Dodgers officially bill $169 million luxury tax bill for 2025, more than 12 teams’ payroll

The Los Angeles Dodgers are two-time consecutive World Series champions. No one will ever say it was cheap.

MLB’s final competitive balance calculations for the 2025 season arrived Friday, cementing the Dodgers as the most expensive team in baseball history. Their CBT payroll: $417,341,608. Their luxury tax bill: $169,375,768. That brings the team’s total cost to $586,717,376 in MLB’s eyes.

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Los Angeles’ tax payment is greater than the CBT payroll of 12 MLB teams, including their NLCS opponent, the Milwaukee Brewers. It’s also larger than the combined luxury tax bill of every MLB team other than the Dodgers or New York Mets.

In total, nine teams were hit with a luxury tax bill, with the Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays rounding out the five biggest payrolls in the league.

Here’s the full list of numbers, via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale:

By Nightengalethe league’s total tax bill is a record $401.3 million.

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It’s worth noting that CBT salaries aren’t as simple as what a team pays players on its roster. Salaries are averaged over the duration of the contract, taking into account inflation from deferred funds. That’s how Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract only amounts to $46.1 million per year. Money from buyouts and player benefits is also taken into account.

You can see an attempt to account for all this at FanGraphs List Resource.

But you don’t need complicated accounting to tell you that the Dodgers spent an ungodly amount of money last year and the year before — and probably for years to come. The team has seven signed nine-figure contracts with Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Will Smith, all of whom have been major contributors to this year’s team.

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All of these players will be here in 2026, with Edwin Díaz, Teoscar Hernández, Tanner Scott, Tommy Edman, Blake Treinen and Max Muncy also receiving eight-figure salaries. The team already has $395.9 million for next year, according to FanGraphs.

How can the Dodgers do all this? Well, they’ve been reaping the benefits of baseball’s most lucrative local cable deal for a decade now, they’ve got the biggest ballpark in MLB with one of the biggest fan bases in baseball, and they’re enjoying all the financial benefits of Ohtani’s contract, which might be the best deal in sports. The rich got richer, then continued to get richer.

All of this will come when MLB and the MLB Players Association sit down to negotiate the next collective bargaining agreement. The league has pushed for a true salary cap in recent years, with the Dodgers’ recent success making it an easy bogeyman, but the players’ union has been making a cap a failure for decades now.