Payton Pritchard, Celtics Agree To Two-Year Extension

The contract includes one standard guaranteed year, with a mutual option (both a team and a player option) for the 2029/30 season, Charania reports.

Pritchard, 28, played a key role for the Celtics’ championship team in 2024, then earned Sixth Man of the Year honors in 2025. However, the best season of his six-year NBA career came in 2025/26, as he took an increased role in the wake of the trade sending Jrue Holiday to Portland and the Achilles tear that sidelined Jayson Tatum for most of the season.

After starting just 17 times in his first five NBA seasons, Pritchard started 50 of his 79 regular season outings in ’25/26, averaging a career-high 32.4 minutes per night. He also established new career highs in points (17.0), assists (5.2), and rebounds (3.9) per game while posting a strong .464/.377/.890 shooting line.

Pritchard, who signed a four-year, $30MM rookie scale extension in 2023, is entering the third year of that contract. He’ll make roughly $7.77MM this season and $8.3MM in 2027/28 before his new deal begins in ’28/29. Since he still has two guaranteed years left on his current contract, he would have been ineligible to sign an in-season extension if he hadn’t finalized a new deal  by October 19.

Because he’s earning less than the NBA’s estimated average salary for this season ($15,163,000), Pritchard’s maximum starting salary in an extension is $21,228,200, 140% of that figure. An 8% raise would result in a second-year salary of $22,926,456, for a two-year total of $44,154,656. Based on Charania’s reporting, it sounds like the Celtics guard will receive those maximum amounts.

The mutual option, which has become popular across the NBA in recent months after not being utilized in a contract in over two decades, means that either side has the ability to opt in for 2029/20 rather than opt out. In other words, the option can be exercised by either Pritchard or the Celtics, and both sides would have to turn it down in order for him to reach free agency. In all likelihood, the only scenario in which both the player and team would decline the option would be to negotiate a new contract at that time.

As our tracker shows, Pritchard is the third Celtic to sign a veteran extension since the 2026/27 league year began, joining Neemias Queta (four years, $56MM) and Jordan Walsh (three years, $15.75MM).