What is the NFL Franchise Tag & What Does It Mean?

With the Super Bowl excitement in the rearview window it’s on to a long, but entertaining, NFL offseason. That aroma in the air means it’s almost NFL Franchise Tag season — a two-week period when teams can use a routine yet oft-misunderstood tool in their arsenal to help build their entire roster.

The NFL franchise tag is a one-year deal a team can essentially force upon a player who is hitting free agency. By applying the franchise tag, a team gives one of its impending free agents a one-year, fully guaranteed contract. The player is then ineligible to become a free agent until the following offseason. Teams use the tag in order to keep a player on their roster for one more year or to give themselves extra time to sign the player in question to a contract extension. Once the tag is applied, a player may sign another deal with the team that applied the tag until August. Then they have to sign the franchise tag and play the following season on their expiring contract.

The idea behind the franchise tag is that it gives teams the power to take one of their free agents off the board entirely, but are forced to pay them top-end money as a result. So NFL teams are not going to use it willy-nilly on players they don’t necessarily want because it’ll cost them a lot of money. Conversely, a player’s free agency is taken away but they are paid quite handsomely for their trouble.

Every NFL team can use the franchise tag. However, they can only use it once. There is no changing their minds. Once they report to the league that they’re applying the franchise tag to an individual, that’s it for this year. Next year the cycle starts anew.

The cost of a franchise tag is position-specific. The franchise tag for a quarterback, for example, is worth much more than it is for an offensive linemen. This is because the franchise tag salary is calculated by taking the average of the top-five salaries at a given position. So the franchise tag salary for a quarterback in the 2024 offseason is $32.1 million, the median salary of the five highest-paid quarterbacks in the league.

Below is a breakdown of the projected franchise tag salaries for the 2024 NFL offseason, per Spotrac.

The franchise tag was introduced in 1993 by the NFL. Football historians will note that 1993 is also the year free agency came to the league. So you can guess what happened here. The players bargained for the right to free agency, ensuring they could end up in the places they wanted and earn more money thanks to free market bidding. The owners acquiesed with the caveat that they could maintain some control over impending free agents. Thus, the franchise tag.

In the decades since, plenty of players have chafed at the concept of the franchise tag. Some have even refused to play on the franchise tag because they feel they deserve long-term security or want to get out of their current situation so badly they’d rather sit out. On the flip side, plenty of teams and players have used the franchise tag as a way to work something out long-term.

Each offseason comes with a fresh batch of potential franchise tag candidates. Here are the top players who could be facing the franchise tag as the 2024 offseason begins.