NCAA Agreed-Upon Procedures: What’s New in 2026?

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has issued its 2026 Agreed-Upon Procedures guide.

This year’s guide should come as a bit of a relief after the more substantial and time-consuming updates included in last year’s release. While the updates in the 2026 guide are much more routine, several items are worth noting — particularly those related to revenue sharing, collectives and general guidelines around allocating revenues and expenses by sport.

Here’s a summary of this year’s revisions and what they could mean for your athletics program.

Key 2026 NCAA AUP Reporting Changes

Revenue and expense allocation by sport

The introduction section to the AUP guide now includes a general statement that institutions should “allocate revenues and expenses by sport, where feasible, across all applicable reporting categories to enhance financial analysis.” Given the questions raised by many institutions around revenue share reporting by sport, this is an important clarification to consider. While helpful as a general guideline, it stops short of creating a new sport-by-sport allocation requirement specific to revenue share.

Institutional revenue share

Category 44 has been renamed from “Institutional NIL Revenue Share” to “Institutional Revenue Share,” and the definition wording has been significantly revised. The updated definition now focuses specifically on institutional revenue share payments to student-athletes, including payments from outside parties responsible for facilitating institutional revenue share on behalf of the institution.

Collectives and affiliated/outside organizations

The guide replaces the prior separate definitions of affiliated organization and supporting organization with a broader definition of an affiliated or outside organization as an organization that directly or indirectly controls, is controlled by, or is under common control of the institution or athletics department.

Notably, collectives are now listed as a potential example within this definition. However, Appendix F also adds a new Q&A explaining that institutions generally should exclude collectives from their Membership Financial Reporting Submission unless the collective is under common control with the athletics program r makes payments on behalf of the athletics program, or the institution pays funds to or receives funds from the collective. In the latter two cases, reporting should be limited to the applicable on-behalf activity or the direct transactions.

Updates to Revenue and Expense Category Definitions

Several of the 2026 changes are additional revisions meant to clarify the new post-season reporting categories that were added or revised in the 2025 AUP update. These don’t appear to create any significant new reporting requirements, but they do help clean up the category language and align the guide with the way the categories are intended to be used.

NCAA distributions and reimbursements

The guide makes several minor wording updates to the definitions of Categories 12, 12A, 12B and 12C to clarify the treatment of NCAA distributions, host revenue settlements and post-season expense reimbursements. Most notably, Category 12 now clarifies that NCAA distributions exclude postseason football, and Category 12B now points institutions to the NCAA Host Settlement Financial Report for hosting payments.

Conference distributions and post-season expense reimbursements

Categories 13 and 13A include minor clarifications noting that conference distributions related to post-season expense reimbursements should be recorded in Category 19 for football and Category 12C for all other sports.

Post-season coaching bonuses and benefits

Categories 41A and 42A were expanded to include post-season coaching benefits in addition to coaching compensation and bonuses. Category 42B also adds a minor clarification that non-football NCAA host expense settlements should be reported as reflected on the NCAA Championship Host Report.

Other General Updates

Athletic student aid: The grants-in-aid revenue distribution bylaw reference was updated from Bylaw 20.02.10 to Bylaw 20.02.11.

Division I bylaw reference: The Division I financial reporting bylaw references were updated from Bylaw 20.2.4.18 and 20.2.4.18.1 to Bylaw 20.2.4.17 and 20.2.4.17.1.

Data sharing with conferences and the College Sports Commission: The introduction section now notes that institutions may choose to share all or some of their data with their conference and/or the College Sports Commission. This does not appear to have any impact on the agreed-upon procedures, but it provides a bit of clarity around a data-sharing option that generated a lot of questions during last year’s reporting cycle.

What This Means for Athletics Programs

The changes in the 2026 AUP guide aren’t as sweeping as the 2025 update. Instead, the new guide continues to refine the framework that was put in place last year by clarifying how revenue share payments should be reported, how collective-related activity should be evaluated and how revenues and expenses should be categorized for more meaningful analysis.

As institutions prepare for the next reporting cycle, athletics departments should make sure they understand the updated Category 44 definition, evaluate whether any collective-related activity needs to be captured in the Membership Financial Report and continue building processes for allocating revenues and expenses by sport where feasible.

You can download the NCAA’s complete 2026 Agreed-Upon Procedures guide here.

James Moore’s Collegiate Athletics CPAs and advisors will continue to monitor NCAA AUP updates and other industry developments to help you make financial reporting more efficient, accurate and useful.

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