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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.
9Schools ranked
FY2019Fiscal year
$627.26MCombined total operating expenses
831Reports parsed

All reported athletics operating expenses for the fiscal year.

Rank / schoolReported total operating expensesChange
01

Texas

$204.23M · $204,234,897

−1% YoY
02

Georgia

$143.30M · $143,299,554

+7% YoY
03

Virginia

$112.62M · $112,621,238

no prior year
04

Buffalo

$45.93M · $45,933,053

+13% YoY
05

Georgia State

$38.40M · $38,399,491

+18% YoY
06

Central Michigan

$33.64M · $33,642,870

+3% YoY
07

Northern Illinois

$26.48M · $26,483,239

no prior year
08

UT Arlington

$17.37M · $17,371,036

+9% YoY
09

Montana State University Billings

$5.27M · $5,274,505

−2% YoY
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.