NHL
NHL Injured Reserve vs. LTIR: What Changes for the Roster and Salary Cap?
IR opens a roster place; LTIR can allow capped replacement spending. The current rules also restrict how much replacement relief a team can use.
Injured reserve opens a roster place. Long-term injured reserve can also provide a regulated exception to the NHL salary cap. Neither designation erases the injured player’s contract from the club’s cap calculation.
For the 2026–27 season, the difference also involves limits introduced through the NHL and NHLPA’s 2025 agreement. A description that simply promises the full cap hit of any player placed on LTIR leaves out a material part of the current rules.
Ordinary Injured Reserve
Under CBA Article 16.11, ordinary IR applies when a player is expected to be unable to play for at least seven days. He stops counting against the active-roster limit, allowing the club to replace him. His salary and bonuses continue to count for cap purposes, as do his replacement’s.
Consider a hypothetical injured player with a $5 million cap hit and a replacement costing $1 million. Ordinary IR opens the roster place; it does not turn the first player’s $5 million into spending room. Adding the replacement still requires room under the applicable cap rules.
What LTIR Adds
The long-term exception requires an expected absence of at least 24 calendar days and 10 regular-season games. Both conditions matter. The injured player remains part of the cap calculation, but qualifying replacement spending can take a club above its normal upper limit.
The Current Replacement Limit
Attachment 25-A of the 2025 memorandum restricts the combined averaged cap amounts of replacement players to the prior season’s average league salary. The total replacement salary and bonuses also cannot exceed those of the player being replaced.
The NHL and NHLPA can approve an exception to the average-salary restriction after evaluating the likely time missed. That approval has a substantial consequence: the injured player becomes ineligible for the rest of the season, including the playoffs.
A club therefore cannot assume that replacing an expensive injured player provides his entire cap amount while preserving an unrestricted return later that season. The applicable approval and eligibility conditions must be considered together.
Returning to the Lineup
When a player is fit to return under the regular-season exception, his club must restore cap compliance before he rejoins. The minimum absence is an eligibility condition, rather than a promise that he will be healthy when it expires.
The playoffs have their own lineup accounting under Attachment 25-B. Each game’s 18 skaters and two goaltenders are subject to a calculated playoff cap total that must fit the upper limit. The NHL introduced that system in 2025–26.
For an injury announcement, check which designation the club actually used. IR identifies a roster transaction. LTIR adds a separate cap exception with longer absence requirements and replacement restrictions.
Sources and Notes
- NHL–NHLPA Collective Bargaining Agreement: Articles 16.11 and 50.10(d): roster treatment, minimum absences and salary-cap accounting.
- NHL–NHLPA 2025 memorandum: Attachments 25-A and 25-B: replacement restrictions and playoff-cap calculation.
- NHL: Playoff salary-cap implementation: September 3, 2025 announcement establishing the 2025–26 introduction.
