Veterans report to training camp across the league in the back half of July, with report dates spread from July 17 through July 28, and every summer that stretch doubles as a soft deadline for front offices trying to finish contract business before pads go on. Some of that business looks like Baltimore’s recent scramble, restructuring an existing deal to patch a cap number without actually extending the player. A different, older trick shows up just as often in July cap sheets: the void year, a contract year that exists purely on paper and that the player will never spend a single snap fulfilling.
A void year is a placeholder tacked onto the end of a contract after the seasons a player is actually expected to play. Nobody expects the player to report, get paid a base salary, or suit up during it. Its only job is to give a team more years across which to spread, or prorate, a signing bonus or option bonus, which lowers the cap charge in every year that actually matters.
The mechanism rests on a specific rule in the collective bargaining agreement: a signing bonus can be prorated over a maximum of five years, and contract years where a player has a unilateral right to terminate are excluded from that proration count, which is exactly what a void year is built to exploit. Say a team hands out a $10 million signing bonus on a two-year deal. Prorated over just those two seasons, it costs $5 million against the cap each year. Add three void years and the same bonus prorates over five seasons instead, dropping the annual charge to $2 million and freeing several million dollars of space right now, against a 2026 league-wide cap that the NFL set at $301.2 million.
That relief is not free. When a void year actually arrives and the player has not been re-signed, every dollar of bonus still sitting on the books for the remaining years accelerates into the current league year as dead money, cap space charged against a player no longer on the roster. The same acceleration hits if a team cuts or trades the player before the deal reaches its void years, since any unamortized bonus money comes due immediately rather than staying spread out.
The New York Jets supplied a clean, current example of that bill coming due. Four contracts built with void years, belonging to linebacker Quincy Williams, guard John Simpson, safety Andre Cisco and quarterback Tyrod Taylor, hit their void dates in February 2026 without extensions, adding a combined $13.375 million in dead cap to New York’s books, according to Spotrac’s salary cap data. None of those four players took a snap for the Jets in 2026, yet all four still counted against the cap.
No franchise leaned on the tactic harder or longer than the Saints. New Orleans signed cornerback Marshon Lattimore to a $97 million extension in 2021, then restructured the deal three straight offseasons, converting salary into bonus money and pushing the charges further into contract years he might never play. When the Saints eventually traded him to Washington, Lattimore still cost New Orleans $31.7 million in dead cap space the following season, money owed to a player wearing another team’s uniform. The habit compounded across the roster: New Orleans carried roughly $108 million in dead money against its cap in 2025, nearly 40 percent of that year’s budget, before the front office finally began signing new deals without void years attached this offseason.
The appeal for a team is obvious in the moment. Void years buy immediate cap room to keep a competitive roster together, sign free agents, or fund an extension elsewhere, and if the player gets a new deal before the void years hit, the dead money problem never materializes at all. The risk is just as obvious in hindsight. A front office that keeps kicking bonus money down the road eventually has to pay for years when nobody is on the roster to show for it, and stacking enough of those bills at once, the way New Orleans did, can strangle a roster’s flexibility for years. Teams facing tighter markets at premium positions, including the kind of pass rusher spending reshaping this offseason, will keep reaching for void years anyway, because a cap problem due next February always looks smaller than a roster problem due this week.
