After signing a massive extension in the summer of 2023, Jaylen Brown will join an exclusive club of players with a salary of more than $40 million per season. Those enormous contracts draw the headlines but they're far from the norm — most NBA players make far less than that and plenty are playing on what's known as a minimum contract.
Any team below the hard cap can sign a player to a minimum contract for up to two years. Teams with cap space and exceptions available can offer minimum contracts that last as long as five years, although those kinds of deals are very rare.
The minimum NBA salary on these contracts is determined by a player's level of experience — each season of NBA experience bumps up the minimum contract value, making these deals much more lucrative for veterans.
What's the minimum NBA salary for 2023-24?
Players who sign multi-year minimum contracts use the salaries above as the base value and are eligible for a five percent raise in each year of the contract. However, the base minimum NBA salary goes up each year by the same percentage as the NBA's salary cap increases so a player signing a new minimum contract next season could get a salary increase of larger than five percent.
One other advantage for teams using one-year minimum contracts is that the NBA will cover some of the costs of contracts for veterans with at least three years of experience. To incentivize teams to continue to sign veterans instead of just younger, cheaper players, the league pays for the cost of any salary over the two-year veteran threshold for players with at least three years of experience. The full amount of the salary still counts against a team's salary cap but teams only have to actually pay $2,019,706, with the rest covered by the NBA.
