The league’s salary cap is set to $84.0 millions. Since Puck Drop does not support salary retention at the moment, the cap has been increased from the current NHL cap of $81.5 million to accommodate teams that rely on salary retention to fit under the cap.

Cap Hit, Buried Salary

Team’s cap hit is the sum of salaries of all players who have an active contract with the team. When a player is assigned to the major team, their entire salary counts towards the cap. When a player is assigned to the minors, a fixed value of $1.050 million is subtracted from the player’s salary (so called buried salary) and the resulting amount (if positive) counts towards the cap.

The table below shows a couple of examples of the difference in players’ cap hit depending on whether the player is assigned to a major or minor team:

Currently there are no signing or performance bonuses, variable salaries per season or pro-rated cap hits. Player’s cap hit is simply their contract salary.

Injured Reserve Salary Relief

When a player suffers a major injury and cannot participate in games (regardless of the duration of the injury), their salary no longer counts towards the team’s cap hit. While this salary cap relief can be used to call-up a player from the minors, it does not apply to trading. For the purposes of trading, the injured player’s salary still counts towards the team’s salary cap. This is to make sure the team is not allowed to make a trade which would put them over the allowed salary cap once the injured player becomes healthy.

Teams With Negative Cap Space

Since the salary of injured players counts towards the team’s salary cap for the purposes of trading, some teams may appear to be over the allowed salary cap during the season when viewing the trade screen.