Every time a big NFL contract makes headlines, the total value of the deal only tells part of the story. The real substance is in the structure: how much is actually guaranteed, how the cap hit is spread out, and what happens if the player gets cut early. Here's a breakdown of the terms that show up most often in contract reporting.

Guaranteed Money

Guaranteed money is the portion of a contract a player is owed no matter what happens, whether he gets injured, cut, or benched. Not all guarantees are the same. Some money is guaranteed at signing, some becomes guaranteed only if the player is still on the roster by a certain date in a future year, and some contracts include injury guarantees that only kick in if the player is hurt. Fully guaranteed contracts, where the entire value is locked in regardless of performance or roster status, remain rare in the NFL. The Cleveland Browns' fully guaranteed $230 million deal for Deshaun Watson in 2022 was considered groundbreaking specifically because that structure is almost never used. Most contracts only fully guarantee the signing bonus and the salaries for the first year or two.

Signing Bonus

A signing bonus is money paid to a player upfront when he signs a contract. For salary cap purposes, that bonus isn't charged all at once. Instead, it's prorated evenly across the length of the contract, up to a maximum of five years. That's why teams often prefer front-loading a big bonus rather than a large first-year base salary: it lets them spread the cap hit out and keep more space available in the short term.

Void Years

Void years are extra, artificial years added to the end of a contract purely for cap purposes. They don't reflect years the player will actually play under that deal; instead, they exist to let a team spread a signing bonus over more years than the real contract length, lowering the cap hit in the early seasons. For example, a $5 million signing bonus on a straight one-year deal would count the full $5 million against the cap that year. Add four void years to the same deal, though, and that bonus gets prorated over five years instead, dropping the annual cap hit to $1 million. The tradeoff is that all the remaining prorated bonus money comes due as dead cap the moment those void years are reached, since the player isn't actually on the roster to keep spreading it out further.

Dead Cap and Dead Money

Dead cap, also called dead money, is money a team still owes against its salary cap for a player no longer on the roster. This typically happens when a player is released or traded before his contract is finished, and there's still unpaid, prorated bonus money left on the books. Rules generally allow that remaining money to be spread across up to two seasons if the move happens after June 1st, or charged all at once in the current year if it happens before. One of the most extreme examples came when the Denver Broncos released quarterback Russell Wilson, taking on a record-setting dead cap hit north of $85 million.

Incentives: LTBE and NLTBE

Incentive clauses reward players for hitting performance thresholds, such as making the Pro Bowl, reaching a certain number of catches, sacks, or snap counts. These incentives get classified in one of two ways for salary cap purposes: Likely to Be Earned (LTBE) or Not Likely to Be Earned (NLTBE). The classification depends on whether the player hit that same threshold the year before. If a player already reached the mark in the prior season, the incentive is considered LTBE and counts against the team's cap immediately, in the current year. If the player fell short of the mark the previous year, the incentive is classified NLTBE and only counts against the cap if and when it's actually earned.

This creates a kind of accounting correction the following year. If a team budgeted cap space for an LTBE incentive that the player ends up not earning, that amount gets credited back to the team's cap in the next league year. If a team didn't budget for an NLTBE incentive that the player then does earn, that charge gets added to the following year's cap instead. A well-known real-world example: Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones had a $1.25 million incentive tied to reaching 10 or more sacks in 2022. Since he'd only recorded 9 sacks the year before, the incentive was classified NLTBE and didn't count against the cap right away. When Jones hit 15.5 sacks that season and earned the bonus, the Chiefs absorbed a $1.25 million cap charge the following year instead.

Rookie contracts follow a slightly different incentive structure than veteran deals. All incentives written into a rookie's Year 1 contract are automatically classified as LTBE, regardless of the player's lack of an NFL track record. Those incentives are usually tied to playtime thresholds rather than statistical marks. For players selected in the first or second round, the playtime threshold is set at 35 percent of offensive or defensive snaps in the first contract year, rising to 45 percent in any later year of the deal. For players drafted in the third round or later, along with undrafted players, that threshold starts lower, at 15 percent in the first year and 30 percent in any subsequent year.

Workout Bonuses

Workout bonuses pay players a set amount for attending an agreed-upon percentage of a team's offseason workout program. Under the current collective bargaining agreement, players with four or more accrued NFL seasons are allowed five excused absences from offseason workouts without forfeiting the bonus, giving veterans some flexibility to manage their own training and recovery.

Why All of This Matters

Two contracts can carry the exact same total value on paper and mean completely different things in practice, depending on how much is truly guaranteed versus how much depends on incentives, void years, or future roster spots. That's why reporters and fans dig past the headline number on a new deal to look at the guarantee structure, since that's usually a much better indicator of how committed a team actually is to a player and how much risk they're taking on.