Florida drew a line on NIL agent fees. Will the rest of the country catch up?

Hey everyone,

Debra Bangert is back again today, writing about another issue where the law and college sports intersect. She’s going deep on a Florida bill that capped agent fees for collective deals — a bill that could have national resonance if other states take note. Let’s get to it …

— Joan

Florida drew a line on NIL agent fees. Will the rest of the country catch up?

By Debra Bangert

I spend a lot of time in the weeds of name-image-likeness law, and every so often, a state proposal jumps off the page because it isn’t just another tweak to registration rules or disclosure forms. Florida’s new NIL bill is exactly that. On July 1, Florida became the first state to cap the percentage an athlete’s agent can charge him or her when negotiating deals with school-affiliated NIL collectives for both collegiate and high school athletes. The limit: 5 percent.

NIL is a market without many guardrails. Agents accustomed to the free-market world of endorsements often ask for 10, 15, even 20 percent of collectives’ payouts. That might make sense for a one-off shoe deal — but it looks predatory when the money is closer to a stipend or salary. The Florida bill, then, is a first attempt to curb those kinds of exploitative contracts; no other state has yet set a hard percentage ceiling specifically for collective transactions. The bill also created a public database of licensed athlete agents and clarified access to vetted advisors for high schoolers.

And this isn’t just a Sunshine State quirk. It’s a stress test for the entire NIL ecosystem. 

The bill targets NIL collective payouts because those dollars increasingly look like roster-based compensation, not classic brand endorsements — making a 3 to 5 percent “player-contract” style cap feel more appropriate than the 10 to 20 percent marketing commissions historically charged on ad deals. This matters because NIL collectives aren’t your typical endorsement partner. They’re the quasi-salary arms of college athletics, pooling booster money to guarantee athletes a baseline income in exchange for appearances and community events. So these deals are, functionally, roster-based compensation packages masquerading as marketing contracts.

Florida lawmakers clearly agree. Their legislative analyses point to two main goals: protecting young athletes, many of them still teenagers, from paying professional-sized commissions on what is essentially team compensation and borrowing a page from the pro leagues, where players’ unions have long capped contract-agent fees in the range of 3 to 5 percent. 

But Florida’s law goes further. It directs the state to create a public database of licensed athlete agents and clarifies who can give financial advice to high-school athletes. In other words, it tries to bring transparency to a marketplace that, so far, has thrived on opacity. This is where Florida becomes an outlier.

There is no national standard for NIL agent compensation. Many states regulate sports agents through the Uniform Athlete Agents Act, licensing, disclosures and eligibility warnings — but they haven’t ventured into capping fee percentages. The NCAA points schools and athletes to UAAA-style protections and, in 2024, adopted NIL disclosure/transparency rules and a voluntary service-provider registry to add sunlight, not price controls.  

A few states do have some additional heft. For instance, California’s Miller-Ayala Act requires athlete-agent registration plus a $100,000 security, a barrier that weeds out drive-by operators.And Louisiana recently formed an NIL task force made up of representatives from almost every public institution in the state, private sector representatives, as well as some high school representatives, with a “goal … to come up with safeguards to better protect athletes, especially high schoolers.”

Missouri lawmakers were early to allow high-school athletes to profit from NIL and even streamlined how schools license team marks — but they left agent compensation to the marketplace. Likewise, the Texas legislature recently greenlit direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes after the House settlement. Again, no percentage cap on agent fees.

As universities harden their guardrails, concern is growing that predatory actors may drift to high school, where rules vary widely. In Florida, it will be interesting to see how the 5 percent cap on collective deals will drive behavior; traditional endorsements, such as apparel brands and social-media campaigns, will remain subject to ordinary market rates, often 10 to 20 percent, so could agents shift to flat-fee or hourly billing for collective work while keeping percentage commissions for brand deals? Expect legal challenges, too. Critics will call the cap an unconstitutional restraint on trade or argue it interferes with multi-state contracts. Florida will counter that regulating licensed professionals and protecting consumers is well within its police powers.

Florida has planted a flag, but other legislatures and the NCAA, still groping for a national NIL framework, will watch closely. If the Sunshine State’s experiment reins in excess without scaring away competent representation, don’t be surprised if 5 percent becomes a new informal benchmark. 

Florida is trying something most states have been reluctant to do: re-price the middleman where the money looks like salary. Even as the market self-corrects thanks to disclosure, tax scrutiny and better education, the soft underbelly remains high school, where uneven rules create openings for predatory pitches. A narrow 5 percent collective-deal cap plus licensing sunlight is one way to close that gap without kneecapping legitimate representatives. The next six to 12 months will show whether Florida has built a model — or if it’s just picked a fight the rest of the states aren’t ready to join.

Debra Bangert is an attorney and writer specializing in NIL and the evolving legal landscape of amateur and collegiate athletics — particularly in ice hockey. Debra writes at the intersection of law, player development and the business of sport, and she is the voice behind @HockeyLawyerMom on TikTok.