Who spends the most on recruiting
Transportation, lodging, and meals for prospective student-athletes and for staff on official and unofficial visits.
Georgia
$5.17M · $5,172,890
Texas
$2.83M · $2,833,372
Virginia
$1.90M · $1,900,260
Central Michigan
$659K · $658,515
Buffalo
$630K · $630,172
Georgia State
$480K · $479,874
Northern Illinois
$282K · $282,049
UT Arlington
$227K · $227,164
Montana State University Billings
$66K · $65,770
How to read these rankings
These figures come from filed NCAA financial reports collected in our document corpus and parsed from the report text. 831 reports parsed cleanly; 56 could not be read and are absent from these rankings, so a school missing from a year has not necessarily reported nothing.
Football and basketball views come from the report's per-sport allocation tables. They cover recruiting and team travel, not aviation alone: commercial airfare, buses, hotels, meals, and other eligible costs share the same lines. A school can also leave some expenses unallocated.
Private universities have no public-disclosure obligation and generally do not appear. Fiscal years are not uniform — most close June 30, but some schools close on a different date, so a single “FY” column compares slightly different periods. Schools also categorize inconsistently between reports, so treat cross-school gaps of a few percent as noise rather than signal.