The Los Angeles Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champions. No one is ever going to say it was cheap.
MLB’s final competitive balance tax calculations for the 2025 season arrived Friday, cementing the Dodgers as the most expensive team in the history of baseball. Their CBT payroll: $417,341,608. Their luxury tax bill: $169,375,768. That brings the total cost of the team to $586,717,376 in MLB’s eyes.
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L.A.’s tax payment is larger than the CBT payrolls of 12 MLB teams, including their NLCS opponent Milwaukee Brewers. It is also larger than the combined luxury tax bill of every team in MLB that isn’t the Dodgers or New York Mets.
In total, nine teams were hit with a luxury tax bill, with the Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays rounding out the league’s five biggest payrolls.
Here’s the full list of numbers, via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale:
Per Nightengale, the league’s total tax bill comes out to a record $401.3 million.
It should be noted that CBT payrolls aren’t as simple as what a team is paying the players on its roster. Salaries are averaged out over the course of a contract, with inflation from deferred money factored in, which is how Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract counts for only $46.1 million per year. Money from buyouts and player benefits is also factored in.
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You can see an attempt to account for all of this at FanGraphs’ Roster Resource.
The Dodgers’ rotation is not cheap. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
(Gregory Shamus via Getty Images)
But you don’t need complicated accounting to tell you the Dodgers spent an ungodly amount of money last year and the year before — and likely for years to come. The team has seven nine-figure contracts on the books in Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Will Smith, all of whom were major contributors to this year’s team.
All of those players will be around for 2026, with Edwin Díaz, Teoscar Hernández, Tanner Scott, Tommy Edman, Blake Treinen and Max Muncy also receiving eight-figure salaries. The team already has $395.9 million on the books for next year, per FanGraphs.
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How can the Dodgers do all this? Well, they’ve been reaping the benefits of the most lucrative local cable deal in baseball for a decade now, they have the largest stadium in MLB with one of baseball’s biggest fan bases, and they’re enjoying all of the financial benefits of Ohtani’s contract, which might be the best bargain in sports. The rich got richer, then kept getting richer still.
All of this will come up when MLB and the MLB Players Association sit down to negotiate the next collective bargaining agreement. The league has been pushing hard for a real salary cap in recent years, with the Dodgers’ recent success making them an easy boogeyman, but the players’ union has made a cap a nonstarter for decades now.
