One state tried to draw a line on NIL agent fees. Will there ever be a national standard?

CORRECTION: Thursday’s NIL Wire newsletter mistakenly reported that a bill in Florida to cap NIL agent fees had gone into effect on July 1. The bill passed the Florida House but did not make it out of the state’s Senate in June. We apologize for the error and have updated the story accordingly.

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 attempted to cap agent fees for collective deals. Let’s get to it …

— Joan

One state tried to draw a line on NIL agent fees. Will there ever be a national standard?

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. An NIL bill that advanced through the Florida House this year before dying in the state’s Senate was exactly that. And even though the bill failed, it still caught my attention for what it aimed to do: limit 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 proposed limit? Five 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, was a first attempt to curb those kinds of exploitative contracts; no state has so far set a hard percentage ceiling specifically for collective transactions. The bill also would have created a public database of licensed athlete agents and clarified access to vetted advisors for high schoolers — all initiatives that would’ve gone a long way in the world of NIL regulation.

Though it didn’t pass in Florida, I’m curious to see if a similar bill surfaces in any other states. It would be a stress test for the entire NIL ecosystem. 

The Florida bill targeted 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.

In Florida, lawmakers pointed 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. 

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.

Florida’s proposed bill planted a flag. If a similar bill ends up passing there or elsewhere — and if it manages to rein in excess without scaring away competent representation — it could be the first step toward wider regulation. 

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.