NASCAR Ends 2025 Season Down 14% In Viewership of Cup Series Races

Nov 2, 2025; Avondale, Arizona, USA; Smoke comes from the car of NASCAR Cup Series driver William Byron (24) after hitting the wall with a tire failure in the closing laps of the NASCAR Championship race at Phoenix Raceway. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Last Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway, where Denny Hamlin suffered cruel heartbreak and Kyle Larson gained his second career Bill France Cup, ended down in viewership from the 2024 edition of the event.

NBC earned a 1.44 rating with 2.774 million viewers for its one-race winner-take-all championship race on Sunday, which is expected to mark the final time NASCAR decides its champion in the format it has used since the 2014 season. Last year, NBC's broadcast of the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race got a 1.60 rating and averaged 2.9 million viewers.

The decline in the season's final race capped off what amounted to a 14% decline in overall television viewership for the NASCAR Cup Series, which hosts 38 races (36 point races, and two exhibition events).

While a double-digit decrease in viewership in a single season, the first season of a new seven-year media rights agreement, seems like a troubling figure, NASCAR's commissioner Steve Phelps explained in the State of the Sport Address ahead of last weekend's events at Phoenix Raceway that the sanctioning body fully expected a 14-15% decrease in viewership this season.

"When the season started, because of the distribution changes to be less [network TV] broadcast-heavy and more cable-heavy and streaming, we knew we were going to have a reset," Phelps explained. "We had projected that reset and told everyone in our industry that reset would be between 14% and 15% in Cup."

Interestingly, while many expected the five races on Amazon's Prime Video streaming service to be among the lowest races viewed in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2025, due to fans needing to purchase a streaming service in order to watch the races, three of the five Prime Races garnered over 2 million viewers, and the Coca-Cola 600 on Prime ranked as the ninth-most viewed NASCAR Cup race in 2025.

While Phelps credited FOX, and Amazon's Prime Video for delivering better-than expected numbers from their offerings on the schedule, Phelps admitted that cable races lagged in viewership from what even NASCAR expected to see on TNT and USA Network in 2025.

"The Turner numbers were slightly softer than we thought they would be, slightly, but in line with the projections. I would say the cable portion of the NBC package has been a little softer than we had expected," Phelps said.

Phelps expects the arrow to begin trending upward in 2026, and the 14% decrease in 2025 doesn't concern NASCAR one bit.

"Again, the expectation moving forward, now that we have had the reset, is that we are going to grow," Phelps predicted. "We're going to grow because we have the best racing in the world, our stars are going to be more out there, we're creating better content, all the things that make fandom. Again, are we concerned about where the ratings are? No, it's exactly where we thought they'd be."

NASCAR fans have been vocally opposed to the current NASCAR Playoff Format, which again, is expected to be overhauled, or possibly scrapped altogether next season. Depending on what the format of deciding a champion is changed to in 2026, that could help spark some life in the viewership of the races in the second-half of the season, where Playoff fatigue seemed to play a role this season.

But as of now, NASCAR has yet to reveal the format for the championship next season.

If the current Playoff format is revised, the biggest rumor is that we will see two three-race Playoff rounds narrow the Playoff field down to the Championship contenders, who would battle it out in a four-race championship series.

If the Playoff format is scrapped, NASCAR is expected to decide between the classic 10-race Chase for the Championship format used to decide the champions from 2004 to 2013, or the classic full-season championship format (the Latford point system) utilized from 1975 until 2003.

There's a chance though, that NASCAR goes an entirely different route altogether.

We'll have to wait and see what the system will be, but any change should, at least in the first season, result in a slight bump in viewership as fans look to see if they enjoy the new format. If the format is well-received, there's a chance the revised championship format could be one of the catalysts for turning the sport's sagging television viewership numbers around.

While the NASCAR Cup Series saw a 14% decline in viewership in 2025, the NASCAR Xfinity Series, which moved from a cable-heavy broadcast schedule in 2024 to a network tv broadcast schedule with The CW in 2025, saw a 10% increase in viewership.

In 2025, the NASCAR Xfinity Series had 21 of its 33 events record more than 1 million viewers, which is a massive number for NASCAR's second-tier series.