The Dallas Cowboys have a lot of work to do in order to be compliant with the NFL’s salary cap for 2026. With a deadline of March 12, the team is currently $56 million over the $301.2 million cap. They’ll need to rearrange a few cap impacts through extensions, restructures or releases, but Dallas will be under the cap by the start of the new league year.

They’ll of course need to solve more than $56 million worth of conflicts if they want to be players in free agency and add talent to their current roster. And from there, they’ll need to have enough room to sign their rookie class.

Dallas, thanks to having two first-round picks in the Top 20, but no more selections until No. 112, currently are set to spend $13.7 million in cap hits for 2026 salaries for their rookies. They don’t need to create that much additional space, though.

Each NFL team has a rookie pool based on their picks, and Over The Cap has calculated that number based on comp pick projections that will be finalized over the next week. But because of how the offseason cap is calculated, not every draft pick is going to add to the compliance calculation.

In the NFL offseason, when teams can carry up to 90 players on their roster, only the Top 51 salaries count towards cap compliance. Those numbers, plus dead money from players who had bonus money pushed beyond their time on the teams roster, compose that actual number.

So any player whose deal lands him outside of a team’s Top 51, doesn’t have a material impact on the cap. And when players do land inside that Top 51, they are pushing another player out of the calculation; so only the difference between those cap hits is what gets “added” to the cap.

With Dallas’ current projection of having two comp picks (fifth and sixth round) in addition to their five other picks, they will add $7.5 million of cap hits based on their rookie draft picks.