What it actually costs to win a player off waivers. Measured from 80,449 real bids in 512 public FAAB league-seasons (10-team, 12-team, 14-team leagues, 2024 and 2025), with every losing bid included. Sleeper and ESPN show you the winning bid. The losing bids are the market. Nobody else publishes them.
Public Sleeper leagues: 512 complete league-seasons from 2024 and 2025, all 10-team, 12-team, 14-team formats with FAAB waivers. We store a reduced capture of each league: bids, outcomes, budgets, and draft slots. No names, no team names, no user accounts. Beta users' leagues are not in this report and never will be; that promise is in our privacy policy.
Those bids group into 58,769 separate player-week auctions. 13,931 of them were contested, meaning two or more managers bid on the same player in the same week. Contested auctions are where prices are real, so most of this page is built on them.
Every number below has a minimum sample size. A grey cell means the sample is under that minimum. We show it anyway, with its n, instead of hiding it. How the FAABFAX bid model uses this data is written up in plain English on the demo page.
Median winning bid on contested claims, as a share of the league budget, by position and time of season. Hover any cell for the full percentile spread. The most expensive market of the season: QB in weeks 2-7, where the median contested win costs 12% of budget and the top tenth of wins run 55% or more.
| W1 | W2-7 | W8-12 | W13-17 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RB | 5.0%p90 29% · n=1324 | 10%p90 37% · n=1380 | 5.5%p90 28% · n=541 | 10%p90 57% · n=490 |
| WR | 4.0%p90 25% · n=1614 | 7.0%p90 28% · n=1549 | 4.2%p90 22% · n=773 | 5.0%p90 28% · n=253 |
| QB | 4.0%p90 32% · n=357 | 12%p90 55% · n=650 | 9.9%p90 45% · n=400 | 5.0%p90 50% · n=201 |
| TE | 4.7%p90 34% · n=604 | 5.0%p90 25% · n=490 | 4.7%p90 30% · n=296 | 3.0%p90 37% · n=155 |
Gate: 30 contested wins per cell. Grey cells are below it and carry their n. Uncontested $0 pickups are excluded here; they get their own section below.
Only a losing-bid ledger can measure this: the gap between the winning bid and the best losing bid. Across 12,303 contested claims, the median winner paid 2.2% of budget more than needed to win. And 25% of contested claims tied, where the dollars decided nothing and waiver priority picked the winner.
| W1 | W2-7 | W8-12 | W13-17 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RB | 1.8%n=1324 | 4.8%n=1380 | 3.0%n=541 | 4.8%n=490 |
| WR | 1.0%n=1614 | 3.5%n=1549 | 2.0%n=773 | 3.0%n=253 |
| QB | 2.0%n=357 | 5.1%n=650 | 5.0%n=400 | 2.0%n=201 |
| TE | 1.0%n=604 | 2.0%n=490 | 2.4%n=296 | 1.0%n=155 |
Gate: 20 contested claims per cell. Claims with one winner and at least one loser only. In 8.3% of contested claims a losing bid was above the winner; those are same-week re-auctions or short budgets, and they stay in the math (details in the notes at the bottom).
Week 1 carries 8x the bid volume of a typical week: 52 bids per league against a mid-season norm of about 6. Competition peaks right after: week 2 is the most contested market of the season at 28%, and by week 17 it cools to 11%.
Every winning claim we can match to NFL weekly stats, scored by what the player did for the rest of that season. The uncomfortable result: paying more buys you very little certainty. A claim of up to 1% of budget turned into a starter or better 10% of the time; bids of 35%+ of budget managed 14%. True league winners are rare at every price: between 3.0% and 4.3% of wins, in every tier.
| bid size share of budget | wins scored | starter or better | league winner | bust |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| up to 1% | 10,301 | 10% | 3.0% | not defined below 15% |
| 1-5% | 3,537 | 14% | 3.6% | not defined below 15% |
| 5-10% | 1,948 | 16% | 4.3% | not defined below 15% |
| 10-20% | 1,728 | 15% | 3.6% | not defined below 15% |
| 20-35% | 899 | 17% | 3.0% | 62% |
| 35%+ | 577 | 14% | 4.2% | 60% |
Gate: 50 scored wins per tier. Covers 18,990 of 52,925 winning claims (36%), the ones that match an NFL stats identity; the rest are mostly deep stashes and defenses with no stat line to score. "Bust" requires a bid of at least 15% of budget by definition (losing $2 is not a bust), so it reads "not defined" below that line. Among bids of 35%+ of budget, 60% were busts.
Across the whole season, 56% of winning claims cost $1 or less. In week 1 it is 63%, and by week 17 it reaches 70%. The blind auction everyone sweats over decides a minority of pickups; knowing which claims will actually cost money is most of the game.
On contested claims only: how often each bid size won. A $0 bid won 31% of the time. A bid of 35%+ of budget won 72%. Note what the curve does not do: it never reaches certainty, and it climbs slowly through the middle. Doubling a mid-size bid buys fewer percentage points than most managers think.
Gate: 100 contested bids per band. Uncontested claims are excluded; they win at any price and would flatten this curve into a lie.
Cumulative share of FAAB budget spent, across 5,708 roster-seasons. The median manager finishes week 17 having spent 40% of the budget. A quarter of managers finish under 3.0%. Unspent FAAB in December bought nothing all season; the losing bids above tell you what it could have bought.
These limits matter, so they are on the page instead of in a drawer:
1. The corpus is Sleeper leagues, 2024 and 2025 only. ESPN and Yahoo markets may bid differently, and older seasons are not here.
2. Bids are recorded by week, not by waiver run. When a player is dropped and won again inside one week, those merge into one auction. That is why 8.3% of contested claims show a losing bid above the winner; excluding them would flatter the overpay number, so they stay in.
3. Outcome scoring (section 4) covers the 36% of winning claims that match an NFL stats identity. Kickers, defenses, and players with no stat line cannot be scored and are not silently counted as anything.
4. Percentages of budget pool leagues with $20 to $10000 budgets on a common scale. The $1 section uses nominal dollars and says so.
5. This page describes markets, not your league. The whole point of FAABFAX is that your league's own ledger prices players differently than any average. These are the priors; your league is the posterior.