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Filed athletics finances

Who spends the most on total operating expenses

Every figure is read from the school's own NCAA financial report — the annual filing each Division I athletics department submits to the NCAA. Ranked by reported dollars, not by results.
11Schools ranked
FY2016Fiscal year
$510.07MCombined total operating expenses
831Reports parsed

All reported athletics operating expenses for the fiscal year.

Rank / schoolReported total operating expensesChange
01

Texas

$171.39M · $171,394,287

no prior year
02

Georgia

$116.63M · $116,633,645

no prior year
03

Boise State

$46.74M · $46,741,012

no prior year
04

Akron

$35.38M · $35,378,884

no prior year
05

App State

$31.52M · $31,523,281

no prior year
06

Texas State

$31.27M · $31,268,882

no prior year
07

Central Michigan

$29.62M · $29,618,926

no prior year
08

Georgia State

$28.08M · $28,077,647

no prior year
09

Southeast Missouri State University

$12.22M · $12,219,493

no prior year
10

Georgia Southern

$7.21M · $7,211,422

no prior year
11

Marshall

$8 · $8

no prior year
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.