Deal Valuation. Total Athlete Valuation.
Deal Valuation prices one deal — what a brand pays for specific work. It is the only number NIL Go reviews.
Total Athlete Valuation prices a whole year — what the school pays for the roster spot, and what brands pay across the season.
Priced by audience size and engagement, per platform and per format. Video carries a premium over a static post.
Rates fromCreator-market surveys, resurveyed every year and published by follower tier
Priced per event rather than per hour, by the athlete’s profile and what the appearance asks of them.
Rates fromReal NIL transaction data, plus reported appearance and signing fees and how these agreements are scoped
Priced by the reach and the life of the campaign. Local, regional and national are separate tiers, and the term sets the rest.
Rates fromThe SAG-AFTRA commercials rate card, plus market tiers and how a usage buyout is scoped
Follower and engagement counts on every platform the athlete uses. Engagement matters more than size: a small, live audience outsells a large, quiet one. That is true of the commercial work priced here and not of the roster spot, where our study of 112 athlete contracts found follower count does not predict what the school pays.
Where it comes fromRead from the platforms themselves at pricing time, and attributed by verifying the account belongs to the athlete rather than by matching a name.
What they did on the field, ranked within their own position. A starting quarterback and a backup share a follower count only by coincidence.
Where it comes fromSeason statistics per athlete from ESPN’s public college sports data, stored exactly as published so any figure traces back to it — joined to Sports-Reference and RealGM through 10,902 cross-source identifiers, each carrying the confidence of the match and the reason behind it, and read against team-strength ratings, tempo-adjusted for basketball.
What the athlete was rated before they ever played a college down — the input that prices a signing with no college season behind it.
Where it comes fromPublished recruiting bulk files rather than a paid API: the 2026 class carries 4,453 recruits with 68 five-stars and a numeric grade on 79% of them. For athletes who went abroad instead, European professional rosters — the half of a draft class that never appears in a college database. The transfer portal is deliberately not built, because a partial portal reads as a complete one.
The size and wealth of the metro around the school. Appearances and regional campaigns are bought locally, so local money sets what they are worth.
Where it comes fromThree federal sources joined: IPEDS puts each campus in a metro area, the Census Bureau gives that metro its population, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis its economic output.
What the athletic department earns and spends, by sport. It stands in for how much public attention the program puts an athlete in front of.
Where it comes fromRevenues and expenses per team from the Equity in Athletics returns every college taking federal student aid files annually.
A regional bank wants Indiana quarterback Josh Hoover for a season. The collective brokered it; the bank pays. Here is the report they would get, in two parts.
Prepared 3 August 2026. An illustrative example — Josh Hoover is not affiliated with Civly and this is not an endorsement. The figures here and in the season below are estimates built from published rates, not an offer and not a prediction.
Who is paying, who is being paid, and exactly what work is being bought.
Each piece priced against a published rate, with the reasoning shown.
Priced as submitted. The work has to arrive in units — how many posts and on which platform, how many appearances and for how long, what the campaign covers and for what term.
Each line starts from a published rate for that kind of work, then places this athlete inside it. Every rate links to where it was published.
The same athlete, valued for a year instead of for one contract. It splits by payer: what a school would pay to have him on the roster, and what brands would pay for his commercial work across the season. We report the two separately, because they are answers to different questions.
A published pay range for the position, then the athlete placed inside it by how he performed against everyone else who plays it. This is roster pay: revenue share out of the $20.5 million annual pool every Division I school now shares, plus collective money on top.
Annual pay by position, from ESPN’s survey of more than 20 college general managers and agents, covering the 2025 offseason transfer cycle. Transfer prices set the floor and the ceiling, and the source is explicit that they do not describe what every Power Four player earns; it puts elite quarterbacks at $3–$4 million, above the band shown. Figures circulating for the 2026 cycle run higher again, so this range is a year old and old in the direction of understating.
The same rates as the deal above — posts by audience and engagement, appearances per event, likeness by reach and term. A season changes the count, not the rate.
The counts come from transaction data covering more than 150,000 deals across more than 125,000 student-athletes. Commercial volume varies between sports by more than an order of magnitude, so there is a count per sport rather than one number for college sport.
Commercial activities per year, top 25 earners in each sport, with roster pay excluded. From Opendorse, NIL at 3, extrapolated from transactions between 1 July 2021 and 7 June 2024.
The same data splits those activities by what was bought: 31.4% social posts, 10.5% appearances.
| Work | Rate each | Per season | Season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored posts | $500 | 7 | $3,500 |
| Appearances | $1,000 – $3,000 | 2 | $2,000 – $6,000 |
| Regional campaigns | $5,000 – $10,000 | 2 | $10,000 – $20,000 |
| What brands would pay | $15,500 – $29,500 |
The rates are the ones argued line by line in the deal above, applied to a season of work rather than to one contract. Two regional campaigns a season is our own estimate and is not measured — no published figure separates campaigns from the category they sit in — and it carries about two thirds of this total. Broadcast, podcast, signings, licensing and merchandise have no sourced rate and are left out, so the commercial side is understated.
The quarterback range, with a 92nd-percentile passer placed in its top half. Roster pay, inside the revenue-sharing pool.
A season of commercial work at the rates argued above. This is the only half a business writes a cheque for.
These do not add up to anything. One is a roster cost a school carries; the other is what outside businesses pay for work. Only the second is a deal, and only the second is what NIL Go reviews.
Each valuation states its season, links to published rates, and receives analyst review.
Every valuation carries the season it prices. The published position table on this page is already a year old and says so; a figure from last cycle should never be read as this one.
School-to-school comparisons report what changed and what did not, rather than presenting a difference that is inside the noise as though it were a finding.
Figures are calibrated against On3’s published valuations, so the card can be read next to the number a collective or an agent will look up anyway.
A valuation goes through the same review as a research book — every source link checked, every rate traced to where it was published, and an analyst reads it before delivery.
Send us the deal as it is written — the posts, the appearances, the campaign and the term — and we will price it line by line, every rate linked to where it was published. Or send a roster and we will value the season on both sides, kept separate. Built to be read by the person who has to approve it, and worth pairing with athlete vetting before anyone signs.