Dodgers officially run up $169 million luxury tax bill for 2025, larger than payrolls of 12 teams
- - Dodgers officially run up $169 million luxury tax bill for 2025, larger than payrolls of 12 teams
Jack Baer December 20, 2025 at 1:24 AM
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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, officially cementing the Dodgers as the most expensive team in the history of baseball. Their CBT payroll: $417,341,608 million. Their luxury tax bill: $169,375,768, bringing the total cost of the team up to $586,717,376 in MLB's eyes.
That tax payment is larger than the CBT payrolls of 12 different teams, including their NLCS opponent Milwaukee Brewers. It is larger than the combined luxury tax bill of every team in MLB that isn't the Dodgers or New York Mets.
Nine different teams were hit with a luxury bill in total, with the Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays rounding out the top 5 of the league's biggest payrolls. The full list of numbers, via USA Today's Bob Nightengale:
The final CBT payrolls with the Dodgers paying record taxes pic.twitter.com/W8B78F3Mkt
— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 19, 2025
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 it has on 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 only counts for $46.1 million per year. Money from buyouts and player benefits is also factored in.
You can see an attempt at accounting all of this stuff 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 all receiving eight-figure salaries. The team already has $395.9 million on the books for next year, per Fangraphs.
How can the Dodgers do all this? Well, they've been enjoying the benefits of the most lucrative local cable deal in baseball for a decade now, have the largest stadium in MLB with one of baseball's biggest fanbases and are now enjoying all of the financial benefits of the Ohtani contract, which might be the best bargain in sports. The rich got richer, then kept getting richer.
This will be coming up when MLB and the MLB Players Association sit down to figure out 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 have made that a non-starter going back decades.
Source: “AOL Sports”
