Any player with four or more accrued seasons and an expired contract; free to negotiate and sign with any team.<\/p>\n
A player with three accrued seasons and an expired contract. RFAs are free to negotiate and sign with any team, but their original team can offer them one of various qualifying offers (\u201ctenders\u201d) that come with the Right of First Refusal and\/or draft-pick compensation. If the tender is withdrawn by a team, the RFA becomes an unrestricted free agent. Teams must submit these tenders before the start of the 2026 League Year (4 p.m. ET on March 11). These amounts change annually but the following numbers are for the 2026 season (players can choose either (a) or (b) regardless of which is greater in the applicable tenders below).<\/p>\n
Any player with fewer than three accrued seasons and an expired contract. If his original team offers him a one-year contract at the league minimum (based on his credited seasons), the player cannot negotiate with other teams.<\/p>\n
Used to determine a player\u2019s free agency status (unrestricted, restricted, exclusive rights). In order to accrue a season, a player must have been on (or should have been on) full-play status for at least six regular-season games in a given season. A player under contract must report to his team\u2019s training camp on his mandatory reporting date to earn an accrued season. If player holds out his services for a \u201cmaterial period of time,\u201d he is also at risk of not accruing a season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Any player with four or more accrued seasons and an expired contract; free to negotiate and sign with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[49,48,206463,514,82],"class_list":["post-524429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-denver-broncos-free-agency","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}