Women’s Championship clubs vote to go fully professional by 2028 with £26,000 minimum salary

The 12 clubs of the Women’s Championship have voted to make the second tier of English women’s football fully professional from the start of the 2028-29 season, with a minimum salary of £26,000 and a requirement that every player be contracted for at least 35 hours a week.

The vote, which passed 10-2 at a meeting of the league’s board on Friday, follows a survey of players conducted by the Professional Footballers’ Association in the spring that found 41% of Championship players had a second job and that the lowest-paid were earning around £6,000 a year while training four evenings a week.

Under the plan, clubs will be required to meet the minimum salary and hours from July 2028, with a transitional year in which the floor is set at £18,000. The league, which has been run by a company jointly owned by the WSL and Championship clubs since 2024, will provide a central fund of £9m over three years, raised from the new broadcast deal and a levy on WSL clubs, to help smaller clubs meet the cost.

“This is the moment the second tier stops being a place where players subsidise the game with their own time,” said Carys Pritchard, the league’s chief executive. “We have had clubs promoted from this division who were effectively part-time and clubs relegated into it who were full-time and could not afford to stay that way. Neither of those things is sustainable.”

The two clubs who voted against are understood to be a Midlands club and a club in the north-east, both of which are owned by men’s clubs outside the Premier League and both of which have warned they may be unable to meet the cost without additional support. The north-east club’s general manager, Paul Ferris, said his club “supports the principle entirely and has said so for three years”, but that “a principle that bankrupts half the division is not a principle, it is a cliff”.

Championship wage bills currently range from about £300,000 a year to more than £3m. The PFA, which has campaigned for a minimum wage in the division since 2022, said the vote was “overdue but welcome” and that it would press for the figure to be index-linked. Its women’s football lead, Dr Amaka Nwosu, said the £26,000 floor was “roughly what a newly qualified teacher earns, and no one thinks teachers are overpaid”.

The decision does not affect the third-tier National League, where clubs remain amateur or semi-professional, and where several have already said they will struggle to attract promotion-standard players if the gap to the Championship widens further. A review of the third tier is due to report in the spring.

For the players the change will come, by the league’s own timetable, roughly five years after the WSL went fully professional and 11 years after the first demands for it were made. “I will be 31 by then,” said one Championship midfielder, who asked not to be named because her club had not authorised her to speak. “It is great. I just wish it had been great a bit sooner.”