5 Key Takeaways from the 2025 NCAA AUP Season

For many athletics business offices, the fiscal year 2025 NCAA Agreed-Upon Procedures (AUP) season felt heavier than usual. The reporting itself was familiar, but the context was not. Late-breaking changes to the AUP categories, heightened scrutiny driven by the House settlement and ongoing staffing constraints combined to make this cycle more complex than prior years.

Working with more than 30 Division I institutions (from the largest Power 4 programs to mid-majors without football), a few themes showed up consistently. Here are five key takeaways that stood out across this AUP season and what they may signal heading into fiscal year 2026.

#1: Updated AUP categories were directionally right, but timing and clarity created stress.

The NCAA’s updates to the 2025 AUP categories were largely well received. Many of the changes reflected feedback the industry had been advocating for, particularly around postseason reporting and facilities costs. In practice, however, the late release of the guidance compressed timelines and introduced friction.

Several questions surfaced repeatedly as a result of these changes:

• Do conference championships qualify as postseason for expense reporting? The NCAA’s intent was for the new postseason categories to capture NCAA postseason activity only, not conference tournaments.
• Should operating costs associated with revenue share be included in the revenue share category? That category is intended to capture payments to student-athletes only. Technology, personnel and other infrastructure costs tied to administering revenue share remain operating expenses within the other expense categories.
• Should NIL collectives be treated as affiliated entities? Generally, no. The prevailing rule is that most collectives do not qualify as “affiliated or outside organizations” because they are not under common control with the institution’s intercollegiate athletics program or aren’t making payments on behalf of athletics. However, direct fund flows between athletics and a collective would be picked up in the appropriate revenue or expense category.

The takeaway was not resistance to change, but a reminder that timing and precision matter when changes intersect with an already burdensome process.

#2: Institutional support is under a brighter spotlight than ever

Institutional support remains one of the grayest areas in the NCAA AUP, and 2025 brought a more intentional and cautious approach from both athletics and campus finance teams. With the House settlement driving headlines and scrutiny from faculty, students and external stakeholders, institutions are paying closer attention to how different forms of support are structured, documented and reported. Small decisions like shifting who pays for a particular function or how services are provided can materially affect how support is categorized.

Many schools large and small underestimated how much internal alignment this would require. Athletics and central finance often needed to revisit assumptions and ensure everyone understood how pulling one lever could ripple through the AUP and broader financial disclosures.

#3: Conference distribution reporting remains inconsistent across the Power 4.

One of the more persistent challenges in 2025 was inconsistent reporting of conference distributions, even among institutions within the same conference. Differences emerged in:

• Allocation methodologies between media rights revenue (Category 11), post season generated revenue (Category 13A) and other conference distributions (Category 13).
• Treatment of conference expenses and reporting of those expenses with conference distributions.

The NCAA’s MFRS FAQs clarify an important point: Conference distributions should be reported net, with conference expenses offsetting revenue rather than being reported gross with a corresponding expense. The MFRS is designed to capture the operating revenues and expenses of the athletic department, not the conference. While most institutions within a given conference ultimately aligned with one another, each conference tended to provide different reporting guidance to its members.

Questions also arose around how to treat conference-level legal expenses tied to House settlement back damages. Because the defendants in the case were the NCAA and conferences (not the individual schools) the settlement economics do not belong to the institutions. As a result, those legal costs follow the same treatment as other conference expenses, and conference distributions should not be grossed up to reflect them.

Conferences generally provided their members with sufficient detail and guidance to support consistent allocation of conference revenues among the revenue categories. However, the responsibility for allocating conference expenses as offsets to those revenues ultimately rested with each institution. Similarly, decisions regarding the allocation of conference distributions across sports were typically made at the institution level. This contributed additional variability in reporting.

#4: Scholarship testing was harder than expected.

Scholarship testing is never the easiest part of the AUP, but this year it proved especially challenging. Compliance teams have spent the past year operating in a world reshaped by the House settlement, and many have understandably moved away from thinking in terms of equivalencies. Re-engaging with equivalency-based testing required a mental reset. In several cases, documentation existed but was not organized in a way that mapped cleanly to the AUP testing requirements. The result was additional back-and-forth late in the process, under a tight deadline.

#5: The process itself remains a pain point.

Even in a so-called normal year, the AUP is not anyone’s favorite exercise. 2025 added a few more weights to the bar. For many teams, the AUP felt less like a compliance exercise and more like a capacity test. Institutions that relied heavily on manual spreadsheets and ad hoc processes felt that strain most.

A growing number of institutions took a different approach by investing in more standardized, system-driven reporting workflows. Several have implemented DAPORA, which centralizes NCAA reporting data and aligns it more closely with day-to-day financial operations. The result is not just a smoother AUP season, but better visibility throughout the year, fewer last-minute surprises and less reliance on heroic effort from already stretched teams.

As revenue sharing, external scrutiny and reporting expectations continue to intersect, that kind of operational resilience is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a baseline expectation.

What This Means Heading Into FY 2026

If 2025 felt heavy, 2026 is unlikely to feel lighter. Many of the dynamics that made this AUP season challenging are not one-time events, they are structural shifts. A few implications are already coming into focus.

Less tolerance for interpretation gaps.

With revenue sharing now embedded in operations and public scrutiny heightened, gray areas in NCAA reporting will continue to attract attention. Institutions should expect more questions around institutional support, revenue share and category alignment.

Earlier coordination across campus will matter more.

Schools will feel unnecessary pressure if they wait until late spring to align athletics and central finance when there are strategies to shift how athletics and the institution support each other. The most efficient AUP processes in 2025 were driven by institutions that collaborated with each other proactively. With the addition of revenue share expenses to athletics budgets in fiscal year 2026, institutional support will be more necessary than ever. It will be critical for campus stakeholders to understand the reporting implications of enhanced institutional support.

Conference reporting inconsistencies may persist.

Unless conferences further standardize guidance, schools should be prepared to document their methodology clearly and apply it consistently year over year. Institutions should also educate their conference CFO offices about the NCAA financial reporting rules so that conference reporting is apples-to-apples with the reporting requirements.

Capacity constraints are not going away.

Staffing shortages and competing priorities inside athletics business offices remain real. Manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes will only become more fragile as reporting expectations expand.

The takeaway is not that institutions need perfect answers today, but that they benefit from clearer structure, better documentation and fewer one-off workarounds before the next AUP cycle begins.

Across the institutions we work with, the common denominator among smoother AUP cycles is not size, conference affiliation or budget. It is intentionality around data, process and ownership. As expectations continue to rise, many athletic departments are rethinking how they manage NCAA reporting more broadly — not just to get through the AUP, but to have real-time visibility into the numbers and manage their department budgets more strategically.

If you would like support in preparing for your NCAA AUP, reach out to the James Moore Collegiate Athletics team today. We are one of the most experienced collegiate athletics CPA and consulting firms in the country, supporting more programs with their NCAA AUP than any other firm. We’re here to help you not only get it right, but to deliver insights, operational support and future-focused strategies that drive results.

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