Current NFL Referee CBA expires May 31, and the league is eying changes

So a bit of an important note by the NFL when the next season rolls around was dropped yesterday. This season will be the last of the existing agreement between the league and the NFL Referees Association. It is set to expire at the end of May.

A memo was set out yesterday by NFL vice president of football operations Troy Vincent and general counsel Larry Ferazani.

They said that they have been in talks to extend the current agreement since the Summer of 2024, but they have been unsuccessful.

NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent informed teams today that the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Referees Association ends in May, making this is the final season of the agreement. The league now views this as an…

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) December 10, 2025

What Will Happen?

It is time to hire NFL referees full-time. This should not even be a discussion. Let them focus on this all year round.

Every single year you hear people say that they need to be hired full-time because of how bad some of these calls are, and it is not because they don’t know what they are doing, it is because they can’t focus on this stuff all season long.

It will never be perfect, nothing in life is, but it would be great to see more consistency and not what we see on a year-to-year basis.

One of the changes the league is bargaining for is a longer probationary period to assess new officials and “to gain flexibility in removing those who are underperforming.” Well, you know what can fix that? Just hire them full-time, and there would be no need for more flexibility to do this if you had the ones you trust full-time.

In my honest opinion, we will never get full-time referees, and we will be back here once the new contract ends talking about how they should do it. Heck, it will be week one of the new season, and we will be complaining about how bad some of these calls are.

Remember, if they can’t come to an agreement by the time the new season starts in 2026, we will have to go back down the road we did in 2012. That was so bad.

They had a lockout to start the year, and did not return until September 26th, after the controversial “Fail Mary” game between the Packers and Seahawks. Please do not let us have to go back down that route.

This is a bit of a big deal since they have been working on it since last summer and still can’t find common ground. Just be careful what you wish for NFL, this could get ugly.