FAAB bidding basics
FAAB turns the waiver wire into a blind auction. Every team gets the same budget for the season, and the highest bid wins the player. The rules are simple; spending well is the hard part.
Below are the rules as they work on Sleeper, then what one real league did with them. The league is the same one as the sample report: 12 teams, a $100 budget each, teams shown as Team 1 to Team 12. Every bid below is a real one from its 2025 season, playoffs included.
How a FAAB waiver works
FAAB stands for free agent acquisition budget. When a player is on waivers, any team can put in a claim with a bid. Nobody sees anyone else's bid. When waivers run, on the day your league's settings choose, the highest bid for each player wins and that amount comes out of the winner's budget. Teams that lost the auction keep their money.
- Ties go to the team higher in the waiver order, so a tied bid is not a coin flip. Check how your league sets the order.
- Minimum bid. The commissioner can set one. This league's minimum was $0, which is common on Sleeper: a $0 bid is a real claim and can win if nobody bids more.
- Drops. Most claims name a player to drop if the roster is full. If the claim wins, the drop happens with it.
- Free agents. Once waivers have run, unclaimed players become free agents and can be added instantly for nothing until the next waiver period.
- Trading FAAB. On Sleeper, budget dollars can be included in trades. This league made 4 trades that moved FAAB.
Most claims cost nothing
The league filed 328 waiver claims over the season. 155 went through and 173 did not, either because another team won the player or for roster reasons, such as a drop that was no longer on the roster.
| Winning bid | Claims won | Share |
|---|---|---|
| $0 | 83 | 54% |
| $1 to $5 | 32 | 21% |
| $6 to $15 | 21 | 14% |
| $16 to $30 | 10 | 6% |
| Over $30 | 9 | 6% |
54% of winning claims were for $0. Among the 72 that cost money, the median bid was $6 and the average $11.5; a few big bids pull the average up. The biggest was $57, more than half a season's budget, for J. Johnson by Team 6 in week 2. The lesson: a typical pickup is cheap, and the budget is really there for the two or three players a season worth fighting over.
Overpaying, and paying when nobody else bid
Because bids are blind, the winner usually pays more than they needed to. We can see this because Sleeper keeps losing bids too. 63 players (32% of all player auctions) drew bids from more than one team in the same waiver run. When a paid bid won one of those, it beat the next-highest bid by $8.9 on average, with a median of $4. Some auctions were tight: 7 were won by exactly $1, and 19 were ties settled by waiver order.
More striking: 32 of the 72 paid claims had no other bid at all. Those teams spent $212 between them on players they could have had for $0. Nobody can know that in advance, which is the point of a blind auction, but it is a useful habit to ask "would anyone else really bid on this player?" before putting real money down.
When to spend
Here is how the league's spending was spread across the season:
| Waiver run | Paid claims | Spent | Share of spending |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 4 | 27 | $362 | 44% |
| Weeks 5 to 8 | 24 | $189 | 23% |
| Weeks 9 to 12 | 10 | $83 | 10% |
| Week 13 and later | 11 | $194 | 23% |
Weeks 1 to 4 took 44% of all spending. That is normal and mostly sensible: early in the season nobody knows yet who will break out, and a player bought in week 2 can play for your team for 15 weeks, while one bought in week 12 plays a handful. Our FAAB return guide shows how those early buys actually scored.
Spending picked up again late, with 23% from week 13 on. Some of that is teams chasing a playoff spot or covering injuries, and some is teams with money left and nothing else to use it on. In most leagues unspent FAAB does not carry over, so a dollar left in December is a dollar wasted. In this league 5 teams spent every dollar, while Team 5 never spent a dollar. The median team ended with $18.5 left.
Simple rules of thumb
- Decide which kind of player is worth a big bid before waivers open: a new starting running back after an injury, usually, or a quarterback in a SUPERFLEX league (see FLEX and SUPERFLEX).
- Use $0 and $1 bids freely for depth and bye-week cover. Most winning claims in this league cost $0 to $5.
- Avoid round numbers when you really want a player. A $21 bid beats everyone who stopped at $20.
- Spend before the playoffs, not after. A player added in week 14 helps only if your team is still playing.
What it cannot tell you
- Overpay is hindsight. The winning team did not see the other bids, and a bid that looks too high afterwards may have been the right price for the risk of losing the player.
- A claim that did not go through is not always a lost auction. Sleeper also fails claims for roster reasons, and the data does not always say which.
- One league's habits are not a market price. A player's value depends on who needs him, and that changes from league to league and week to week.
For whether those dollars turned into points, read FAAB return. A Shoulda Started season report shows the same numbers for your own league.