With an average annual salary of $52.7 million over this year and the next three, Mahomes is set to place only behind Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, at least until the NFL’s next megadeal comes to pass. Burrow had raised the bar for quarterbacks and all other players earlier this month when he agreed to a five-year contract extension worth $275 million, for an average annual value of $55 million.
When Mahomes signed his deal in 2020, it made him the NFL’s highest-paid player, but since then the market has been reset several times. Following massive deals given earlier this year to the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jalen Hurts and the Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson, and before this year to the likes of Kyler Murray (Arizona Cardinals) and Deshaun Watson (Cleveland Browns), Mahomes had fallen to eighth on the highest-paid list, well behind Burrow. However, the Chiefs quarterback proved again in February that he takes a back seat to no one in terms of on-field value, when he led his squad to a Super Bowl win that gave Kansas City its second NFL championship with him under center.
Clark Hunt, the Chiefs’ chairman and CEO, said in April that “coming up with a dollar value for what Mahomes means to K.C. would be a challenging endeavor.”
“I don’t know that there’s really a way to quantify it financially,” Hunt added at the time. “And no matter what he makes over his career, I’m sure one way or another, he’ll be underpaid.”
A spokesperson for the Chiefs did not respond immediately Monday to a request for confirmation on Mahomes’s contract and for additional comment.
The restructured deal includes escalator clauses that could increase Mahomes’s payout over the next four years to $218.1 million, NFL Network reported. Following the 2026 season, at which point Mahomes would again be set to tumble down the ranks of the NFL’s highest-paid players, he and the Chiefs are expected to revisit his contract. As it stands now, his 10-year pact still has by far the largest overall monetary value of any in the league, with Burrow’s a distant second.
Kansas City’s reported agreement with Mahomes comes a week after the team ended a lengthy holdout by defensive tackle Chris Jones with a revised one-year deal.
