After introducing a new playoff salary cap as part of its recent extension to the collective bargaining agreement with the NHL Players’ Association, the NHL is going to bring that new rule into effect immediately, according to league sources.
That means the 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs will be played with teams limited to icing a 20-man roster that is cap-compliant for each game and includes changes to how the long-term injury exception will be applied in cap accounting before the playoffs.
The changes are being introduced before the existing CBA expires on Sept. 15, 2026.
The NHL and NHLPA have agreed to a rolling implementation of the new rules included in the four-year CBA extension they signed in late June.
In addition to the playoff salary cap, other immediate changes include: no deferred compensation in contracts and no double salary retention in trades; a new mandate that prevents teams from implementing a player dress code; and the removal of a rule preventing players from endorsing wine and spirits.
Other agreed-upon changes to player contracting issues, including reducing the maximum length of contracts to seven years for a player re-signing and six years for a player signing with a new club, won’t take effect until Sept. 16, 2026, meaning that Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel, Kirill Kaprizov and everyone else with one year remaining on an existing contract are still eligible to sign eight-year extensions in the meantime.
However, the introduction of a playoff salary cap and changes to the rules around cap accounting will likely have an immediate impact on how teams do business this season.
What this means for the cap
The main impact of adding a postseason salary cap will be an end to teams being able to stash players on long-term injured reserve and use that additional cap space to add more talent before the playoffs.
The Chicago Blackhawks (2015), Tampa Bay Lightning (2021), Vegas Golden Knights (2023) and Florida Panthers (2025) are all examples of teams that employed LTIR to remove injured star players from the cap temporarily, only to have them return for the postseason. All four won the Stanley Cup that season.
Having a salary cap in the playoffs will also impact the way teams behave during the season in other ways. Previously, NHL teams were able to accrue extra cap space by remaining under the cap for stretches of the season. They could then acquire players midseason and only account for the portion of their salary that remained during the year (i.e., roughly one-quarter of their salary at the trade deadline).
Under the new playoff salary cap, however, players’ full-season salaries will be used to calculate if a team is cap compliant in the postseason, even if players were only on a team’s books for a small portion of the season.
In other words, acquiring a $6.1 million player like Brad Marchand at the deadline, as the Panthers did last season, will require having much more cap room than it did previously in order to allow for the added player to play in the postseason. This change makes accruing cap space a far less effective tool than it has been in the past, as the accrued space doesn’t benefit a team in the playoffs.
The only way to reduce a player’s cap hit in a trade will now be using salary retention, although even that mechanism has been limited in the new CBA. The new rules will prevent the majority of double retention trades — where players had salary retained by a third-party team in deals — which will also make freeing up cap space before the deadline more complicated.
Both of these changes will likely make it more difficult for GMs to make trades. The fact that the cap has risen considerably to $95.5 million for 2025-26, however, does mean more teams have flexibility than during the league’s pandemic-induced flat-cap era of the past six seasons. — James Mirtle, senior NHL writer
(Photo of Marty Walsh and Gary Bettman: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)