Topline
The 2025 NFL season will kick off next Thursday with the rival Eagles-Cowboys matchup on NBC, and by the time the 18-week regular season is over games will have aired on nine different channels and streaming platforms, costing die-hard fans more than $750 in subscriptions to watch every single game.
Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates after scoring a 22-yard touchdown against the Buffalo Bills on Jan. 21, 2024.
Getty Images
Key Facts
NFL fans without cable or streaming subscriptions can access NFL games on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC—which will air at least 218 of the 272 games in the regular season, per the league’s official schedule—but local TV only broadcasts a handful of games across the Sunday afternoon timeslots in each market, requiring fans to shell out much more if they want access to every out-of-market game.
To truly see every game available on those channels across the country, viewers would need to shell out for a Sunday Ticket annual subscription at $378 for returning subscribers, and a base subscription to YouTube TV, which is $83 per month for returning subscribers (new users get Sunday Ticket for $276 per year and YouTube TV’s base plan for $50 per month).
Traditional basic channel packages, which open up access to NFL games airing on ESPN and NFL Network if the channels are included in the subscription, range in price from $30 to $70 depending on market and provider, for an average cost of $50.
Thursday Night Football games will air exclusively on Amazon Prime Video again this season, which costs $9 per month, and Netflix will air two Christmas Day games, which costs a minimum of $8 per month.
Some Monday Night Football games will air exclusively on ESPN, which will require viewers to either have a cable TV package, YouTube TV, a subscription to ESPN Unlimited ($30 per month), ESPN+ ($12 per month) or the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle ($30 per month for the first year, then $36 per month).
Six of the league’s seven international games—in Ireland, London (3), Germany and Spain—will air on NFL Network (available as a cable channel) or via NFL+, which costs $7 per month or is available through the YouTube TV package.
One game in week 17, which has yet to be announced, will air exclusively on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, which costs a minimum of $11 per month for live sports.
The Friday night week one matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers in Brazil will air on YouTube for free—a first-of-its-kind broadcast.
For the estimated 50% of Americans who have cut the cord with traditional broadcast TV providers, it will cost at least $765 to watch every regular season NFL game, not including fees and taxes, which can be as high as 10% in some states.
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Big Number
10. That’s how many platforms NFL games will air on this year: Netflix, Prime Video, NBC, YouTube, Fox, CBS, ABC, ESPN, NFL Network and Peacock.
Key Background
Watching NFL games has become increasingly expensive over the last decade as the league has sold broadcasting rights across traditional cable channels, broadcast networks and streaming services. The league added games exclusive to NFL Network in 2006, Amazon Prime and ESPN+ in 2022 and Netflix and Peacock last year. The NFL’s current television rights deals are worth more than $110 billion across 11 seasons, according to The New York Times. ESPN, for instance, pays the NFL around $2.7 billion per year to air 25 games annually (plus the right to the Super Bowls in 2027 and 2031). Netflix is reported to have paid $150 million for three years of rights to NFL Christmas Day games, and Amazon pays about $1 billion per year for the exclusive rights to stream “Thursday Night Football” and a Black Friday game.
