NIL Valuation
Civly Athletics

How we price an NIL deal

Price the work, not the athlete.

Since the House settlement, every third-party NIL deal worth $600 or more has to clear NIL Go, the Deloitte-built clearinghouse run by the College Sports Commission. It rejects 20.2% of all dollars submitted, rising to 24.7% so far in 2026, and denied deals average 4.8× larger than approved ones, per its 1 July 2026 report. The deals that fail are the overpriced ones.

Below is how we arrive at a price, and then one real deal taken through it end to end, with every number linked to where it came from.

Prepared 3 August 2026. The deal below is an illustrative example — Josh Hoover is not affiliated with Civly and this is not an endorsement.

Price a Deal See a Worked Example
The method

Every piece of the deal, priced against a published rate

A deal is a list of things a business is buying: posts, appearances, the right to use someone’s face in an ad. Each of those has a published market rate. We price every piece at its rate, adjust it for the athlete, and add them up.

NIL Go weighs five factors when it reviews a deal, and those five are what we measure. Four describe the athlete, and we hold them for all 991 Division I football and basketball programs. The fifth is the work itself, which arrives with your deal.

These are not our categories. They are the ones Deloitte’s review runs on.

Working this way is also what gets a deal through. The review asks whether the money is commensurate with what similar athletes are paid for similar work, and deals are denied for failing exactly that test. A price that shows the rate for every piece, and where each rate is published, answers the question in the terms it was asked. A total on its own asks the reviewer to take it on trust.

What the work costs

Social posts

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

Appearances

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

Likeness in advertising

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

What we know about the athlete

Audience

Follower and engagement counts on every platform the athlete uses. Engagement matters more than size: a small, live audience outsells a large, quiet one.

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.

Production

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.

Local market

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.

Program scale

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 worked example

One real deal, priced end to end

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.

01

The deal

Who is paying, who is being paid, and exactly what work is being bought.

02

What the work is worth

Each piece priced against a published rate, with the reasoning shown.

Step 01 · The deal

What is being bought

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.

Who pays A regional bankThe bank pays the athlete directly. The collective brokered the deal and is not a party to the payment.
Who is paid Josh Hoover — quarterback, Indiana28,000 Instagram followers. 3,473 passing yards and 29 touchdowns in 2025, at TCU, before transferring in.
For what work Four Instagram feed posts · two branch appearances · likeness in a regional ad campaignOne season. No category exclusivity requested.
For how much The open term, and what this report answers
Step 02 · What the work is worth

Priced one piece at a time

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.

Four Instagram feed posts $2,000
What it covers Four in-feed posts to his own Instagram account across the season, organic only, no paid amplification and no usage of the content in the bank’s own advertising.
The benchmark Two published anchors bracket this. The creator-market rule of thumb is $100 per 10,000 followers for a static feed post, a 20% premium for video. Surveyed rates for the 10,000–100,000 tier run $500 to $5,000 per post, the spread driven by engagement, niche and production.
This athlete 28,083 followers, and a median of 3,532 likes at a 12.8% engagement rate across his last 16 feed posts, read 3 August 2026 — 11.5% excluding his two transfer-announcement posts. Typical for this tier is 1.5–3.5% on a static post, so he runs three times the top of his band. The per-follower anchor prices a post at $280 on followers alone; engagement is what moves a rate within a tier, and he clears the surveyed floor of $500.
Rate used $500 per post  ×  4 posts
Two branch appearances $2,000 – $6,000
What it covers Two in-person appearances at bank branches, roughly two hours each, including photographs with customers. No signed memorabilia supplied by the athlete.
The benchmark Appearance fees are set per event rather than per hour. Reported NIL appearance pricing runs from a few hundred dollars for a local athlete to several thousand for a high-profile one, with $1,000 for a sports-camp appearance the most commonly cited concrete figure.
This athlete A starting quarterback in a Power Four conference is not a local athlete, so the bottom of that range does not apply. He is also not a national name — he transferred in from TCU this year and has not yet played a snap for Indiana — so the top does not either. Two hours with customer photographs is at the demanding end of what an appearance usually asks.
Rate used $1,000 – $3,000 per appearance  ×  2 appearances
Likeness in a regional ad campaign $5,000 – $10,000
What it covers Use of his name, image and likeness in the bank’s campaign across its regional footprint for one season. Broadcast, digital and in-branch. No renewal and no use beyond the term.
The benchmark Commercial talent is paid in two parts: a session fee for the shoot, then usage scaled to carriage and term. Under the 2025 SAG-AFTRA agreement the on-camera principal session fee is $783.10 for an eight-hour day, with usage paid on top. Above that floor, market practice runs $500–$1,500 for a one-off local spot, $5,000–$10,000 regional, and $50,000 and up national.
This athlete A regional campaign takes the regional tier directly. Union scale is a floor for an unnamed performer, and a starting quarterback known in the bank’s own market sits above it. One season, no renewal, no further use is the narrow end of a buyout, which keeps it off the national tier. It outweighs the four posts on scope: those reach his followers once each, the campaign runs to the bank’s whole market for a season.
Rate used $5,000 – $10,000 for the term
The work, at published rates $9,000 – $18,000

Have a Deal to Price?

Send us the deal as it is written — the posts, the appearances, the campaign and the term — and we will return a report like the one above, with every rate linked to where it was published. Built to be read by the person who has to approve it.

Price a Deal Pair It with Athlete Vetting