The NHL Just Made Injuries Expensive Again: How LTIR Works Under the New CBA
NHL LTIR rules explained: Starting 2026-27, clubs expecting injured players back receive about $3.82 million in cap relief, regardless of earnings.
Quick answers
How much LTIR relief can an NHL team receive in 2026-27?
A club expecting an injured player to return receives relief capped at the previous season's league-average salary, about $3.82 million. Full cap-hit relief is available only if the player is declared out for the entire regular season and playoffs.
How does the NHL's playoff salary-cap rule work?
Before each playoff game, a team submits a lineup of 18 skaters and two goaltenders, and that dressed group must fit under the salary cap. The total playoff roster may exceed the cap, but all of those players cannot dress together.
For most of the last decade, a serious injury to a highly paid NHL player carried a strange consolation prize. It gave his team money to spend. Long-term injured reserve let a club exceed the upper limit by roughly the injured player’s cap hit, and the smartest front offices turned that into a deadline shopping budget. Then the playoffs arrived, the cap stopped applying, the injured star walked back into Game 1, and the team iced a roster it could never have dressed in November.
That era is over, and it ended in two separate steps.
Step one: the playoff cap
The first change was fast-tracked ahead of the rest of the new CBA and applied to the 2026 postseason. Teams now submit a lineup before each playoff game, 18 skaters and two goaltenders, due by 3 p.m. local time or five hours before puck drop. That dressed group has to be cap-compliant on its own.
The distinction matters and it is frequently mangled. As it was explained when the change was expedited, you can still have $130 million in salaries on your total roster once the playoffs start; it is the 18 players and two goalies on the ice who must fit under the number. Nobody is forced to trade anyone. They just cannot all play on the same night.
The practices this was aimed at were not hypothetical. Nikita Kucherov, Mark Stone and Matthew Tkachuk had all been out of a lineup for extended stretches and back in it for Game 1 of a first round, and the pattern had become conspicuous enough that the league stopped defending it.
Step two: capped relief, starting now
The second change takes effect with the 2026-27 season and is the one that reshapes how teams plan around injuries.
A club placing a player on LTIR who is expected back at any point in the season or playoffs no longer receives relief equal to his cap hit. Relief is capped at the previous season’s league average salary, roughly $3.82 million, regardless of whether the injured player earns four million or twelve. The full relief still exists, but only on one condition: the club must declare the player out for the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs both. Making that declaration means giving up his return entirely. There is a narrow route to exceeding the cap on relief with the approval of both the NHL and the NHLPA, and that is it.
The eligibility threshold itself is unchanged. A player must be expected to miss at least 24 days and 10 regular-season games to go on LTIR at all.
What that does to a real roster
Run it against this summer’s actual cases. The cap sits at $104 million for 2026-27, up $8.5 million, with a floor of $76.9 million and a new maximum individual salary of $20.8 million. A team carrying a player who will miss the first six weeks after offseason surgery, and who is plainly coming back, gets $3.82 million of room and not a dollar more.
For a mid-salary forward that is close to full relief and barely registers. For a genuine star it is a fraction of the hit, and the club absorbs the difference. Injuries to expensive players are now expensive to the team, which is exactly what the rule intends.
Why bettors should care
Two practical consequences. First, October rosters will be thinner than they used to be, because clubs can no longer bank on a deadline splurge financed by an injured contract. Fewer teams will paper over an absence with a rental.
Second, and more usefully, the incentive to be vague about a timeline has flipped. Declaring a player out for the year now buys real cap room but forfeits him completely, so the declaration itself becomes a signal. When a club makes that call, it is telling you something it would previously have kept to itself.
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