Who Actually Makes The Most Money In The NHL Right Now
Connor McDavid holds the highest active cap hit in the league. His contract with the Edmonton Oilers runs through the 2025-26 season and carries an average annual value of $12.5 million. That figure is what matters for salary cap purposes, not his total payout which includes signing bonuses and deferred money woven into the structure. Most people assume the player with the biggest total contract value is the same as the player with the highest cap hit. They are not always the same thing. McDavid's deal is $100 million over eight years, but the cap number everyone cares about is the $12.5 million AAV. Other players like Nikita Kucherov and Nathan MacKinnon sit right behind him around $11.5 to $12 million range. I spent years tracking these numbers for a sports media outlet and the main headache is that cap hits do not equal actual yearly payouts. Edmonton structured McDavid's deal with heavy signing bonuses early on and lighter ones later. The cap hit stays flat at $12.5 million every year, but if you look at actual cash flow his real yearly earnings shift significantly between seasons. This matters if you are doing financial planning or contract analysis because a casual reader will misread the total value.
The tricky part is players with deferred compensation. Some deals spread payments out over decades after retirement, which inflates the headline number without showing up on the books the same way. McDavid does not have that complication, which is why he tops the straightforward list. One edge case I ran into: the NHLPA and CapFriendly use slightly different calculation methods when a player is injured or placed on LTIR. I once published a piece claiming the highest cap hit was someone else because I did not factor in how Edmonton's deferment structure interacted with the cap floor calculation for that specific season. The fix was pulling the raw CBA language and cross-referencing it with CapFriendly's breakdown tool rather than relying on secondary summaries. That saved me from running an error that would have spread fast. If you want current numbers, CapFriendly and the NHL official site both publish updated figures. The rankings shift every offseason when new contracts get signed or restructured, so the list I give here could change by next summer.
