The salary cap is the ceiling on what your roster can cost. Every contract on your team counts against it, and the space left over, your cap space. Is what you have to sign free agents, absorb salary in trades, and bid on waivers. Managing that space is the game inside the game.
One budget, not two
Unlike most fantasy platforms, Capr has no separate FAAB budget. Your cap is your bidding budget: when you bid on a free agent, the bid amount becomes the player's contract salary and lands on your cap. This is why cap discipline matters all season. The team hoarding cap space in October is the team that wins the waiver war in November.
It's a hard cap
The cap is enforced to the dollar. There's no soft cap, no luxury tax, no going one dollar over. Capr blocks any move that would put you above the cap before it happens.
Holds: cap you have committed but not yet spent
Your cap page counts three things that are not contracts yet, because each one is money you have already promised. Every rookie pick you own holds cap at the midpoint salary of its round until the pick is made. A free agent you have won but not yet signed holds his winning bid. And any live auction lot you are currently leading holds your proxy maximum on it, not the visible price, because a rival can push you to that number without you lifting a finger. Holds release on their own: a pick signs, a win becomes a contract, a lot closes.
Cap size and floor
Core cap settings and their defaults
- Salary cap
- Default 500Range 200–10,000
- Total cap per team. Also your bidding budget for waivers and auctions.
- Cap floor
- Default OffRange —
- Optional minimum percentage of the cap each team must spend, keeps rebuilders from fielding bare rosters.
- Cap rollover
- Default OffRange Up to 15% of cap by default
- When on, unspent cap carries into next season, up to the configured maximum.
- In-season floor lock
- Default OffRange —
- When on, a move that would drop you under the floor is refused there and then. Off means the floor is trued up once a year at rollover.
- Over-cap lineup lock
- Default OffRange —
- When on, an over-cap team cannot set a lineup at all until it is compliant.
Bigger caps (1,000+) give you finer-grained salaries and more room for creative contracts; smaller caps keep numbers short and readable. Both play the same. Pick the scale your league likes to talk in.
Two kinds of escalation
Each new season, two separate escalators fire, and the difference between them is the engine of long-term strategy. Cap escalation (default 10%) grows the league-wide cap ceiling, like the real NFL cap rising each year. Contract escalation (default 12%) raises every existing contract's salary year over year.
Because contracts grow slightly faster than the cap by default, long deals get more expensive in real terms as they age: a contract that looked cheap in year one has to keep earning its keep in year three. That's deliberate: it stops teams from locking up a roster forever and forgetting about it.