MLB salaries, 1985-2016
Historical per-player salary rows for the 1985 through 2016 seasons come from the SABR / Sean Lahman baseball database (2025 edition, CRAN Lahman_14.0-0, Salaries table), used under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Those records end with the 2016 season; the database never published a later Salaries table.
| Role | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dataset | SABR/Lahman 2025 database (CRAN Lahman_14.0-0), Salaries table |
| Seasons covered | 1985-2016 (real salary rows only; the Lahman Salaries table was last updated for 2016) |
| Salary rows used | 26428 |
| License | CC BY-SA 3.0 (attribution + share-alike) |
MLB payrolls, 2017 to the current season
Team payrolls for the 2017 season onward come from the per-player payroll tables published by Spotrac (team pages of the form spotrac.com/mlb/<team>/payroll/_/year/<season>, last accessed 2026-10-22). Each team-season page publishes player-by-player allocations across the active roster, injured list, dead money, retained salary, exempt and suspended lists, and buried minor-league salaries, plus the club’s own headline total. We mirror that headline total exactly and cross-check it against our row-level sums; per-page crawl delays follow the site’s robots policy. A refresh for a new season is one command, so this archive keeps pace with the league.
| Role | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dataset | Spotrac team payroll tables |
| Seasons covered | 2017-2026 (per-player payroll allocations; team totals equal the source pages' published totals) |
| Access date | 2026-10-22 |
| Player rows used | 19158 |
| Team-seasons | 300 |
Honesty note: on 10 of 300 team-seasons our row-level sums differ from the source’s published total by a small residual (the source applies internal adjustments to some suspended and dead-money rows, and a few pages’ own category rows do not sum to their own headline). We publish the source’s headline number and record every residual in the build artifacts rather than smoothing it away.
How the payroll aggregates are computed
All payroll figures are nominal US dollars with no inflation adjustment; choosing a deflator is an editorial call we leave to the reader. The 1985-2016 series sums roster salary records, while the 2017-onward series counts a club’s full payroll allocation (injured-list, dead, retained and buried minor-league money included), so totals step up slightly across the era boundary. League and franchise pages, averages, medians and contract leaderboards are computed from these records by our build pipeline and are regenerated from source on every refresh.
Other site data
Player ratings and card metrics are derived from Baseball Savant Statcast data (Major League Baseball). Transaction archives are built from the MLB Stats API. Historical play-by-play research used in our sim engine was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet; interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org. Historical statistics are also derived in part from the Lahman Baseball Database, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.