Women’s NIL Deals Doubled to 4,772 in 2026

In late July 2026, Learfield put out a number that got picked up by roughly a dozen NBC affiliates and then mostly disappeared. Female college athletes signed 4,772 name, image and likeness (NIL) deals during the company’s 2026 fiscal year, up from 2,136 the year before. A 123% jump. Every outlet ran the same wire copy, filed it under sports, and moved on.

Buried in the same dataset was the part that should interest anyone who sells something locally. Nearly 1,700 of those new partnerships came from local companies and organizations near the athletes’ campuses, according to the Learfield data reported by Athletic Business. Not Nike. Not Gatorade. Restaurants, credit unions, orthodontists, car dealerships, med spas, gyms. Businesses operating inside a ten-mile radius of a college campus.

Which means several thousand athletes in their late teens and early twenties spent last year sourcing sponsors, quoting rates, producing content, and delivering against contracts. They’re running small businesses. Most of them don’t call it that, and neither does the coverage.

Women’s NIL deals growth in 2026 is the largest unreported small-business story in American college towns, and the tactics behind it transfer directly to founders who have never watched a gymnastics meet.

Last updated: September 2026

Quick answers

How many NIL deals did female college athletes sign in 2026?

Female athletes signed 4,772 NIL deals through Learfield in fiscal year 2026, up from 2,136 the previous year. That’s a 123% increase in participation. Nearly 1,700 of the new partnerships came from local businesses near the athletes’ universities rather than national brands.

How much do female college athletes make from NIL?

Most female college athletes earn modest four-figure sums. Average deal size on the OpenSponsorship platform was $5,147 in 2025, double the prior year. A small group at the top clears six and seven figures: On3’s women’s NIL rankings value JuJu Watkins at roughly $739,000 and Kai Trump at $1.2 million.

Why are brands paying female college athletes more?

Engagement economics. Solly Fulp, Learfield’s head of NIL, told ESPN that female student-athletes are strong content creators who bring genuine brand enthusiasm, and that brands are seeing the benefit in campaign engagement rates. Lower asking prices paired with higher engagement make the math work for local advertisers.

What the Learfield numbers actually say

Learfield’s fiscal 2026 data shows female athlete NIL participation more than doubling, from 2,136 deals to 4,772. The company handles multimedia rights for hundreds of college athletic departments, so its books capture a meaningful slice of the legitimate, contracted NIL market rather than the collective-funded payments that dominate headlines.

The money attached is real. Female student-athletes earned more than $300 million through Learfield multimedia rights partnerships, according to data the company shared with USA Today in July 2026. Twenty-two national brands ran athlete campaigns over the year, including Geico, SeatGeek, State Farm, EA Sports, Uber, AT&T and Marriott, featuring more than 260 athletes across 69 schools.

Those national names are what got quoted in every wire pickup. They’re also the smaller half of the story. Twenty-two brands and 260 athletes do not explain a jump of more than 2,600 deals.

The rest came from Main Street. Restaurants led every sponsor category, followed by financial services, health care, and business and professional services. That ordering tells you who’s actually buying: operators with a physical location, a defined trade area, and a marketing budget measured in thousands rather than millions.

How much do female college athletes make from NIL?

The typical female college athlete with an NIL deal earns a few thousand dollars per agreement, not a life-changing sum. Average deal size across athlete marketing platform OpenSponsorship reached $5,147 in 2025, roughly double the prior year’s figure of about $2,500. The platform reported that 75% of its activations went to female athletes.

The top of the market looks nothing like the middle. On3’s women’s NIL valuation rankings put USC guard JuJu Watkins near $739,000 and Kai Trump at about $1.2 million. Oregon State gymnast Jade Carey, an Olympic gold medalist, sits near $397,000 and has been reported to hold a Reebok agreement worth roughly $200,000.

That spread matters for anyone thinking about the market as a buyer. The headline valuations belong to maybe two dozen athletes nationally. Below them sit thousands of women with five to fifty thousand engaged local followers and no agent, whose price is set by what a regional business is willing to pay. Most of them will never appear in an On3 ranking.

The gap between those two tiers is where the whole opportunity lives. A dentist in Corvallis cannot buy Jade Carey. She can very likely buy a starter on the soccer team for the cost of one month of local radio.

Why are women’s NIL deals growing faster than men’s?

Women’s NIL deals are growing faster because female athletes deliver higher social engagement at lower cost, and because their audiences are distributed across more sports than the men’s market. SponsorUnited tracking has put women’s deal growth at roughly 12% annually against 8% for men, and that was before the Learfield surge.

Three forces are doing the work.

First, audience growth. NIL athletes in women’s basketball and gymnastics have added at least 60,000 social followers in a single season, roughly triple the follower growth in men’s football. Brands buy reach trajectory, not just reach.

Second, content quality. “What we’re discovering with female student-athletes and their engagement with our brands is they’re excellent content creators and storytellers, they’re generally social media savvy and they have a genuine brand enthusiasm,” Fulp told ESPN. He added that the authenticity “humanizes the partnership” and that brands are seeing it show up in engagement rates.

Third, the broader market is repricing women’s sports underneath all of this. Nielsen has measured sponsor valuation increases of 71% for the WNBA, 82% for the NWSL and 51% for the LPGA. The WNBA’s own sponsorship market grew from $72.3 million in 2024 to $105 million in 2025. College athletes ride that wave without having gone pro.

There’s a fourth reason nobody in the press releases wants to say plainly: women were underpriced. A market correcting an old mispricing always looks like explosive growth. It’s arbitrage, and the arbitrage window closes.

Which women’s college sports get the most NIL deals?

Women’s basketball leads NIL deal volume among women’s sports, with gymnastics and volleyball behind it, and softball rising fast. Learfield’s fiscal 2026 data put women’s basketball third across all college sports, men’s included, and softball inside the top five behind baseball.

The distribution is the interesting part. Men’s NIL money piles into one sport; women’s money spreads across several.

Share figures for women’s sports reflect SponsorUnited deal-mix tracking; Learfield’s ranking data covers all college sports and is reported by deal volume rather than percentage. Treat both as directional.

For a local buyer, the softball row is the one worth reading twice. Loyal regional audience, low competition for the athlete’s attention, and a price nobody has bid up yet.

The local deal is the real business story

Nearly 1,700 new local partnerships means several thousand athletes ran an outbound sales process last year, and almost none of them had training for it. Look at what the job actually involves and it stops sounding like sports.

She identifies businesses whose customers overlap with her audience. She writes the outreach. She sets a price with no comparable data, because local NIL rates aren’t published anywhere. She negotiates deliverables: two Instagram posts, one appearance, exclusivity in her category for the season. She shoots and edits the content. She invoices. She files a 1099.

That’s a one-person agency. The athletes who do it well look a lot like the founders we’ve covered moving from endorsement to ownership, just ten years earlier in the arc and with far less capital.

The economics reward it. An athlete with 20,000 local followers who lands four seasonal partnerships at $3,000 each clears $12,000 for maybe 40 hours of work. That’s a better hourly rate than almost any campus job, and it builds an asset the job doesn’t: a portfolio, a rate card, and a list of businesses that have already paid her.

The pattern continues after eligibility ends. Livvy Dunne turned a college gymnastics following into brand equity that now includes a co-ownership position in the $500 million CHAMP fund alongside Kevin Durant and Joe Burrow. Breanna Stewart built a similar ownership playbook on the pro side. Platforms like Passes exist because athletes figured out that the audience, not the sport, is the durable asset.

Most of the 4,772 won’t end up there. They’ll graduate with something almost as useful: proof they can sell.

What small business owners can copy from this

The 1,700 local sponsors found a channel that most small businesses still overlook, and the mechanics are reproducible without a college campus nearby. Four things they’re getting right.

They buy trajectory, not size. A junior adding 60,000 followers in a season is worth more next March than her current number suggests. The same logic applies to any creator, podcast, or newsletter in your market. Price the slope, not the snapshot.

They buy category exclusivity cheap. Being the only dental practice associated with a university’s volleyball team for a season costs a fraction of what exclusivity costs in any mature media channel. Scarcity is the product. Local NIL still sells it at pre-inflation prices.

They let the partner make the content. Learfield’s own read is that the authenticity carries the campaign. Brands that hand over a script get a worse result than brands that hand over a brief. This is the single most common mistake operators make when they first buy creator inventory.

They measure the trade area, not the impressions. A restaurant near campus doesn’t need national reach. It needs 3,000 people who live within two miles to see a familiar face eating there. Reach that would be worthless to a national advertiser is exactly the reach a local operator should be buying.

The broader point for founders: women’s sports commercial revenue is in a repricing cycle that hasn’t finished. Elite women’s sports revenue is on track to pass $3 billion globally in 2026, up from about $2.4 billion in 2025, with commercial revenue including sponsorship and merchandising accounting for roughly 45% of the total. Fortune 500 participation in women’s sports sponsorship has doubled in a year. When the enterprise money fully arrives, local pricing goes with it.

Buy the inventory before the correction, or don’t. But the window is visible from here.

How to price a local athlete partnership

Start from the audience inside your trade area, not the follower count, then work backward from what that attention is worth to you. Local NIL has no published rate card, which cuts both ways: athletes guess high or low with equal frequency, and a buyer who does the arithmetic negotiates from a much stronger position.

Here’s a working method. Take the athlete’s follower count and estimate the share that lives in your market. For a state school athlete, a reasonable assumption is 25% to 40% local, higher for softball and volleyball, lower for a nationally known gymnast whose audience came from viral clips. An athlete with 20,000 followers and 30% local concentration gives you roughly 6,000 people who could plausibly walk into your store.

Next, apply a realistic engagement rate. Micro-accounts in college sports commonly run between 4% and 8% on organic posts, far above what a brand account gets on its own feed. Six thousand local followers at 5% engagement is about 300 meaningful interactions per post, from people who already live nearby.

Then price it against your existing channels. If you’re paying $800 for a local radio flight that reaches a broad, unverified audience, a four-post seasonal package at $2,500 with category exclusivity and one in-store appearance is competitive rather than expensive. The benchmark that matters isn’t the national average of $5,147; it’s your current cost to put a message in front of someone within driving distance.

Three structural terms worth insisting on. Get category exclusivity in writing for the length of the season, since that’s the scarce asset you’re actually buying. Get content usage rights so you can run the footage as paid social and in-store creative, which usually doubles the value of the deal for no extra cash. And tie a portion of the payment to deliverable completion rather than paying in full upfront, the same way you’d structure any contractor agreement.

Don’t script the posts. The reason these campaigns work is that the athlete sounds like herself, and the moment a local operator hands over approved copy the engagement advantage disappears. Brief, don’t write. That single discipline separates the businesses seeing returns from the ones who tried it once and concluded creator marketing doesn’t work.

The same arithmetic applies well beyond NIL. It’s how founders should evaluate any celebrity or creator partnership, and it’s the discipline behind operators who scaled brand-led retail, from Tom Brady’s CardVault expansion to the wave of athlete-backed consumer ventures now drawing retail investors.

Where the model breaks down

Three honest limits belong next to the growth numbers, because most coverage of women’s NIL deals growth in 2026 leaves them out.

The base was small. Going from 2,136 to 4,772 is a 123% increase and also an increase of about 2,600 deals across every women’s program Learfield touches. Football’s total dollar volume still dwarfs it. Percentage growth off a small base flatters the story, and any founder who has watched a seed-stage metric triple knows exactly how that works.

The distribution is brutally uneven. A handful of athletes hold seven-figure valuations while the median NIL athlete earns a few thousand dollars. That mirrors the creator economy generally and the top of the athlete earnings pyramid specifically. Averages hide it. Medians don’t.

And the revenue-sharing era complicates everything. With schools now able to pay athletes directly, institutional dollars flow toward revenue sports first, and the question of whether third-party local deals keep expanding or get crowded out is genuinely open. Learfield’s data shows growth in non-revenue sports so far. So far is doing work in that sentence.

None of that undercuts the core finding. Thousands of young women built functioning personal-brand businesses in a single year, mostly by selling to businesses in their own zip code, and the people best positioned to learn from that aren’t sports fans. They’re anyone trying to buy attention in a local market before the price goes up.