Title IX & Revenue Sharing: A Year In — and Female Athletes Are Still Waiting for Their Fair Share
What a full year of data reveals about gender equity in college athlete pay — and what you can do about it now.
Revenue sharing has been in effect for one year, following the July 1, 2025, approval permitting schools to provide direct payments to student athletes. If you are a female student-athlete, you have probably noticed checks are not equal, the explanations are vague, and the people in charge seem very confident that Title IX does not apply.
They may be wrong. The courts are still deciding.
Here's what you need to understand about where things stand, and what your legal options look like right now.
How We Got Here (The Short Version)
On June 6, 2025, the House v. NCAA settlement unlocked the first era of direct school-to-athlete revenue sharing in NCAA history. Last year, schools could share up to $20.5 million annually with their athletes. For the 2026-27 academic year, that figure is rising to $21.3 million. Last January, the Biden Administration Department of Education issued guidance that the payments were subject to Title IC proportionality requirements, also the same standard that governs scholarship.
The Trump administration rescinded that guidance 27 days later. That rescission didn't change Title IX and Title IX rights. It changed who could enforce it. The law is still on the books. The dispute in federal court presently is how Title IX applies to these new payments.
What the First Year Actually Looked Like
This is where insight matters more than history.
Most schools built their revenue-sharing models around sport revenue, with football receiving roughly 60-75% of available funds and men's basketball taking about another 20%. Combined, women's basketball and all remaining women's programs receive roughly 8-12% of the total pool, according to data from Opendorse, one of the leading NIL payment platforms.
If your school's athlete population is roughly half women, and women's programs receive less than 15% of revenue-sharing dollars, that disparity would likely be impermissible under decades of Title IX scholarship precedent if it arose in the scholarship context. The legal question now is whether direct pay is treated differently.
Judge Claudia Wilken, who approved the settlement, was explicit: she did not rule that forward-looking revenue-sharing payments comply with Title IX. She said athletes are free to sue separately. The Ninth Circuit is now reviewing Title IX challenges that will almost certainly signal how courts treat prospective pay equity claims as well.
Three Scenarios
Understanding where your school lands matters. Here's what we're seeing:
Scenario 1: Sport-revenue weighting (most common)
The school distributes based on how much each sport generates. Football gets the majority, followed by men’s basketball. Women's Olympic sports split the rest. No proportionality analysis was done. This model carries the most Title IX exposure and typically has the least documentation to defend against a challenge.
Scenario 2: Hybrid model with a floorSome schools created a base per-athlete payment for all sports, plus additional amounts tied to sport revenue. The floor amount matters: a $500 per-athlete base paired with a $75,000 football stipend papers over a Title IX problem.
Scenario 3: Proportional or equity-reviewed model
A proportional or equity-reviewed model presents a distribution that reflects the male/female makeup of the roster. Legal experts widely recommend this model for Title IX risk mitigation.To date, no Power Four school has publicly committed to this approach.
You can ask which model your school is using. You don't need to file a complaint to have that conversation.
What the Ninth Circuit Litigation Means for You Right Now
Eight female athletes - from soccer, volleyball, and track at Vanderbilt, Virginia, and the College of Charleston - filed a Title IX appeal in June 2025, arguing that directing 90% of the $2.8 billion back-pay fund to football and men's basketball players deprives women of more than $1.1 billion in compensation. Opening briefs have been filed, and we have filed an amicus brief supporting the appellants.
Why does that matter to a current athlete? Because the legal reasoning in that case will directly shape how courts treat forward-looking challenges. If the Ninth Circuit finds proportionality requirements apply to back pay, schools using sport-revenue weighting for ongoing payments face acute exposure, and athletes who accepted a lower allocation may have grounds for corrective relief.
This federal litigation may have direct consequences for how your school is paying you today.
What You Can Do Right Now
You don't need to wait for a ruling to protect your interests:
Request your school's revenue-sharing allocation in writing. Ask your athletic department how the annual pool is divided by sport. Schools should be able to produce this.
Cross-reference it with your school's public EADA data. The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act requires schools to publish participation and financial aid data by sex. It's publicly available. If women make up 47% of your roster and receive 12% of revenue-sharing funds, document that gap.
Talk to a Title IX attorney before filing anything. The litigation landscape is ongoing. An attorney can evaluate your facts, advise whether an internal grievance, OCR complaint, or civil action is the right path, and help you avoid procedural missteps that could limit your options.
Coaches: document operational impact. If your program's budget, staffing, or recruiting is being harmed by a revenue allocation model that starves women's sports, keep records. These disparities compound the pay equity problem and may independently support a Title IX claim.
For a deeper look at how Title IX protects your rights across all areas of collegiate athletics, visit our Title IX resource page.
The Bigger Picture
The schools that structured equitable plans did so voluntarily, not because anyone required them to. The schools that allocated 90% to football did so because no one stopped them. A year in, patterns are established and real distributions exist for courts to evaluate.
Female athletes should ask for the same legal protection that has governed athletic scholarships for 50 years. Title IX doesn't disappear because a federal agency changed its enforcement position. It has survived every administration that has tested it.
If you believe your school's revenue-sharing plan shortchanges women athletes in violation of Title IX gender equity requirements, Christine Brown & Partners is here to help. We have deep experience filing Title IX claims, guiding athletes through internal grievance processes, and advising coaches on institutional compliance concerns.
