If you ever wondered how your salary compared to that of a professional women’s hockey player, now you can check. The PWHLPA made every player’s base salary public for the first time in the league’s three-year history.
The records became available without fanfare, appearing on the PWHLPA’s website Tuesday morning after a player vote.
While the move was intended to promote transparency, many aspects of players’ paychecks remain hidden. The PWHLPA’s Salary Guide only discloses base salaries, with bonuses and other compensation information still not publicly available. Additionally, the guide is accurate as of April 12 and will only be updated annually.
The newly accessible records revealed the floor and ceiling of PWHL salaries: the lowest being $37,131.50 and the highest $126,090. To the shock of many women’s hockey fans, Montreal captain Marie-Phillip Poulin, often considered the greatest women’s player of all time, was only the fifth-highest paid player (making $110,216), with Ottawa Charge forward Emily Clark coming in as the highest paid.
Notably, Clark’s $126,090 salary is just 14.8% of the NHL’s minimum salary for the 2026-27 season.
Top 10 highest-paid PWHL players during the 2025–2026 Season
| Rank | Player | Team | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emily Clark | Ottawa Charge | $126,090 |
| 2 | Sarah Fillier | New York Sirens | $125,000 |
| 3 | Brianne Jenner | Ottawa Charge | $122,003 |
| 4 | Abby Roque | Montreal Victoire | $116,699 |
| 5 | Marie-Philip Poulin | Montreal Victoire | $110,216 |
| 6 | Renata Fast | Toronto Sceptres | $106,090 |
| 7 | Hilary Knight | Seattle Torrent | $106,090 |
| 8 | Gabrielle Hughes | Ottawa Charge | $105,000 |
| 9 | Megan Keller | Boston Fleet | $105,000 |
| 10 | Kendall Coyne Schofield | Minnesota Frost | $100,785.50 |
Just 10 players (three of which are on the Charge) hit a six-figure salary mark, with the remaining 184 contracted players falling under. 16 players earn the league minimum of $37,131.50 (and a handful only make 50 cents more at $37,132), and nearly two-thirds of the league make less than $60,000.
Under the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, every player also received a $1,700 housing stipend monthly for the 2025-26 season. That stipend increases by $100 every season. Additionally, players receive comprehensive insurance and are paid maternity leave.
Unlike the NHL and other professional sports leagues, there is no maximum salary or salary cap in the PWHL’s current CBA. Instead, teams must hit an average base salary of $58,349.50 this past season. The agreement allows for discrepancies up to 10 percent to account for trades and new signings. Every season, the average increases by 3 percent. The current CBA remains in effect until 2031, largely preventing drastic across-the-board salary increases for players.
Although the guide is not fully comprehensive of a player’s total compensation, it makes player salaries much more easily accessible than the NHL. The NHL, which releases the contract length and salary of every signing through team press releases, does not organize that information on a website and does not provide any way to access it directly. Instead, fans have taken the matter into their own hands, and fan-run sites are the only way to access complete lists such as PuckPedia.
One such fan-run site was Capgeek, which was purchased by the Washington Capitals in 2024 for internal use.
Gary Bettman directly addressed this topic in 2015, and hasn’t seemed to change his tune much since. He claimed that salary information was “not something that seems to be driving fan interest.”
“GM’s have access to information. The tools that we have for internal business use are different, but everything we do internally for business purposes doesn’t necessarily need to be made public and be the object of discussion.”
The PWHL holds different opinions and attitudes on salary transparency than the NHL. PWHLPA executive director Malaika Underwood explained the sentiments behind the move via CBC, stating “This decision reflects our belief that greater salary transparency gives players clearer information and stronger context in individual negotiations, while also supporting a more transparent and credible marketplace for the league overall.
“Given that players had previously approved disclosure among players and agents, and that minimum and average salary figures are already public in the [collective bargaining agreement], this is a natural next step,” she said.
