The ultimate Brock Purdy contract breakdown — including new details on the megadeal

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The 49ers’ five-year, $265 million extension with Brock Purdy is the largest pay raise in NFL history.

The 49ers owe their quarterback a little more than $270 million over the next six years as he’ll now earn more per start than he did over the entirety of the past three seasons. But the 49ers are being charged only 3.3% of their $270 million commitment — $9.1 million — on the 2025 salary cap.

Even after paying Purdy franchise-record money and finalizing new contracts for tight end George Kittle and linebacker Fred Warner — both of which are the richest deals in NFL history for their respective positions — the 49ers have more than $40 million in 2025 cap space, the second-highest total in the league.

How?

This is an echo of the financial strategy the 49ers have successfully employed for years. They’re surfing the wave of the rising salary cap. The 49ers, because they’ve committed nearly $1 billion through new contracts for just nine players over the past 21 months, are now playing the cap-pushback game more aggressively than ever.

Evenly distributing that money against the salary cap would be not only foolish, but also impossible — the 2025 cap is set at just $279.2 million, and the 49ers have an entire roster’s worth of contracts to fit under that limit.

So they’re using the NFL’s amortization rule — signing and option bonus money can be prorated for up to five years against the salary cap — as diligently as ever. The 49ers loaded Kittle’s contract up with five prorated bonuses, the most in league history. Warner’s extension will employ a similar technique and it will lower the linebacker’s previously hulking $29.2 million cap hit — all while rewarding him with a pay raise.

Both player and team — as long the player is a reliably great performer — benefit from such maneuvers, and Purdy’s agent, Kyle Strongin, and the 49ers’ negotiators, Paraag Marathe and Brian Hampton, recognized as much. The 49ers and Purdy, who’s been the NFL’s top-rated passer since joining the league in 2022, aimed to strike a similar win-win deal.

The sheer size of the quarterback contract market, combined with the 49ers’ massive spending list, made this negotiation uniquely challenging. But thankfully for the 49ers, Purdy came to play ball.

“We wanted to make sure we were working together with the organization to set everyone up for success,” Purdy said Wednesday. “It wasn’t about me just getting as much money as I could. … I want to get what I deserve, but also surround myself with guys around me and not take every penny for myself.”

That spirit of compromise yielded a contract that looks like this.

PRTD SB is the prorated signing bonus, shaded in blue. OPT BON 1, 2 and 3 are Purdy’s three prorated option bonuses, which are shaded in green, gold and teal, respectively. The fully guaranteed portions of Purdy’s base salary are shaded in dark red, while the partially guaranteed portion (which comes in 2027) is shaded in light red.

We’ll parse this through five primary points.

The 49ers actually left meat on the bone for more potential cap adjustments, starting as soon as 2026. This is different than Kittle’s contract, in which the 49ers completely maxed out prorations from the jump — the tight end’s base salary is the veteran league minimum in all of the next five seasons. Purdy’s base (also known as Paragraph 5) salary is only at the minimum in 2025 before climbing in each subsequent season.

That means the 49ers maintain the optionality to reduce Purdy’s cap hits as soon as next season. They’d simply convert nearly all of the $8.3 million 2026 base into a prorated bonus. Cap size will continue to increase in proportion to NFL revenue, which is projected to continue skyrocketing. The cap has grown more than 24% over just the past two seasons, a trend that’s encouraged teams like the 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles to stack unprecedented amounts of future cap hits into void years.

The 49ers did that again with Purdy’s contract, and they’ll very likely be pushing even more money from it into the future. Remember: Given a rising limit, cap space now is more valuable than cap space later, and moving money forward is penalty-free. It’s tantamount to a zero-interest loan against the cap.

Purdy’s deal gives the 49ers room to shuffle cap money as they see fit in future years. The team will, by design, carry over most of its $40 million of cap space into 2026 (although it does maintain optionality on the free-agent and trade markets). This carryover is a fundamental technique of surfing that rising cap wave.

Even when the 49ers completely maximize proration maneuvers, they can only reduce cap hits by a finite amount. The 49ers needed Purdy’s cooperation to keep his 2025 cap hit at that extraordinarily low $9.1 million mark.

Consider this: Purdy’s camp deemed it important to score a contract that edged out the deal that the Detroit Lions struck with their QB Jared Goff, and they succeeded in doing that. Over the next four years, Purdy is in line to make $165.05 million — just ahead of Goff’s $160 million over his first four years.

But the path to $165 million is markedly different for Goff and Purdy. Whereas Goff scored a $73 million signing bonus, the largest in NFL history, Purdy’s $40 million signing bonus is considerably smaller.

Prorated over five years, a signing bonus of Goff’s size would contribute about $15 million to an annual cap hit. Purdy, because he was willing to take less money at signing, registers this formula instead:

$1.1 million base salary + ($40 million signing bonus divided by 5 years) = $9.1 million 2025 cap charge.

Percentage of cash flow in first year for recent QB mega deals

By Year 3 of his extension, the percentage of contract cash paid to Purdy (62.3%) is set to exceed the average of other recent five-year mega deals (62%). So he’s in line to be fairly compensated. But there’s a willingness to wait here that helps the 49ers’ proration plan.

This sensibility permeates the entire contract and explains how the 49ers and Purdy were able reach an agreement so early — on May 16.

Purdy could’ve certainly held out for a spicier per-year amount, but he deemed $53 million, cap flexibility for his team, and a distraction-free offseason to be worth more than a hollow climb up the APY list. And the 49ers could’ve striven to limit the scope of guarantees to two years (more on that below), but they effectively embraced much more than that through the deal’s $176 million in rolling guarantees — a clear sign of their belief and trust in Purdy.

Purdy signed for $100 million in fully guaranteed money. So even if the 49ers cut him tomorrow, he won’t see a penny less.

Full guarantees shouldn’t be confused with weaker total guarantees, which include pay that’s secured only in the event of injury. Purdy has $181 million in total guarantees.

There’s a mechanism in this deal that bridges the gap between total guarantees and full guarantees. It’s called the rolling guarantee.

Below is an illustration of the division between full guarantees (sum in blue) and total guarantees (sum in teal). It’s centered on the intermediary, rolling guarantees (sum in green), which vest into full guarantees on the first day of April in four consecutive years.

One can cross reference this table with the larger contract illustration above. Purdy’s first two years — headlined by the signing bonus and the first option bonus — are fully guaranteed. His third year is partially guaranteed, as only $11.9 million of $27.2 million in 2027 compensation is fully locked in at signing.

The remaining $15.3 million, while guaranteed for injury now, will vest into a full guarantee on April 1, 2026. So assuming Purdy doesn’t suffer a monumentally unprecedented collapse this coming season, 100% of 2027 cash will lock in far before that season even begins.

The next rolling guarantee is the hinge point of this contract, and that’s why its vesting date is highlighted in red above. On April 1, 2027 — after Purdy will have presumably played just two seasons on this contract — his massive $55.1 million chunk of 2028 compensation will vest into a full guarantee.

That’s the trigger that can push Purdy’s compensation at that point of the deal past Goff’s and above the recent-deal average.

That’s also the trigger that can bring this contract to its promised land: 2028.

Refer back to the first color-coded table. Once 2028 hits, all of Purdy’s option bonuses will have triggered, guaranteed, and started hitting the salary cap. His cap hit in 2028 would therefore register at $57.6 million, a 533% increase over its current $9.1 million mark.

The 49ers, therefore, should be incentivized to rework Purdy’s contract at that point — to lower his cap hit and to exact more years of team control beyond 2030. On the flip side, we can assume that Purdy would be amenable to a pay raise and boost of guaranteed money at that time. Another win-win, similar to the ones the 49ers just struck with Kittle and Warner, would be be on the table.

Of course, Purdy can’t tank the next two seasons for this to come to fruition. But it’s also in the 49ers’ interest to see continued success from him, and Purdy’s performance so far — he’s ranked as high as No. 1 in QBR and only as low as No. 7 — suggests he’s on track to clear this contract’s pivotal checkpoint.

And if that does happen, we can meet right back here in three years for the next Brock Purdy contract negotiation. By then, he should have his bass boat, and — if all fully goes according to the 49ers’ plan — some more hardware on top of that.

That’d call for another pay raise. We’ll write about that potential deal, too — even if it’s not quite as big as this one.