Your Guide to 2022 Green Bay Packers Salary Cap Situation

Another offseason is upon us what feels like prematurely, and with that, a lot of potential changes to this Green Bay Packers roster as GM Brian Gutekunst and Executive Vice President Russ Ball navigate a number of salary cap challenges.

But before we dive into what’s ahead for the Green Bay Packers, let’s take a look back at this past year, as it helps illustrate how we got to this point.

With no fans — or very few of them — in the stands during the 2020 season, the league-wide salary cap shrank from $198.2 million to just $182.5 million in 2021. For the Green Bay Packers, who were coming off a second NFC Championship loss, that meant undergoing a number of salary cap-saving maneuvers in order to keep the band together for one more year–or in short; they kicked the can down the road on a number of contracts.

The two ways that they went about this were through contract restructures, which is a way to push cap charges into future contract years by converting the base salary into a signing bonus — more on this later — or by adding voided years to the contract.

As Ken Ingalls put it, voided years are the salary cap version of a credit card. Voided years don’t actually add years onto a deal, rather, they only do so on paper, allowing the team to push cap charges into future years. However, once the contract is actually up, the cap charges for those voided years accelerate and come due immediately.

Ken independently tracks Green Bay’s salary cap situation, and by his calculations, the Packers kicked $50.9 million worth of cap charges from 2021 into future years, with a good chunk of those dollars landing in 2022.

So, now that we are up to speed, where does the Green Bay Packers salary cap sit heading into 2022?

Well, according to Over the Cap, Green Bay is currently sitting at $40.08 million over the projected salary cap, which is going to increase from $182.5 million up to $208.2 million. However, as we’ve often discussed here, that is only the beginning for the Packers.

This $40.08 million figure does not include the incoming draft class, the 52nd or 53rd players on the roster, any free-agent additions, the cost to retain any of Green Bay’s own free agents, the 16-man practice squad, or cap space for any in-season additions, like Whitney Mercilus or Rasul Douglas from this past season.

Ken does bake those costs into his final figure, and he currently has the Packers needing to clear $71.25 million worth of cap space by the start of the regular season.