LTIR is a buffer, not cap space

A player whose injury is expected to keep him out for at least 24 days and 10 regular-season games may be placed on long-term injured reserve, LTIR for short. Nothing about his contract changes: he is still paid, and his cap hit still counts against the club's total. What changes is what the club is allowed to do while he is out.

Ordinarily a club must stay at or under the upper limit all season. With a player on LTIR, the club may go over the limit, by up to an amount called its LTIR relief, to pay for the players who replace him. The ceiling does not move. The club is simply allowed to be above it.

Cap space is room under the ceiling. LTIR relief is room above it, and the two are not the same thing. A club using LTIR is over the ceiling, which means it has no cap space in the ordinary sense: its charges exceed $104,000,000, and the relief is what makes that legal. That is why a team page here can show more than 100% of the cap used and still read as compliant, and why the cap bar draws LTIR as a band above the ceiling rather than adding it to the space below.

The figure a club using LTIR cares about is its effective space: how far it still is from the top of its relief. That is the room it can actually spend. The term is defined with the others on the Methodology page.

• The player has to come back. When he is activated, his replacements are still on the books and the relief goes away. The club must be back under the upper limit the day he returns, which often means a trade, a demotion or a player going on waivers first.
• Relief is fixed on the day of placement. A club that placed a player with a lot of room to spare cannot get that room back later by adding contracts.
• The playoffs now count. For years a club could spend its relief all season and activate the player for the playoffs, when the cap did not apply. Under the agreement in force from 2026-27, the roster a club dresses for each playoff game must also fit under the upper limit.