Brockonomics: How the 49ers are set up for a rising salary cap — and a pricey Purdy

Paying Brock Purdy won’t be a cheap proposition. Nevertheless, the 49ers remain in good financial position to fortify their roster around its quarterback centerpiece, even after a gargantuan potential deal is finalized.

This is possible because the 49ers, led by chief negotiator Paraag Marathe and salary-cap specialists Brian Hampton and Jeff Diamond, have deftly surfed the wave of a rising cap as the team has signed numerous stars to market-setting contracts.

It’s left the 49ers with an expensive roster — they have over $284 million in 2025 liabilities alone — but one that hasn’t crippled their financial structure. The 49ers are projected to have over $35 million in effective 2025 salary-cap space, which represents their maximum amount of possible room after filling out a 53-man roster.

They carried over a league-high $50 million of unused space from 2024, most of which had been freed up by restructuring maneuvers that spread cap hits into a future where the limit should be higher. That’s because the cap grows along with NFL revenues. The 49ers are taking full advantage of this with a measured push-forward strategy.

How the 49ers spend their $35 million of effective 2025 cap space will be one of the primary questions of the next few months — but their positioning in the upper left of the graph below, which shows the nice chunk of space coupled with a relatively manageable amount of roster turnover, illustrates that flexibility will exist.

Here’s a rundown of the 49ers’ biggest options and their potential effect on the salary cap, along with a fuller context of how Marathe, Hampton, and Diamond might manage the situation.

The 49ers’ cap situation: Annual NFL limits

*Projected cap. Final total will be announced later this winter.

Think of each season’s salary-cap situation as a progressively larger sink. Expenditures pour in through the faucet. Cost-saving measures — such as outright cuts or restructures that move cap hits to future seasons — pour out through the drain and into a pipe that ultimately leads to future years’ sinks. Teams must practice flow control so that the water does not flood the sink of any particular cap year.

The 49ers have diverted water to the future with frequent contract restructures. Those convert base salary to a signing bonus, which prorates for up to five years against the cap — meaning that an immediate cap hit is subdivided into several smaller pieces, the majority of which will register against the limit when there is more space.

There’s no penalty for doing this, so it’s tantamount to a zero-interest loan against the cap that’s allowed the 49ers to remain financially sustainable even as they’ve awarded more big contracts than any other NFL team since coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch joined in 2017.

Expect Purdy to be the next big name added to this list. Kittle will also likely make a second appearance this offseason, since he’s entering the lame-duck year of the deal signed in 2020. The 49ers can actually lower Kittle’s 2025 salary-cap hit of over $25 million through an extension that spreads hits into the future via signing bonus.

Trades and releases are bigger money-savers than restructures and extensions since they actually remove money from the books instead of merely reallocating it.

The majority of NFL contracts aren’t guaranteed, so teams constantly scour them for inefficiencies. Last offseason, the 49ers asked defensive lineman Arik Armstead — who’d missed 13 games with injuries over the prior two seasons — to take a pay cut. Armstead had been slated to make $18 million in 2025. The 49ers, according to Armstead, offered a reduced salary of about $6 million. He refused, so the 49ers cut him. Armstead signed for $14 million annually with the Jacksonville Jaguars. The 49ers replaced him by trading for defensive tackle Maliek Collins, who cost about $10 million. So they saved roughly $8 million with the maneuver.

The 49ers now have similar concerns with 31-year-old defensive tackle Javon Hargrave, who’d initially been under contract through 2026 but who missed most of 2024 with a torn triceps muscle. Hargrave’s $21 million salary for 2025 — none of which was guaranteed — was too rich for the 49ers, so they plan to release him once the new league year begins in March. That’s a maneuver that allows teams to push dead-money hits (Hargrave has earned signing bonus money that must hit the cap at some point) further into the future. Ultimately, the 49ers will preserve about $20 million of 2025 cap space while wiping away another $20 million of 2026 expenditures.

The 49ers are open to re-signing Hargrave, but only at a more manageable price. “What I told Javon is he’s a player we really like,” Lynch said earlier this month. “Same reason we went out and signed him. That hasn’t changed. He’s an impactful player. We have some salary-cap challenges, and so this … gives him an opportunity to go see what’s his market and that may include us.”

Contractual drama has become an annual 49ers tradition. Receiver Deebo Samuel made headlines throughout the 2022 offseason before signing a new deal. Then defensive end Nick Bosa held out until days before the 2023 season opener. He ultimately signed a record contract one year before receiver Brandon Aiyuk held in and ultimately netted a deal worth $30 million annually.

Purdy, up next, is yet another reminder that building a robust roster of NFL veterans is not easy.

“I think we have a lot of good players and one of the things that comes with having a lot of good players is it’s hard to feed everyone and you’ve got to make tough decisions,” Lynch said. “And we’re certainly at a point where we’ve had a five-year run with four NFC Championships, two Super Bowls — you have to go back to the fundamentals of really building the thing. The lifeblood of your organization needs to be strong drafts because it gives you young players that you have under contract.”

The NFL’s rookie wage scale, enacted with the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement, locks in first-timers’ contracts at preset and relatively low amounts. It offers teams a way of maintaining affordable rosters — as long as draft classes are productive.

While Purdy’s selection at No. 262 of the 2022 draft salvaged otherwise disappointing hauls in that season and in 2023, the 49ers’ 2024 class was highly successful right off the bat. Seven new players started games.

“We’re really excited about this rookie class and that movement,” Lynch said. “We’ve got to continue to add to it.”

The 49ers are slated to have 10 picks in the 2025 draft. Three of them are compensatory picks from player departures in free agency. Two of them are fourth rounders, the highest round possible, since quarterback Sam Darnold and edge rusher Chase Young tilted the formula by signing with their new teams for relatively big money.

The 49ers’ 10 picks are slated to cost only $13.4 million total against the 2025 cap. Consider that Young, whose departure netted the 49ers one of those inexpensive selections, cost the New Orleans Saints $13 million all by himself this season.

The 49ers, despite big spending, ended up carrying over about $40 million of unused salary-cap space from 2023 to 2024. They then carried over roughly $50 million from 2024 to 2025.

Both totals were NFL highs and indicative of the team’s broader strategy. The 49ers believe that cap space now, since there is less of it and since the pot is growing, is more valuable than cap space later. So they’ve been acting in accordance with this salary-cap inflation and can be expected to continue doing so.

We can view the looming work with Purdy through that lens. His current 2025 cap hit is $5.1 million, thanks to a pay boost tied to his qualification for the Pro Bowl in the 2023 season. But even with a contract that might end up as the largest in NFL history, the 49ers should be able to keep Purdy’s 2025 cap hit at about $15 million — which would leave them with around $25 million in effective cap space that could be rolled over into 2026 or used to further fortify the roster. (Remember than an extension for Kittle would open up even more room.)

Remember, the structure is what ultimately matters — not just in this massive negotiation, but in all of the 49ers’ financial work.

Gaudy average-per-year totals will dominate headlines when deals are projected and signed. But surface-level numbers carry little relevance in team-building. Can the 49ers continue structuring and restructuring contracts in a fashion that capitalizes on the rising salary cap? That’s the money question.

Limits always exist, but they’re impossible to firmly define since the exact number of future caps isn’t yet known. Managing this entire process requires an intuitive feel and dexterity that the 49ers have established with their roster-building system over the past eight years.

Now the 49ers have reached a critical juncture where they must perpetuate this nimbleness.