Latest NFL news puts Bengals in exclusive company that will help them achieve their bold offseason plans

The NFL salary cap for the 2025 season has landed on $279.2 million, a whopping $23.8 million more than the 2024 cap. The cap has increased by $96.7 million since taking a downturn in 2021 due to COVID-19, and that growth isn't expected to stop in the near future. 

The Cincinnati Bengals, and every other team for that matter, are operating under a different cap ceiling. The Bengals officially carried over $5,935,175 in cap dollars from 2024 that will give them slightly more space to work with this year. Their adjusted cap will be $285,135,175.

How much space does that net them? Quite a bit.

Bengals to start with over $60 million in cap space

If the Bengals make no other roster moves from now until the beginning of the new league year on March 12 at 4:00 p.m. ET, they'll have $61,521,257 in cap space to work with. Only seven other clubs have at least $60 million in space to start with.

This is calculated by subtracting the Bengals' top 51 cap hits currently on the roster ($221,255,956) along with the amount of dead cap the club is responsible for ($2,357,962) from the team's aforementioned adjusted cap ceiling. These are the only numbers that teams concern themselves with during the offseason when looking at the salary cap due to the top-51 rule. 

That's $285,135,175 - $221,419,826 - $2,357,962 = $61,521,257

The bulk of this space will be used in free agency, starting with potential new contracts on the way for Tee Higgins, Ja'Marr Chase, and Trey Hendrickson. There's a strong chance that Chase and Hendrickson's new deals would actually decrease their current cap hits if the Bengals chose to structure them as such. 

Higgins is expected to get hit with the franchise tag first before that happens, which would cost the team about $26.2 in cap dollars, but Higgins' tag would also knock out a minimum salary from counting against the cap. If the tag was the next move made by the team, it would cost them $25,220,000 in cap space.  

The Bengals pretty much never get too close to their adjusted cap, leaving around $10 million in space after the NFL Draft, so don't expect them to utilize every penny they have. But $45-50 million in cap dollars used? That's reasonable to expect.

Director of player personnel Duke Tobin referenced Cincinnati's cap situation as a reason why new contracts for his three star players are possible. 

"We've managed our cap well," Tobin said Tuesday at the NFL Scouting Combine. "We've got low dead money. We want a high payroll and low dead money so the people that are in Cincinnati playing for us can get all the money. That's what we want, and we're in a position to re-sign these guys. And it's a good position to be in. It really is, and we're going to attack it." 

The time to attack it is now.