Major League Baseball generates somewhere around $12B to $13B a year, depending on who is counting and what they count - Forbes put fiscal 2024 at an estimated $12.1B on a convention that excludes ancillary money like ballpark districts and club-owned networks, while Sportico put 2025 at an estimated $13.1B on a convention that includes them. But that money is not distributed evenly. The Dodgers’ local television deal alone reportedly pays them close to $200 million per year. A team like the Marlins or Guardians might generate a fraction of that from local media. Revenue sharing is baseball’s attempt to close that gap — but whether it works is another question entirely.
This trips up almost every conversation about baseball economics, so it is worth separating up front.
Team-to-team revenue sharing is the system this page describes: high-revenue clubs contribute to a pool that is redistributed to lower-revenue clubs. It moves money sideways, between owners. It exists to address competitive balance.
The player-owner split is a different question entirely: what share of the sport’s money goes to players at all. MLB has never had a negotiated percentage split - the NFL, NBA and NHL all do. That is one of the central fights in the current negotiation, and it is what our Revenue Sharing Designer lets you build and test.
When you see a headline about “revenue sharing” in baseball, checking which of the two it means is usually the fastest way to understand what is actually being argued about.
MLB’s revenue sharing system requires all 30 teams to contribute a percentage of their local revenue into a central fund. This includes approximately 48% of local broadcast revenue, along with portions of ticket sales and other locally generated income. National revenue sources — national television deals, MLB.TV, merchandise licensing, and league-wide sponsorships — are generally split equally among all teams regardless of market size.
The central fund is then redistributed equally among all 30 teams. The effect is a transfer of money from high-revenue teams (Dodgers, Yankees, Mets) to lower-revenue teams (Marlins, Guardians, Royals). The system is designed to give smaller-market teams enough resources to build competitive rosters, even if they can’t match the local revenue of teams in New York or Los Angeles.
Revenue sharing sends money to smaller-market teams. But there is no strict requirement that those teams spend the money on player payroll. The CBA includes language stating that revenue sharing funds should be used to improve on-field performance, but enforcement is limited and the bar is vague.
This creates a perverse incentive. A team can slash payroll, collect revenue sharing checks, and still turn a healthy profit — without fielding a competitive team. Critics point to teams that have maintained payrolls well below $100 million while receiving tens of millions in revenue sharing as evidence that the system subsidizes losing rather than promoting competition.
This is one reason the MLBPA has pushed for a salary floor: a minimum payroll requirement would ensure that revenue sharing money actually reaches players rather than becoming owner profit.
The phrase “small market” gets thrown around a lot in baseball, but market size is only part of the story. Revenue disparity comes from three main sources: local broadcast deals (which can vary by hundreds of millions of dollars between the biggest and smallest markets), gate receipts and in-stadium revenue (driven by attendance, ticket prices, and stadium capacity), and regional sponsorships.
Some teams in mid-size markets have found ways to compete consistently despite lower revenue — the Rays, Brewers, and Guardians have each made postseason runs in recent years with modest payrolls. But competing consistently over many years is much harder without the spending power that comes with a large market and lucrative local media deal.
The NFL shares national broadcast revenue equally and uses a salary cap tied to a percentage of a defined revenue base, with categories weighted differently and deductions taken before the split. The NBA has a revenue-sharing system that transfers money from higher-revenue teams to lower-revenue teams, alongside a salary cap. The NHL also uses a cap-and-floor system tied to league revenue. In each case, the revenue split between players and owners is explicitly negotiated — typically around 50%.
MLB players are commonly said to receive around 47%, against roughly 50% in the NFL, NBA and NHL. That comparison is looser than it looks, and the reason matters.
A percentage is only meaningful next to the thing it is a percentage OF. In the capped leagues the split is applied to a contractually defined revenue base, and money is removed from that base before the split happens - expense allowances, partial inclusions, outright exclusions. Revenue that never enters the base is not shared at all. So the headline percentage and the share of every dollar the sport generates are two different numbers, and the second is always the smaller one.
That gap is the whole argument, and it is easier to see than to describe. Our Revenue Sharing Designer lets you set a headline percentage, choose what counts toward the base, and watch the effective share move; the methodology page shows where every input comes from and how confident anyone can be in it.
In MLB Lockout 2027, revenue sharing is one of the key CBA issues you negotiate. How you structure it affects whether small-market owners feel supported and whether players believe the money will actually reach their paychecks. Getting it wrong can cost you approval on all three meters.
Or build the split yourself: Revenue Sharing Designer
Revenue Sharing Designer: build your own split