Both player and team — as long the player is a reliably great performer — benefit from such maneuvers, and Purdy’s agent, Kyle Strongin, and the 49ers’ negotiators, Paraag Marathe and Brian Hampton, recognized as much. The 49ers and Purdy, who’s been the NFL’s top-rated passer since joining the league in 2022, aimed to strike a similar win-win deal.
The sheer size of the quarterback contract market, combined with the 49ers’ massive spending list, made this negotiation uniquely challenging. But thankfully for the 49ers, Purdy came to play ball.
“We wanted to make sure we were working together with the organization to set everyone up for success,” Purdy said Wednesday. “It wasn’t about me just getting as much money as I could. … I want to get what I deserve, but also surround myself with guys around me and not take every penny for myself.”
That spirit of compromise yielded a contract that looks like this.
PRTD SB is the prorated signing bonus, shaded in blue. OPT BON 1, 2 and 3 are Purdy’s three prorated option bonuses, which are shaded in green, gold and teal, respectively. The fully guaranteed portions of Purdy’s base salary are shaded in dark red, while the partially guaranteed portion (which comes in 2027) is shaded in light red.
We’ll parse this through five primary points.
The prorations are aggressive, but…
The 49ers actually left meat on the bone for more potential cap adjustments, starting as soon as 2026. This is different than Kittle’s contract, in which the 49ers completely maxed out prorations from the jump — the tight end’s base salary is the veteran league minimum in all of the next five seasons. Purdy’s base (also known as Paragraph 5) salary is only at the minimum in 2025 before climbing in each subsequent season.
That means the 49ers maintain the optionality to reduce Purdy’s cap hits as soon as next season. They’d simply convert nearly all of the $8.3 million 2026 base into a prorated bonus. Cap size will continue to increase in proportion to NFL revenue, which is projected to continue skyrocketing. The cap has grown more than 24% over just the past two seasons, a trend that’s encouraged teams like the 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles to stack unprecedented amounts of future cap hits into void years.
The 49ers did that again with Purdy’s contract, and they’ll very likely be pushing even more money from it into the future. Remember: Given a rising limit, cap space now is more valuable than cap space later, and moving money forward is penalty-free. It’s tantamount to a zero-interest loan against the cap.
Purdy’s deal gives the 49ers room to shuffle cap money as they see fit in future years. The team will, by design, carry over most of its $40 million of cap space into 2026 (although it does maintain optionality on the free-agent and trade markets). This carryover is a fundamental technique of surfing that rising cap wave.
Purdy’s biggest concession came early
Even when the 49ers completely maximize proration maneuvers, they can only reduce cap hits by a finite amount. The 49ers needed Purdy’s cooperation to keep his 2025 cap hit at that extraordinarily low $9.1 million mark.
Consider this: Purdy’s camp deemed it important to score a contract that edged out the deal that the Detroit Lions struck with their QB Jared Goff, and they succeeded in doing that. Over the next four years, Purdy is in line to make $165.05 million — just ahead of Goff’s $160 million over his first four years.
But the path to $165 million is markedly different for Goff and Purdy. Whereas Goff scored a $73 million signing bonus, the largest in NFL history, Purdy’s $40 million signing bonus is considerably smaller.
Prorated over five years, a signing bonus of Goff’s size would contribute about $15 million to an annual cap hit. Purdy, because he was willing to take less money at signing, registers this formula instead:
$1.1 million base salary + (
$40 million signing bonus divided by 5 years) = $9.1 million 2025 cap charge.
Percentage of cash flow in first year for recent QB mega deals
- Jordan Love: 30.7%
- Joe Burrow: 27.7%
- Goff: 24.5%
- Dak Prescott: 21.8%
- Justin Herbert: 15.2%
- Purdy: 13.5%
- Tua Tagovailoa: 9.4%
- Jalen Hurts: 7.8%
By Year 3 of his extension, the percentage of contract cash paid to Purdy (62.3%) is set to exceed the average of other recent five-year mega deals (62%). So he’s in line to be fairly compensated. But there’s a willingness to wait here that helps the 49ers’ proration plan.
This sensibility permeates the entire contract and explains how the 49ers and Purdy were able reach an agreement so early — on May 16.
Purdy could’ve certainly held out for a spicier per-year amount, but he deemed $53 million, cap flexibility for his team, and a distraction-free offseason to be worth more than a hollow climb up the APY list. And the 49ers could’ve striven to limit the scope of guarantees to two years (more on that below), but they effectively embraced much more than that through the deal’s $176 million in rolling guarantees — a clear sign of their belief and trust in Purdy.
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