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The 49ers Have More than $92 Million in Dead Money for 2025

The 49ers lead the NFL in a strange statistic.
Grant Cohn|
May 9, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, right, confers with defensive coordinator Robert Saleh during the teamís rookie minicamp. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
May 9, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, right, confers with defensive coordinator Robert Saleh during the teamís rookie minicamp. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images | D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers lead the NFL in a strange statistic.

They currently have $92 million in dead salary cap space for 2025 -- $21 million more than the team with the second-most dead money, the Seattle Seahawks. And the 49ers have all these salary-cap penalties because they gave bad contracts to players who no longer are on the team. I'm talking Deebo Samuel, Arik Armstead, Javon Hargrave, Leonard Floyd and Charvarius Ward.

So what does this mean for the 49ers?

Dead money is salary cap space that they can't use. The 49ers have to pay a penalty for releasing or trading expensive veterans they no longer wanted. That's a big reason the 49ers currently rank 29th out of 32 teams in active salary cap spending.

Interestingly enough, the 49ers also rank second in the NFL in effective cap space with more than $53 million. Even after trading for Bryce Huff, the 49ers have plenty of cap space to make another significant move either this offseason or during the season if they need to.

And that's good news because the 49ers will need another safety if Ji'Ayir Brown's foot injury lingers into the regular season and Malik Mustapha's ACL recovery takes longer than expected. At the first week of OTAs last week, the 49ers' starting safeties were Richie Grant and Jason Pinnock. Not great.

The Huff trade indicates that the 49ers are serious about contending in 2025, not just building a young team that will be ready to compete in 2026. It will be interesting to see how the 49ers use their remaining cap space. If they use it.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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