Do I pay taxes on NIL money?

Yes. All of it. And nothing about the way the money arrives changes that.

That's the short version, and if it's all you came for, you can stop reading. The rest of this is about the three specific places athletes get caught, because in our experience it's never the headline that gets people — it's the detail underneath it.

Last updated: August 21, 2026.

There's a page on irs.gov called "Name, image and likeness income." It was updated on August 14, 2026. It exists because enough athletes were confused that the IRS built a page about it.

The sentence that does the most work:

"You must report all NIL income that you receive even if the payer does not issue you a Form 1099 or Form W-2."

Read that twice. The obligation doesn't come from the form. The form is a payer telling the government what they paid you. Your responsibility exists whether or not that paperwork ever shows up.

The IRS defines NIL income as "any monetary or financial gain, in cash, property, or services" — endorsements, sponsorships, social posts, autographs, appearances, and revenue-sharing payments from your school.

"Property, or services."

The free gear counts. The truck you're driving for the season counts. The meals, the flights, the hotel comped by a brand for an appearance — if you got it because of your name, it has a value, and that value is income.

Nobody sends you a form for a truck. You still had income.

This is the one athletes find hardest to believe, and it's the one that produces the biggest surprises, because product deals tend to be the largest by dollar value and the least likely to be written down anywhere.

Most athletes now have income landing from more than one direction. Revenue sharing from the school. Third-party deals from brands. Collective money. Maybe a stipend.

Each payer knows what they paid you. None of them knows the total. And the total is what the tax is calculated on — not each deal in isolation.

That's the mechanism behind the thing athletes describe over and over: they weren't careless with any individual check. They just never had all the checks in one place at the same time. A quarterback in our Boise State pilot put it this way:

He has an accountant. He has an LLC. He makes quarterly payments. And the outside deals were still the gap.

If you're paid as an independent contractor, you owe self-employment tax — 12.4% for Social Security plus 2.9% for Medicare, 15.3% total — and that's on top of income tax, not instead of it.

You file for it once your net self-employment earnings reach $400.

Most athletes doing rough math in their head are thinking about income tax only. Self-employment tax is the line that turns a number that felt manageable into one that doesn't, and it's the single most common thing we see missing from an athlete's estimate.

Source: IRS, Self-employment tax, updated June 27, 2026.

Tell you your percentage.

We could write "set aside 30%" and this post would perform better. But the honest answer is that the right number depends on your total for the year, your state, your filing status, and your expenses — and an athlete who sets aside a number they got from a blog is still guessing, just with more confidence.

What we'd rather do is make the total visible. In Veloro you log a deal, and in under two minutes you see what that specific deal leaves you and where you stand for the year across every source. The calculations are CPA-approved. The app calls the number "Tax Suggested" and not "Tax Owed" — because it's an estimate you plan against, and your actual liability could land above or below it.

Then you take that to whoever files for you. You're not replacing them. You're showing up to that meeting with a year of records instead of a year of memory.

Not signing up for anything. Just this: write down every deal you've done this year, including the ones that paid in product, including the small ones, including the ones nobody sent you a form for.

Most athletes have never seen that list in one place. Seeing it is the whole thing.

Last updated: August 21, 2026.