College Football Transfer Portal and NIL Rules Explained

Oct 23, 2026 • 2 hours ago

The NCAA transfer portal is the database a player enters when he wants to talk with other schools, and in football it now opens for a single short window each January. Player pay in college football runs through two channels: name, image and likeness (NIL) deals with outside businesses, and direct revenue-sharing payments from schools under the House v. NCAA settlement, both overseen by the College Sports Commission.

Updated for the 2026 season.

What the transfer portal is

The transfer portal is the NCAA's national transfer database. A Division I player who wants to explore a transfer gives written notice to his school's compliance office, which must enter his name within two business days of the request. Once the name is in, other schools can find it and are allowed to contact the player. Before that, coaches at other schools generally cannot recruit him.

Entering the portal is a notice, not a commitment. A player can withdraw his name at any time, but his current school is not required to take him back on the team or keep paying his athletic scholarship for future terms. Athletic aid cannot be cut in the middle of the term in which the notice is given, though a school may reduce or cancel it immediately if the notice comes between terms.

Did a player enter the transfer portal?

The portal is built for member schools, not as a public lookup site. News that a player has entered usually comes from the player, his school or reporters who cover recruiting. Entry alone does not mean a player has picked a new school, and it does not guarantee he will be eligible there; the new school's compliance office certifies that. National Football Post tracks notable moves, as in this transfer portal roundup of quarterbacks on the move.

Football transfer windows for 2026-27

Football players may enter the portal only during set windows. The NCAA has reshaped these windows twice since 2025, so the current dates matter.

For the 2025-26 cycle, the NCAA dropped the old December and spring windows and replaced them with one 15-day window, Jan. 2-16, 2026. On Oct. 7, 2026, the Division I Cabinet approved a new football window, described by the NCAA as "a 10-day window beginning the first business day following Jan. 1." Because Jan. 1, 2027 falls on a Friday, news reports noted the next window opens Monday, Jan. 4, 2027. The rule covers both the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS).

Cycle	Regular football window	Length
2024-25	December window plus a spring window (April)	Two windows
2025-26	Jan. 2-16, 2026	15 days
2026-27	Begins the first business day following Jan. 1, 2027	10 days

Exceptions: coaching changes and late postseason games

Under the rules adopted in October 2025, a player whose head coach leaves gets a separate 15-day window that opens five days after the school hires or announces a new head coach. That replaced the older 30-day window that started when the coach departed.

The 2025-26 rules also gave players whose teams played a postseason game on or after Jan. 12 five consecutive days to enter, starting the day after their final game. For the 2026 cycle that meant a Jan. 20-24 window for the two College Football Playoff finalists. The NCAA's Oct. 7, 2026 announcement of the 10-day window does not address either exception, so players should confirm the current terms with their school's compliance office.

Immediate eligibility after a transfer

Since April 2024, Division I transfers do not have to sit out a year, even if they have transferred before. An undergraduate is immediately eligible at the new school if he left his previous school academically eligible and in good standing (not under suspension or dismissal) and meets the new school's progress-toward-degree requirements. A graduate transfer must have earned his degree, left academically eligible and enroll full-time in a graduate program.

How many seasons a player has left is a separate question. In June 2026, Division I adopted an age-based model that gives athletes up to five years of eligibility if they enroll full time no later than the academic year after their 19th birthday. It applies to athletes who first enroll in fall 2027 or later; athletes already in school use whichever set of rules is more favorable to them. Those rules are covered on a separate eligibility page.

Scholarships and roster spots

For schools that opted into the House settlement, the NCAA's football scholarship limit of 85 is gone. In its place is a roster limit of 105 players. A school may give full or partial scholarships to anyone on the roster, as long as the roster stays at or under 105. Every player who receives a scholarship or school payment must be on the submitted roster for the full academic year, and schools must certify their rosters through the College Sports Commission before the season begins or by Dec. 1, whichever comes first.

A player who enters the portal is competing for a limited number of roster spots at his next school.

What NIL is

NIL stands for name, image and likeness. An NIL deal pays an athlete for the use of his identity, for example in a social media post, an appearance or an endorsement. The NCAA lists the basic conditions: the athlete must be paid for actual use of his NIL, the deal must serve a real business purpose, and the pay must be in a reasonable range for someone with similar profile. Pay-for-play, meaning money to attend a school or for on-field performance, remains prohibited.

The NCAA first allowed NIL deals through an interim policy adopted June 30, 2021, and effective July 1, 2021. That policy let athletes follow the NIL law of the state where their school is located, or act freely if their state had no law, while keeping the ban on pay-for-play and recruiting inducements. Early deals drew heavy attention, including a reported seven-figure deal for then-Ohio State quarterback Quinn Ewers, covered in this 2021-era report on the Ewers NIL deal. That story predates the settlement and the current reporting system.

NIL deals and player NIL earnings

Individual NIL contracts are private. Reported figures for a specific player's NIL deal or NIL earnings usually come from the player, his representatives or media reports, and they are rarely confirmed by schools. Disputes over promised NIL money can end up in court, as in the case of former Florida quarterback signee Jaden Rashada, whose NIL lawsuit settlement drew wide coverage.

The House v. NCAA settlement and revenue sharing

On June 6, 2025, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in the Northern District of California approved the settlement in House v. NCAA. It resolved several antitrust suits against the NCAA and the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. Its main pieces:

Back pay: about $2.78 billion in damages to current and former athletes, paid over the settlement's 10-year term.
Revenue sharing: participating schools may pay athletes directly, in addition to scholarships and outside NIL income. Payments are reported through the College Athlete Payment System (CAPS) within five business days of signing.
Roster limits: scholarship limits are replaced by per-sport roster limits, 105 in football.

The annual cap on revenue sharing is 22 percent of the average revenue that schools in the five named conferences earn from media rights, tickets and sponsorships. The cap is a ceiling, not a requirement; schools may pay less.

Academic year	Revenue-sharing cap per school
2025-26	$20.5 million (College Sports Commission)
2026-27	About $21.58 million (College Sports Commission)
2027-28	Expected 4 percent increase over 2026-27
2028-29 onward	Recalculated in Year 4, then reviewed every three years

School NIL and revenue sharing

A school's "NIL" spending usually mixes two things: direct school payments, which count against the revenue-sharing cap, and athletes' deals with outside companies, which do not. Schools generally do not publish full totals.

The College Sports Commission and NIL Go

The College Sports Commission (CSC) enforces the rules created by the settlement: revenue sharing, third-party NIL and roster limits. The NCAA's own enforcement staff still handles all other rules.

Every Division I athlete, whether or not his school opted into revenue sharing, must report third-party NIL deals worth $600 or more in total to NIL Go, an online system built with Deloitte, within five business days of signing. The CSC reviews whether a deal has a valid business purpose, meaning it promotes goods or services sold to the public for profit, and whether the pay falls within a reasonable range of compensation. Deals with "associated" parties, such as school-specific collectives or donors who have given more than $50,000, draw the closest review. As of July 2026, the CSC says it does not apply the pay-range review to deals of $600 to $15,000 until an athlete has reached $50,000 in associated deals in an academic year.

An athlete whose deal is not cleared has 14 days to seek neutral arbitration, which normally concludes in about 45 days. He stays eligible while the case is pending unless the arbitrator rules otherwise.

State laws and federal legislation

State NIL laws were the original reason the NCAA opened NIL in 2021, and they still vary from state to state. Some conflict with the settlement rules, which is one reason schools and conferences have pushed Congress for a single national standard.

As of October 2026, no federal college sports law has been enacted. The House's own bill, the SCORE Act, stalled before a House floor vote, according to legal analyses of the issue. On Sept. 28, 2026, the Senate passed a different bill, the Protect College Sports Act (S. 4668), 77-22. As reported by ESPN and law firms tracking the bill, it would give the NCAA antitrust protection to enforce a pay cap, raise that cap to about $49 million per school, let athletes transfer once without penalty, write a five-year eligibility window into law and override some state NIL laws, while leaving the question of athlete employee status open. The House is scheduled to return Nov. 9, 2026. If it does not pass the bill before the new Congress begins on Jan. 3, 2027, the bill dies.

Are college athletes employees?

That question is unsettled. In July 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in Johnson v. NCAA that college athletes are not automatically barred from being employees under federal wage law and sent the case back to the trial court to apply a fact-based test. As of Oct. 23, 2026, the case remained open in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, according to the court docket, with no final judgment entered. Nothing in the House settlement makes athletes employees.