The Senate on Monday approved a sweeping bipartisan bill to regulate college sports, marking the strongest congressional effort yet to bring order to an industry transformed by soaring athlete compensation and largely unrestricted transfers between schools.
The legislation passed 77-22 and would establish nationwide rules for payments tied to college athletes’ name, image and likeness, as well as limits on how frequently they may transfer. It would also grant the NCAA greater authority to enforce those rules, along with limited antitrust protections.
The measure follows years of negotiations in the Senate, which accelerated after a 2025 lawsuit settlement reshaped college sports by permitting schools to pay their players directly.
It would write that settlement into federal law while adding new restrictions aimed at controlling the rapidly rising costs facing colleges.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz. He negotiated the bill with the panel’s top Democrat, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.
More than 70 senators from both parties support the legislation, saying it would reduce the constant litigation and uncertainty affecting athletes, schools and fans. The bill would also extend new health and labor protections to hundreds of thousands of student-athletes.
The Senate approved a sweeping bipartisan college sports bill Monday following a lengthy delay
Opponents argue that the measure does not go far enough to protect athletes or address the vast sums flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.
“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights organizations to oppose the legislation.
The bill’s path forward remains uncertain.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced interest in the legislation, and the White House formally backed it last month. However, the bill could encounter strong resistance in the House, which failed several times over the past year to bring a different proposal to the floor. The chamber is also in recess until after the November elections.
If both chambers do not approve the measure by the end of the year, lawmakers will have to begin the process again in the next Congress.
College sports have been unsettled since the 2025 court settlement allowed schools to pay players directly for their name, image and likeness. The changes have reshaped the industry, with football roster payrolls now exceeding $40 million in some cases.
The bill would codify the settlement’s provisions, including a revenue-sharing ceiling that permits schools to distribute up to $21.5 million to athletes. It would more than double that figure for some schools by allowing as much as $27.5 million in additional payments through a retention fund. That provision helped secure support from the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference, the two largest conferences.
Schools and conferences would also be allowed to pool their television media rights as they seek to generate additional revenue.
Arch Manning is one of the leading faces of a college game watched by millions each week
The legislation would also seek to bring stability to the NCAA transfer portal, where players have frequently changed teams. Under the proposal, athletes would receive one “free” transfer during a five-year period without having to sit out a season, subject to some exceptions. Players would also be limited to five years of total eligibility.
The eligibility cap follows criticism of schools accused of pushing the boundaries, including LSU’s abandoned plan to add players to its roster who had taken part in NFL training camps.
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“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
The bill would bar coaches from leaving their schools during the season, require schools changing conferences to spend three years as independents and prohibit conferences from expanding beyond 20 programs. The provisions are intended to prevent so-called “superleagues” from dominating college sports.
A last-minute amendment proposed by Florida Sen. Ashley Moody raised that cap from 19 in the original legislation.
The vote was delayed several hours on Monday as senators negotiated Moody’s amendment and others that were eventually adopted, including provisions to make it easier for athletes to sue over sexual assault and a requirement to disclose foreign financing.
US Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks with the media ahead of Monday’s Senate vote
The Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have put limits on ticket prices for fans and two by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year and increased compensation for athletes who have catastrophic injuries.
The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and scholarships.
It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots – an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.
Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.
The legislation ‘places a cap on the students´ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches´ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,’ Murphy said last week.
Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.
All four Black Democrats in the Senate – Booker, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland – have opposed the bill.
Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, noted the ‘outsized role’ that Black athletes play in college sports. He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, ‘and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers’ to exempt antitrust laws.
‘We know who this bill is protecting,’ Booker said.
Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.
House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.
Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have – a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.