Doing the math on the Braves' 2025 payroll
Alex Anthopoulos expects the team to spend more in 2025. What exactly does that entail?
This week, Alex Anthopoulos held his end-of-year press conference and announced that he expected payroll to rise in 2025. That means 2025 will mark the 9th straight year that the Braves have increased payroll. The team is a far cry from its 2016 iteration, which ranked 27th leaguewide in spending and had only three players (Freddie Freeman, Nick Markakis, and . . . Hector Olivera) with a luxury tax hit over $10 million.1 And by increasing payroll for yet another year, it is extremely likely (though, as I’ll discuss below, technically not guaranteed) that the Braves will pay the luxury tax for a third straight year.
Before the offseason begins, I want to break down where the Braves’ payroll stands. I expect I’ll check in with updates throughout the offseason as the Braves make decisions on tenders, execute trades, and sign free agents. But Anthopoulos has gotten us off to an early start by telling the media in that same press conference that the team intends to pick up its club options on Marcell Ozuna, Travis d’Arnaud, and Aaron Bummer. Picking up those options clarifies the Braves’ payroll position - and it also takes a few needs off the board. I’ll write about this in more detail later, but I expect Atlanta’s priorities will now be finding a veteran starting pitcher, a left-handed reliever who can join Bummer and Lee in the late-innings mix, and some competition for Orlando Arcia at shortstop.
So let’s talk about how to think about the Braves’ payroll, and where it stands right now.
What are the payroll numbers that matter?
I’m going to briefly break down on how payrolls work here; skip to the next section if you’re familiar with how cash and luxury tax payrolls are calculated and how Atlanta’s front office uses those numbers.
“How much is the Braves’ payroll?” is a trick question. There are two numbers: the team’s cash payroll and the team’s luxury tax payroll. The cash payroll is calculated by summing up all of the money owed to players in a given year. The luxury tax payroll is calculated by summing up the average annual value of all player contracts.
There’s no difference between the cash payroll hit and the luxury tax payroll hit for an evenly distributed contract. But contracts are often frontloaded, and there, you’ll see a difference. As an example, Spencer Strider signed a 6 year, $75 million contract in 2022. But in 2025, he’s only owed $4 million. So while Strider’s luxury tax payroll hit is his $12.5 million AAV, his cash payroll hit is merely $4 million. (And in 2026, when Strider is owed $20 million, his cash payroll hit will spike but his luxury tax payroll hit will, of course, be unchanged.)
The Braves’ precise budget is, of course, a state secret. But the front office has made it clear in the last few years that they don’t calculate their budget based on tax payroll; they care about their outlays in a given year - i.e., their cash payroll plus their tax bill.
So let’s put this all together in the context of the Braves’ 2024 payroll. In 2024, the Braves’ luxury tax figure was publicly estimated at $278.9 million.2 The Braves’ cash payroll was $235 million. Add in the Braves’ expected tax bill of about $15.8 million and you have a total cash outlay of $253.8 million.
That final number is the number that Anthopoulos and his team care about when they’re trying to figure out if they have budget room to make an acquisition. It’s affected by the luxury tax - but only to the extent that the tax bill comes out of the budget.
Where do the Braves stand on 2025 payroll?
Cot’s Contracts has the Braves at a $185.75 million cash payroll and $194.28 million luxury tax payroll entering 2025. That puts the Braves more than $45 million below the first luxury tax threshold, which is $241 million this year. As a third-time payor, the Braves would be taxed at 50 percent in the first threshold, 62 percent in the second threshold, 95 percent in the third threshold, and 110 percent above that. (Remember, it’s a marginal tax system, so they’re only taxed at each rate on the amount of money within the bracket.)
But Cot’s doesn’t account for the Braves picking up the Ozuna, d’Arnaud, and Bummer options, and it also doesn’t account for the Braves likely tendering contracts to Jarred Kelenic and Dylan Lee, both of whom are arb-eligible for the first time. Using MLB Trade Rumors’ arbitration estimates for those players and inserting the option salaries, we get an up-to-date cash payroll of $218.3 million and an up-to-date luxury tax payroll of $228.8 million. So the Braves are a little under $13 million under the first luxury tax threshold. And they’re a little under $17 million below last year’s cash payroll.
What would it take for the Braves to spend more this year than last year? Maybe your instinctual answer is “$17 million” - but that’s actually wrong, because remember, you have to account for the tax bill. Having played around with the numbers, assuming perfectly evenly allocated contracts, the Braves could give out another $25 million in 2025 salaries without surpassing their total cash payout from 2024.
These numbers are official. And, of course, by backloading salaries (as they usually do), they could give out even more than that.
The short answer, though, is that the Braves have at least $25 million to spend before they match their 2024 cash commitments, and then they’ll have how much ever beyond that they’re willing to increase payroll. It would take about $50 million in annual commitments for them to surpass their 2024 luxury tax payroll figure. I think that’s fairly unlikely. (Remember that the 2024 luxury tax payroll was somewhat artificially inflated by the structure of the Jarred Kelenic deal, which involved absorbing a lot of short-term bad money.) But based on Anthopoulos’ comments, Atlanta certainly has money available to acquire a veteran starter to replace Max Fried (or, y’know, bring him back), to add viable lefty reliever, and maybe to do something interesting at shortstop.
(Want to check my work? You can check out my messy, modified version of the Cot’s payroll spreadsheet here.)
All tax figures in this article come courtesy of Cot’s Contracts, a Baseball Prospectus website which serves as the gold standard of publicly available salary databases.
Alex Anthopoulos said after the trade deadline that this number was slightly off; the team’s internal budgeting had the team below the $277 million third luxury tax threshold.