Despite Joe Burrow’s $46 Million Cap Hit, Bengals Ensure $14M Relief to Trey Hendrickson

The Cincinnati Bengals have finally agreed to open up the checkbook and pay their star pass rusher, Trey Hendrickson. After a multi-month-long negotiation process that featured holdouts, sit-outs, and insults being thrown around in the media, the back-to-back king of sacks has finally found the pay raise that he’s been looking for, albeit with a bit of a caveat.

The Bengals are granting Hendrickson a $14-million pay raise for the 2025 regular season, bringing his yearly salary up to a total of $30 million, nothing more and nothing less. It’s in no shape or form the typical contract extension that either side had initially hoped for, but it’s enough to get the 30-year-old veteran back on the field for the 2025 NFL regular season.

The deal marks the end of what has been a painful period for Cincinnati, as the franchise has routinely struggled with opening up its checkbook. The organization just spent a collective $276 million on the WR tandem of Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, and it is already contending with Joe Burrow’s five-year, $275-million contract extension that was signed last year.

By February of this year, the Bengals had already begun to offer the first of what figures to be many contract restructurings for Burrow. Conveniently enough, however, they had just enough space left to find this short-term deal for Hendrickson.

Prior to the deal, Hendrickson’s $18.6-million cap hit was already the fourth largest on the roster, leaving the Bengals with $27,559,976 in cap space. Now, he’s essentially claimed half of that, leaving the Bengals with a little more than $13-million in cap space for the remainder of the 2025 season.

Thankfully, for the team’s accounting department, they’ll find some relief in 2026, when their total cap space balloons back up to $51,493,961. In light of that fact, some are beginning to surmise that the contract negotiations between Hendrickson and the Bengals are far from over, and that the franchise is simply buying itself some more time.

It may be a bit unconventional, but Cincinnati ultimately found a way to retain the pass rusher’s services without offering him a record-setting contract prior to the start of the season. In that sense, they did manage to succeed in their original goal, which was merely to avoid doing so.

Nevertheless, this is nothing more than kicking the can down the road in terms of offering Hendrickson what he actually wants.

The runner-up 2024 Defensive Player of the Year will soon have the leverage of free agency on his side, meaning that, with every passing week, the pressure for the Bengals to offer him a contract will only grow larger. Should Hendrickson somehow manage to claim the sack title for a third consecutive season, then it’s highly possible that Cincinnati could see one of the best pass rushers in the league walk right out of their front door.