A salary cap league — sometimes called a contract or auction-contract league — assigns every rostered player a salary that counts against a fixed team budget, so a manager can’t simply hoard talent. Building a roster becomes a spending problem: pay up for two elite backs and you’re filling the rest of your lineup with minimum-cost fliers.

Contracts add a second layer of strategy on top of the roster itself. Players are signed for a set number of years, salaries often escalate over the life of a deal, and letting a contract expire returns the player to a pool everyone bids on — so timing when to extend a star versus let him walk is its own game within the game.

Sleeper does not natively support salary caps or contracts, so leagues that want this format typically track it in a spreadsheet or a third-party tool and treat the results as the source of truth alongside their Sleeper rosters.