NHL Salary Cap Floor: Ten Teams Must Spend, and Toronto Benefits

The NHL salary cap floor is $76.9 million, and ten teams are not there yet

The NHL salary cap floor for 2026-27 is $76.9 million. The ceiling is $104 million, the midpoint $90.4 million, and the maximum individual salary $20.8 million. Those numbers were sent to teams in the spring and have been public for months, which is exactly why the second one gets all the attention and the first one gets almost none.

The floor is the more interesting number in August. By PuckPedia's projections, roughly ten clubs — Seattle, Nashville, Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, Columbus, Chicago, Anaheim, San Jose and Pittsburgh — still need to add salary to reach it before the season starts. Chicago alone is projected to have something in the neighbourhood of $43 million in space, about 41 per cent of the entire ceiling.

That is an enormous amount of money that has to be spent by teams that mostly do not want to spend it on anything useful to them. For a Toronto Maple Leafs front office sitting over the cap with a defenceman it needs to move, that is not a curiosity. It is leverage.

Why a high floor creates a seller's market

The cap floor rises with the ceiling, and the ceiling jumped hard. A $76.9 million minimum payroll is a real obligation for a rebuilding club whose roster is stacked with entry-level contracts, because entry-level contracts are cheap by design. A team can ice a competitive young roster for $60 million and be non-compliant.

There are only three ways to fix that. Sign free agents you do not need, at prices you would not otherwise pay. Take on someone else's contract and charge a draft pick for the service. Or extend your own young players early and expensively. The second option is the cheapest of the three in real terms, and it is the one that historically gets used.

The result is a market where teams with unwanted money are looking for teams with unwanted contracts, and the price of dumping salary in August is lower than it was in June. Rebuilding clubs will absorb a bad year or two of a veteran deal if a second-round pick comes with it. That is not charity — it is the cheapest possible route to compliance.

Toronto is on the right side of this, for once

The Maple Leafs sit roughly $2.75 million over the $104-million ceiling. That is not a crisis. Clubs may exceed the cap by 10 per cent — $10.4 million — during the offseason, and Toronto's compliance path runs through Max Domi's long-term injured reserve status, a $3.75-million cap hit with two years remaining, plus routine assignments at the bottom of the roster. We walked through each lever in our breakdown of Toronto's three paths to cap compliance.

What the club does not have is flexibility. Compliance through LTIR is compliance without room — it gets you to the season, not through it. Any in-season addition, any injury replacement above the league minimum, any deadline move requires actual space, and Toronto has none banked.

Which is where the floor teams matter. John Chayka is not trying to buy a player right now. He is trying to sell salary. There are ten clubs in the league legally required to buy some.

What it means for Morgan Rielly

The obvious application is the one that has dominated Toronto's summer. Rielly carries a $7.5-million cap hit and a no-movement clause, and he has provided a short list of western teams he would accept. Vancouver has reportedly checked in but wanted Toronto to retain part of the salary, which Chayka declined. Anaheim was reported to have made early calls before Leo Carlsson's $18-million cap hit consumed its room. Nashville has been reported as being on the approved list.

Note how many of those names appear on the floor list. Nashville, Seattle, Chicago, Anaheim and San Jose are all clubs that need to add money. A team that has to spend $15 million to be legal has a very different view of a $7.5-million defenceman than a contender does. It is not buying a top-four blueliner at market price — it is solving a compliance problem and getting a useful veteran attached to it.

That is the version of a Rielly trade that actually gets done: no retention, modest return, and Toronto banking $7.5 million in room rather than trying to win the deal. We argued the case against selling low in our piece on Toronto's open season on Rielly, and that argument still holds on the return side. It does not hold on the timing side. The leverage window closes when those ten teams get compliant.

The other side of the ledger: Colorado and Vegas

At the top of the range, PuckPedia currently projects only two teams over the 2026-27 ceiling: Colorado and Vegas. That is a much shorter list than usual, and it tells you something about how quickly a $104-million cap absorbed the league's problems.

It also means Toronto has almost no competition among sellers. In a normal August, half a dozen contenders are trying to shed the same kind of contract into the same small pool of buyers. This year the queue is short. If Chayka wants to move money, he is not bidding against many people to do it.

The flip side is equally true and less comfortable: Toronto is over the cap in a league where nearly everyone else is not. The Leafs are one of only three clubs with this problem, which is a hard thing to spin as roster strength.

Why nothing has happened yet

Two reasons, and neither is inertia.

The first is that salary arbitration compressed the calendar. Hearings were scheduled from July 20 through August 1, and every general manager with an unresolved restricted free agent had to keep room available until that business closed. As it turned out, all 15 players who filed reached agreements before a hearing was held, so no case actually went to an arbitrator — but the freeze was real while it lasted. We flagged that dynamic when the deadline was approaching in our look at arbitration season and the Leafs' cap wait.

The second is that floor teams have no reason to rush. Compliance is measured against the regular season, not against August. A rebuilding club can sit on its space through training camp, watch which contenders get desperate, and take on salary in late September at the best possible price. Every week Toronto waits, the buyer's position improves slightly.

What Chayka should actually do

Move first, and accept a market return. That is the unglamorous answer and it is the right one.

The Leafs' problem is not that Rielly is worth less than $7.5 million — the problem is that Toronto needs the room and cannot generate it any other way without gutting the bottom of its roster. Sending Zack MacEwen and his $875,000 to the Marlies, or Troy Stecher and his $1.35 million, gets the club legal. It does not get the club functional.

There is also a real argument for using the floor teams differently — as a place to park a smaller, more moveable contract and keep Rielly, at least until injuries reshape the blue line. Toronto has cap-clearing candidates beyond its longest-serving defenceman, as we noted in our look at Dakota Joshua as a trade chip. A team required to reach $76.9 million will happily take a mid-priced forward off your hands, and that costs Toronto far less in the room than moving a top-four defenceman it has no direct replacement for.

What's next

Watch the ten floor clubs, not the contenders. The first one to make a salary-absorption trade sets the market price for the rest, and that price is what determines whether Toronto gets a second-round pick back for taking $7.5 million off its books or has to attach one.

Training camps open in September, and the compliance deadline is opening night. That is the real clock. For where every club stands against the ceiling and the floor, keep an eye on the contracts page as the roster gets finalized.