Highest-Paid NFL Kickers: Full Breakdown & Salary Rankings

Who are the NFL’s highest-paid kickers?
Chargers kicker Cameron Dicker is one of the NFL’s highest-paid kickers.
Chargers kicker Cameron Dicker is one of the NFL’s highest-paid kickers. / Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

NFL kickers play one of the sport’s most uniquely valuable positions. A great kicker gives a team a massive advantage, allowing them to score from longer distances and reliably put points on the board, even in tough conditions. On the other hand, a struggling kicker can cost a team from winning games it should.

In the early days of the NFL, the league did not have kicking specialists and other players instead handled kicking duties. Benjamin Agajanian is believed to have been the league’s first kicking specialist in 1945, and now 80 years later, kickers have since become highly skilled, able to hit field goals from 60 yards out or beyond. As such, they’ve become the latest NFL position that can earn multi-millions on an annual basis.

Here’s a look at the paid kickers in the NFL, ranked by annual salary.

Who is the NFL’s highest paid kicker?

Unsurprisingly, Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker is the NFL’s highest-paid kicker. Though his accuracy has dipped as of late, Butker has been with Kansas City since 2017 and helped them win three Super Bowls. He signed his extension in 2024, after he converted a career-high 94.3% of his field goal attempts, made all of his extra points and all 19 of his postseason kicks during the 2023 campaign.

Top 15 highest-paid kickers

Kicker

Team

Annual Salary

Total Contract Value

Harrison Butker

Chiefs

$6.4 million

$25.6 million

Jake Elliott

Eagles

$6 million

$24 million

Cameron Dicker

Chargers

$5.501 million

$22.004 million

Graham Gano

Giants

$5.5 million

$16.5 million

Ka’imi Fairbairn

Texans

$5.3 million

$15.9 million

Jason Myers

Seahawks

$5.275 million

$21.1 million

Brandon McManus

Packers

$5.1 million

$15.3 million

Tyler Bass

Bills

$5.1 million

$20.4 million

Chris Boswell

Steelers

$5 million

$20 million

Evan McPherson

Bengals

$4.67 million

$14 million

Daniel Carlson

Raiders

$4.6 million

$18.4 million

Jason Sanders

Dolphins

$4.4 million

$22 million

Will Lutz

Broncos

$4.2 million

$8.4 million

Chase McLaughlin

Buccaneers

$4.1 million

$12.3 million

Cairo Santos

Bears

$3.9 million

$15.6 million

After Butker, Eagles kicker Jake Elliott is the second-highest paid kicker in the league. Like Butker, Elliott has similarly seen his accuracy wane over the past couple years, but he has been a long-tenured member of Philadelphia since their first Super Bowl run in 2017.

Chargers kicker Cameron Dicker certainly merits his spot as a top-three highest-paid kicker. Dicker, who re-signed with Los Angeles in 2024, became the most accurate kicker in NFL history earlier this season with a 93.5 career field goal percentage.

While the kickers on the list above are primarily earning in the $4–6 million per year range, the majority of kickers outside the top 15 are earning between $800,000 and $1.3 million. This is for a variety of reasons, often because they are kickers who are either on rookie deals, short-term contracts, or have struggled with consistency and are on a second or third chance.

Three kickers who could jump into this list are the Cowboys’ Brandon Aubrey, Jaguars’ Cam Little and the 49ers’ Eddy Piñeiro. Aubrey’s long kicking has been a key advantage for the Cowboys this season, and he is 18-19 on field goal attempts this year. Little is currently on his rookie contract and did miss some kicks earlier this year, but he is 6-for-6 over the last two weeks, including hitting an NFL record 68-yard field goal, the longest in league history. Meanwhile, Piñeiro has been one of the 49ers’ most important additions, especially after their prior kicking woes. Piñeiro has made all of his field goal attempts this season.


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Eva Geitheim
EVA GEITHEIM

Eva Geitheim is a contributor to the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Prior to joining SI in December 2024, she wrote for Newsweek, Gymnastics Now and Dodgers Nation. A Bay Area native, she has a bachelor's in communications from UCLA. When not writing, she can be found baking or re-watching Gilmore Girls.