Someone told you 15%. Someone else said 30%. Both of them were guessing.

The honest answer to "what percentage should I set aside" is that nobody can give you one without knowing things about you they haven't asked. That's not us being cagey. It's the actual state of the question.

Last updated: August 21, 2026.

This happens constantly. An athlete sets aside 15% because that's what someone told them. Then someone else — the NIL office, a teammate, a wallet app — says 30%. Nobody explains the gap. The athlete now has two numbers, no way to choose, and a growing suspicion that whichever one they picked is the wrong one.

Here's why both were always going to be approximate.

Five things, at least:

Your total for the year, not the deal. Tax brackets are progressive. The same $5,000 deal is taxed differently depending on whether it's your only income or your eighth deal. A percentage quoted per-deal can't know that.

Whether self-employment tax applies. If you're a contractor, that's another 15.3% on top of income tax — 12.4% Social Security, 2.9% Medicare, starting at $400 of net earnings. Whether someone's "30%" included this or not is usually the entire difference between the two numbers you were given.

Your state. Most states tax NIL income. Arkansas has enacted an exemption. Proposals in several other states have failed, a few are pending, and some are being challenged in court. Your state matters and it may not be settled.

Where the work happened. The IRS notes athletes should track where services are performed, because they may owe tax in a state they traveled to for commercial work.

Your expenses. Legitimate business costs reduce taxable contractor income. Two athletes with identical deals and different records land in different places.

A single percentage collapses all five of those into one guess. It might be close. You have no way to know whether it is.

Because of the week you're actually having.

The NCAA's own time-commitment research — 20,877 athletes across 493 schools, collected December 2024 through June 2025 — puts the in-season medians here:

That's roughly 67 to 75 hours a week before anything else. Before NIL obligations — the content, the agent texts, the appearances. Before family. Before sleep.

The FBS football number is up 5.5 hours since 2019, the largest increase in the study.

It functionally equates to two full-time jobs. And the standard advice offered to someone in that position is to build a spreadsheet, set calendar reminders for four quarterly dates, and reconcile receipts monthly.

That advice isn't wrong. It's just written for someone with a different week.

Source: NCAA GOALS, Current Findings on Student-Athlete Time Commitments.

Give you a percentage.

We're a company that would sell more subscriptions by writing "set aside 30%" in bold at the top of this page, and we're not doing it, for a straightforward reason: our own Terms say we provide tracking, not advice, and we're not tax professionals. A number pulled off a blog by someone who's never seen your situation isn't an answer. It's the same guess you already had, with better formatting.

There's also a version of this that gets someone hurt. An athlete who oversaves on a blog's say-so has money sitting idle they needed. An athlete who undersaves has an April they can't cover. We'd rather show you your own number than hand you somebody's average.

Your own position, updated as you go.

You log a deal in Veloro — the in-app assistant walks you through it — and in under two minutes you see what that specific deal leaves you and where you stand for the year across every source: rev share, third-party, collective, stipend. Not a rule of thumb. Your deals.

It shows you a CPA-approved estimate; you decide what to move. The app calls the figure "Tax Suggested," never "Tax Owed," because your real liability could land above or below it and we're not going to imply otherwise.

Two minutes per deal. Not a course, not a weekly check-in, not a system to maintain. That constraint isn't a feature we happened to hit — it's the design requirement, because a product that costs an hour a week is a product athletes correctly abandon.

Whether you need to make quarterly estimated payments is a real question with an actual IRS rule behind it — generally, if you expect to owe $1,000 or more after withholding and credits, and your withholding falls short of the safe harbor. The dates are April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15.

Whether you meet that test is a conversation for a tax professional. What we can do is make sure you walk into it with the year written down, so the meeting is about decisions instead of archaeology.

Athletes in our Boise State pilot described what came out the other side of that, and it wasn't relief about taxes:

The number isn't the point. Knowing it is what lets you spend the rest without wondering.

Last updated: August 21, 2026.