ceiling, which is $20.8M, a number nobody has reached yet.

So a top-ten earner makes roughly four to five times the league average and twenty times a minimum-salary depth player. And the average itself is misleading, because barely 40% of NHLers actually earn above it, with the elite contracts dragging the mean upward while most of the league lives well below it. That spread is wider than it has ever been, and the rising cap is the reason.

How the $104M Cap Stretched the List

None of these numbers exist without the cap jump. The 2026-27 ceiling is $104M, up from $95.5M, another sharp climb after years of flat-cap stagnation. Remember the context: the cap froze at $81.5M for four straight seasons through the COVID revenue crunch, then broke loose, $83.5M, $88M, $95.5M, and now $104M. Four years of pent-up raises got squeezed into a short window, so stars are not just getting richer, they are catching up to where the market would have had them all along. When the cap rises fast, star AAVs chase it, and the gap between a $17M deal and an $850K deal stretches with it. A flat cap compresses salaries toward the middle; a sprinting cap blows the top wide open, which is precisely what produced a $17M contract that would have been unthinkable three years ago. We broke down which teams won and lost that jump in our cap winners and losers piece, and how the longer schedule factors in via the 84-game season breakdown.

Who Is Chasing the Ceiling Next

Kaprizov's ceiling is not going to stand alone. With the cap projected to keep climbing toward $113M, the next round of mega-deals is already loading. Jack Hughes and the New Jersey core, the next Matthews-tier extensions in Toronto, and the 2026 restricted free agents lining up for their second contracts all give agents a fresh comp to chase. The pressure runs hottest on the RFAs with arbitration leverage, the group our offer-sheet targets board breaks down, where a rival GM can force the price up with a single signed sheet.

There is a structural reason the ceiling keeps lifting, and it is term. An eight-year deal, available only to a player re-signing with his own team, lets a club spread a huge total over more years and soften the annual hit, which is exactly how Minnesota landed Kaprizov at $17M instead of a $20M-plus number. A rival team can only offer seven years, so the biggest AAVs almost always come from players staying put. Pair that lever with a cap that has jumped from $88M to $104M in just two years, and the math nearly forces the top to keep rising. The stars whose contracts expire into a $110M-plus cap, not the ones already locked in at today's figures, are the names most likely to reset Kaprizov's record.

Here is where I land on the near term. The first player to sign above $17M will almost certainly be a winger or center in his prime re-upping on a max-term deal once the cap clears $110M, and it happens before the 2027-28 season, not this one. The teams with the room to even think about it are the cap-space leaders, not the contenders already stacked with $13M stars. If you want the full national-TV slate where all these newly rich stars will actually play, our 2026-27 viewing guide has every channel.

Compiled by Mike Johnson, NHL Senior Editor, 15 years covering contracts and the cap. Every cap hit was checked against Spotrac and PuckPedia; the Kaprizov and McDavid contract terms and the Guerin and McDavid quotes were traced to ESPN, the Oilers, and Minnesota Sports Fan with inline source links; figures are AAV, not raw salary, and can shift with in-season trades. The $17M Ceiling is our framework for how Kaprizov's record AAV reset the top of the pay scale. Published June 17, 2026, and verified against live source URLs the same day. Editorial review: Sarah Chen, Hockey Operations Editor. Corrections: editorial@nhltraderumorstalk.com.

Sources and Reporting

• Spotrac: 2026-27 cap-hit rankings, all ten figures

• PuckPedia: McDavid two-year, $12.5M extension

• ESPN: McDavid extension analysis and quote

• Minnesota Sports Fan: Kaprizov $136M deal, Guerin quote

• PuckPedia: 2026-27 minimum salary $850K

• ESPN: $104M cap confirmation

• Wikipedia: salary-cap history and maximum-salary rule

The Verdict: The $17M Ceiling

I keep coming back to the $4.5M gap between Kaprizov and McDavid, because it captures where the NHL is in 2026-27. The highest-paid player and the best player are different people, and that only happens when one superstar chases the market and another chases the Cup. Kaprizov's ceiling will not stand alone for long, because the cap is climbing toward $113M and the next wave of extensions will test it. Watch the first winger who asks for $17.5M. Whoever blinks first tells you whether the ceiling was a peak or just a new floor.