College Coach Pay Capped at 10x Tuition: New Bill Ties Athletic Salaries to Student Aid Rules

If you’ve ever looked at a college football coach’s $10 million salary—often guaranteed even if they get fired—and wondered how that cash drain affects tuition, this bill is for you. The Correcting Opportunity and Accountability in Collegiate Hiring Act (COACH Act) is aiming to put a hard brake on the arms race of college athletic spending by tying coach compensation directly to a school’s tuition costs. It’s a classic carrot-and-stick approach: keep getting federal student aid (Title IV funds), or stop writing those massive checks.

The New Math: 10x Tuition

Here’s the core rule change in Section 3: To keep receiving federal student aid—the money that millions of students rely on for Pell Grants and federal loans—a college or university must cap the total annual compensation for any single athletics department employee at 10 times the school’s published tuition and required fees for a full-time, in-state undergraduate student. That ratio becomes the absolute ceiling for everyone from the head coach to the Athletic Director. For example, if a state university’s in-state tuition is $15,000, the maximum total pay for any athletic staffer is $150,000. If a private school charges $60,000, the cap is $600,000. This means the impact of the cap varies wildly depending on the school's sticker price, potentially hitting public schools and their coaches much harder than high-tuition private schools.

Buyouts, Bonuses, and the Fine Print

This isn't just about base salary. The bill is careful to define “Total annual compensation” broadly to close common loopholes. It includes wages, bonuses, deferred compensation, and even the infamous contract buyouts. If a school fires a coach and pays them $5 million to leave, that $5 million counts as compensation in the year it’s paid, and it cannot push their total annual pay past the 10x tuition cap. Crucially, the cap also applies to money coming from outside groups like athletic conferences, media companies, or affiliated foundations—meaning schools can’t just shift the massive paychecks to a booster club to get around the rule. Section 3 requires schools to certify compliance annually and publicly disclose their calculated cap and the tuition figure used, adding a layer of transparency.

The Antitrust Safety Net

Why is Congress wading into this? As Section 2 notes, federal courts have previously struck down attempts by the NCAA to cap coach salaries, arguing it violated antitrust laws (think price-fixing). The COACH Act tackles this head-on in Section 4 by creating an explicit “liability limitation.” If a college adopts or enforces the compensation limits set out in this Act, they are automatically protected from federal antitrust lawsuits. This is a big deal: it essentially gives schools a legal shield to coordinate salary limits, something they couldn’t do before without facing massive legal risk. It’s the government saying, “We know this looks like price-fixing, but we’re making it legal for this specific purpose.”

Who Feels the Change?

For the average student or parent, the goal here is simple: reallocate money away from massive athletic salaries and back toward the academic mission. If a school is currently paying a coach $5 million, and their tuition cap is $600,000, that nearly $4.4 million difference theoretically stays with the institution. This could ease the financial strain on academic budgets or non-revenue sports. However, the biggest immediate impact will be on the highest earners in college athletics—the coaches and administrators who currently pull in millions. Their future contracts will be drastically limited. Also, schools with existing contracts are safe for now; the bill includes transition rules that grandfather in existing agreements, but those contracts cannot be amended to increase pay beyond what was originally agreed upon before the Act was signed.