The Solution For NCAA Revenue Share Payments

College sports teams bring passion, excitement, and unforgettable moments to sports fans everywhere. Coming soon, the new revenue-sharing model will change how the athletic department revenue for the 2025-6 academic year works for universities. Going forward, each university will have payments it controls to disperse out to its student athletes, roughly capped to 22% of the institutional revenue, as they adhere to the NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (FRS). 

The big question is, what is the best way to do this? There are then many important questions that follow. By what method are athletes paid: ACH, direct deposit, prepaid card, or instant transfer? What do you do if athletes question when they will be paid or how to upload their information? How do you pay any international student athletes on a team? What is needed to do for the university reporting and then for tax purposes? How can it all be transparent, streamlined, and easy? 

The good news is that there is a payment platform called Payment Labs, specifically designed for NIL payments and all types of athlete payments in sports (i.e., X Games competitions, Arnold Sports bodybuilding championships, pickleball events, esports prize winners, etc.). The payment platform is built with the specific nuances within sports already taken into account. 

The Payment Labs platform is made to solve the unique use case of paying student athletes, and it does that by providing a cost-effective platform that has a streamlined athlete onboarding process, a variety of payment methods for athletes to choose from, and provides payment support for student athletes. The platform has the ability to automatically withhold taxes these athletes must pay the IRS, protecting them from future tax burdens. The platform can do this with a payor dashboard that automates athlete payments and directly reports taxable payments to the IRS.

The Payment Labs platform differentiates itself from the other platforms with clear pricing, cost-savings, and many more features made specifically for athlete payments. 

• The payor dashboard is user-friendly, allowing you to pay up to 1,000 people in a single batch with just emails and amounts. This means you can bundle payouts by different sports teams and not have to approve each payment manually every time. 
• Student athletes can register and onboard in minutes and receive their payments in the method that is most convenient for them (i.e., bank transfer, prepaid debit cards that can be uploaded to mobile phone wallets, instant payments to debit cards, etc.) 
• The platform reduces your security and privacy risks as Payment Labs collects all personally identifiable information (PII) and secures that information with the latest security protocols and requirements set by financial institutions. 

Another benefit is that you save time with automatic tax filing for all eligible athletes, collecting W8 & W9 forms automatically at registration, and providing e-file-ready EOY 1099 and 1042 forms. No more chasing busy student athletes to manually fill out and collect required tax forms.

There are also no more payment delays due to the weekends and holidays. Student athletes can be paid 24/7/365, receiving their money within minutes of the universities approving and sending payments. They can easily track their payments, banking information, and tax records. Additionally, the customer support is better than any other payment service. 

With Payment Labs, you receive a dedicated Slack channel where you and your team can ask questions immediately. You can also talk to the CTO and leadership if you have any questions or unique requests. Finally, there is a dedicated payment support team to answer any questions your student athletes may have about completing the registration process, where their payments are, how to complete their tax forms, etc. No other payment provider offers this.

Recently, the Payment Labs team was at UCLA with Chase Griffin, UCLA QB & 2X NIL Athlete of the Year, and you can hear his video testimonial below of why Payment Labs is the best solution for paying out college athletes.

You can see the platform in action by booking a meeting here or reaching out to the Payment Labs team at hello@paymentlabs.io to ask any questions you may have about how this will work for your university. The new revenue share will bring change for universities, but that doesn’t have to mean more work if you choose a payment solution built for student athlete payments.