With the recent injuries to the Green Bay Packers, I noticed a lot of you have already started talking about the 2026 season. With that in mind, let’s take a deeper dive into what the 2026 roster looks like right now. Between players under contract (excluding the expected cap casualty of Elgton Jenkins and exclusive rights free agents (more on them later), the Packers should return 44 members of their active roster next season, giving them nine open spots on the 53-man roster in 2026.
Before we touch on who is in or out for next season, though, let’s quickly talk about the different types of free agents.
- Unrestricted free agents (UFA): This is what you think when you think of free agents. UFAs are able to hit the open market without the team having any sort of first right of refusal.
- Restricted free agents (RFA): RFAs are players who have been credited for three NFL seasons, but not four, and are on expiring contracts. To hit UFA, a player must have four credited seasons, so RFAs can be hit with three different tenders. If they don’t receive one of these tenders from their original team, they hit UFA.
- Right of first refusal: An original team has the opportunity to match any contract that another team attempts to sign the player to. The cost for this tender, a one-year deal, was $3.3 million in 2025.
- Second round tender: The original team receives a second-round pick if the player signs with another squad. In 2025, the cost of this tender was $5.3 million.
- First round tender: The original team receives a first-round pick if the players signs with another squad. In 2025, the cost of this tender was $7.5 million.
- Exclusive rights free agents (ERFA): Exclusive rights free agents are players who have fewer than three credited NFL seasons, meaning they are unable to qualify for either UFA or RFA, but are on expiring contracts. These players are able to be retained for what is basically the league-minimum, based on their expierience in the league. These players are almost always given an ERFA tender. This is why we’re going to be including ERFAs as players who are functionally already under contract with the Packers in 2026.
- Reserve/Futures: These players are practice squad players and street free agents who are eligible to sign reserve/futures deals at the end of teams’ seasons but before the new league year begins. These players usually signed two-year contracts that amount to the league minimum for their experience. Practice squad players who are retained always sign reserve/futures deals, but not every practice squad player gets the oppotunity to sign them (they sometimes are replaced by other street free agents once a team’s season ends).
Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into the position by position breakdown of the Packers’ 2026 roster. The count of returning players by position will be in parenthesis and will include all...
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