In-season waivers
FAAB in fantasy football, explained
— a bid is a share, not a price.
FAAB is a blind auction for free agents. What a bid costs you depends on what you have left, how many weeks remain, and how your league is set up — which is why there is no universal FAAB price. This guide covers how blind bidding works, how FAAB differs from rolling, reverse-order and first-come waivers, and what changes from one league to the next.
What FAAB means
FAAB stands for free agent acquisition budget. It replaces a waiver order with an auction: instead of waiting your turn, you decide how much of your budget a player is worth to you.
A season budget, not real money
Every team starts the season with the same pot of play money. To claim a player off waivers you bid from it, and a winning bid is deducted from what you have left. In most leagues the budget does not refill, so every claim spends something you cannot get back.
Highest bid wins
When waivers process, each contested player goes to the highest bid. Ties are settled by a league rule — often the waiver priority order — so it is worth knowing which one yours uses before you land on a round number several managers are likely to pick.
Minimums and increments are league settings
Some leagues accept zero bids, some set a floor, some only allow whole units and some allow fractions. These are commissioner choices, which is one reason the same bid means different things in different leagues.
How blind bidding works
FAAB bids are blind: you place a bid on each player you want, the highest bid wins when waivers run, and nobody sees the other bids until then.
Sealed until waivers run
Nobody sees anyone else’s bid before the claim period closes. You are bidding against what you think your league-mates will do, not against a number on a screen.
You pay what you bid
In the usual setup the winner pays their own bid in full, not the runner-up’s bid plus a dollar. Overbidding is not free insurance — the gap between your bid and the next one is budget you gave away.
Their budgets are part of the auction
A blind bid competes with what every other team has left to spend. A league-mate with a full budget and a hole at the position is a different threat from one who spent big in September.
FAAB vs priority and free waivers
Leagues award free agents in one of a few ways, and some combine them. What a claim costs you is different under each.
Rolling waivers
A priority order. The team at the top gets first claim; making a claim sends you to the back of the line. Claiming costs your place, not money.
Reverse-order waivers
Priority follows the standings in reverse — the worst record claims first — and resets each week. It helps struggling teams, and you cannot do much to influence it.
FAAB
A blind auction instead of a line. Any team can win any player if they are willing to spend for it, so the cost of a claim is set by your bid rather than your position in an order.
First-come, first-served
No waiting period and no bids: whoever adds the player first gets them. Many leagues use it after waivers clear, so a player nobody bid on is still available once the claim period ends.
Every league has its own economy
The same player is worth a different bid in each league, because each league sets its own budget, waiver rules and roster shape.
Budget size and league size
Budgets are not standardized, and neither is how many teams are bidding against you or how deep rosters run. A deep league empties the wire faster, and that changes what any claim is worth.
Weeks left and budget left
The same bid is a bigger commitment from a nearly empty budget than from a full one, and a bigger one in week three than in week fourteen, when there are fewer weeks of waivers left to spend on.
Salary-cap leagues
In salary-cap and contract leagues a winning bid can become the player’s salary, sometimes for several seasons. There a bid is a long-term cap commitment, not only a share of this year’s budget.
When you connect a league, LeagueFrenzy reads the waiver type and FAAB budget your platform publishes and lets you fill in what it does not, such as whether a winning bid becomes salary. The Free Agents page then ranks the players on your wire for your scoring and shows your league's budget and cap room beside them. It suggests a bid range only when it has enough of your own league's past winning bids to anchor on, scaled by how much the player improves your lineup — otherwise it says there is not enough history instead of guessing.
What we do not know yet: we do not publish FAAB market prices or clearing prices. We have not measured what players go for across leagues, so this page quotes no bid amounts, and no bid we suggest is borrowed from another league.