Butler gets full guarantees on his 2025 money, while the team gets a thrifty option built in if they want to keep him on the roster in 2026
Just as the Commanders 2025 training camp started, we learned that backup safety and special teams player Percy Butler had signed a one-year extension with the team.
Here are the details per Over the Cap:
At the top, you can see the 2025 salary cap details, comprising Year 4 of Butler’s rookie deal.
At the bottom, you can see the new 2-year deal, which covers the ‘25 and ‘26 seasons.
Total value of extension
To calculate the value of the extension, we can subtract the 2025 cap hit of the original rookie contract from the total 2-year cap hit of the revised deal:
$5,753,255 – $3,603,255 = $2,150,000
The value of Butler’s extension, then, is $2.15m.
Base salary conversion
You can see that Butler’s 2025 base salary was reduced from $3.406m to $2.056m, a difference of $1.35m.
A ‘win’ for Butler is that his 2025 salary is now fully guaranteed, virtually guaranteeing him a roster spot this season. Not bad for a guy that many fans expected to be ‘on the bubble’ this preaseason.
Pro-rata signing bonus
At the same time, we can see that the 2025 pro-rated signing bonus amount jumped from $197,255 to $872,255, a difference of $675,000. That $675K is also the pro-rated figure for 2026.
This is the effect of converting $1.35m of Butler’s 2025 base salary into signing bonus and spreading it over the two years of the contract.
This lowers the ‘25 cap hit by $675K ($3,603,255 – $2,928,255).
Other 2026 incentives
In 2026, Butler has a $200K workout bonus. This is usually an almost-automatic bonus that is earned if the player meets a threshold for working out at the team facility.
Also in 2026, Butler has $425K in total per-game roster bonuses for a 17-game season. At the moment, that will be counted as “likely to be earned” because Butler was active for all 17 regular season games in 2024.
Bottom line
This is an interesting extension because the total added value is $2.15m, which is significantly less than the $3.4m that Butler was scheduled to earn in 2025 under his rookie deal.
My analysis of this is that the contract does a pretty good job of masking the fact that Butler took a pay cut of sorts for 2026 in that the added year gives him just over $2m in new money when he was already earning over $3.4m on the final year of his rookie contract.
What Butler got in return was 100% guarantee on that $3.4m for 2025 in the form of $1.35m converted to signing bonus and paid up front, along with a full guarantee on his remaining 2025 base salary.
The Commanders, in the meantime, gave up nothing for 2026 since the contract has no guaranteed money in that year and the team can save the full value of the $2.15m increase by cutting Butler after this season.
Both parties got something of value out of this contract, which trades guaranteed money in 2025 for a low-cost team option in 2026.