NHL Waivers and the Waiver Wire Explained

Training camp is when the waiver wire does its loudest work. Every club is cutting from a 60-plus-player camp roster to an NHL roster, and each cut involving a veteran means somebody goes on waivers and the other 31 teams get 24 hours to take him for free.

The wire is one of the league's quietest mechanisms and one of its most consequential. It runs all season, it's ordered by reverse standings, and it settles overnight.

This guide covers who has to clear waivers, who's exempt, what happens inside the claim window, and how teams use the wire as a tactical tool at camp and at the deadline.

What NHL waivers are

When a team wants to send a player who isn't waiver-exempt down to the AHL, it can't just do it. The player has to be exposed to every other club first. The rule exists to stop wealthy teams from stockpiling NHL-quality depth in the minors, by giving weaker teams a chance to claim those players for nothing.

The mechanics:

• The team submits the player to waivers by 2 p.m. Eastern.
• Every other club has until 2 p.m. Eastern the next day to file a claim.
• If more than one team claims him, the club with the worst current points percentage wins.
• If nobody claims him, he clears and can be assigned to the AHL.

The claiming team takes the full contract — same term, same cap hit, same salary structure — and gives up nothing. No picks, no prospects. It just absorbs the money, which is exactly why claims are rarer than they used to be.

Who has to clear waivers, and who doesn't

Exemption is governed by two things: age at first professional contract and games played. Whichever runs out first ends the exemption.

First signed at	Skater exemption
18	5 seasons or 160 NHL games
19	4 seasons or 160 NHL games
20-24	Shorter at each successive age
25 or older	Essentially none — one season or one game

Two details that matter more than the table:

• Goalies get a longer runway at every age. A goalie who first signs at 18 is exempt for six seasons or 80 NHL games.
• From age 20 on, all professional games count — AHL games included, not just NHL games. This is why a prospect who spends three full years in the minors can lose exemption without ever being an NHL regular.

There's also a wrinkle for the youngest players: an 18- or 19-year-old who plays 11 or more NHL games in a season has his exemption window cut down — to three seasons for a skater, four for a goalie. It's the waiver-side echo of the nine-game entry-level slide rule, and it's a second reason teams are careful about that tenth game.

For a general manager, the practical question every September is simply: who do we have to expose to send down? That answer drives the last week of camp.

What happens when a player gets claimed

Two things happen at once:

1. The claiming team gets the player and the contract. Same AAV, same term, effective immediately. No trade, no negotiation.
2. The original team loses the player and the cap hit. Nothing comes back, but the space is freed.

Claims used to be common — several a week in October. They've thinned out in the cap era because most teams don't have the room to absorb an unplanned contract. When claims do happen they cluster at the cheap end of the market: veteran depth players whose cap hit a tight team can actually fit.

A claimed player can be put back on waivers by his new team, and occasionally a player moves twice in a week. Each claim is final until he's exposed again.

Re-entry waivers, and why they're gone

Before 2013 the league ran re-entry waivers. A veteran who had cleared waivers and spent real time in the AHL had to be exposed a second time before he could play NHL games again — and the claiming team only paid half his salary.

That rule was scrapped in the 2013 CBA and hasn't come back. Today a player who clears can move between the NHL and AHL freely, subject to a lapse after enough time on the NHL roster or enough NHL games. Nothing in the 2026 agreement changed the waiver system.

How teams use waivers strategically

At training camp

This is the annual peak. Every contender is choosing between keeping a young player on the NHL roster and exposing a veteran to get him to the AHL. Teams usually accept the risk, because losing a depth veteran for free to a worse team costs less than carrying the wrong player at the wrong cap hit for 84 games.

The other camp calculation is money. Burying a contract in the AHL only removes the lesser of the player's cap hit or the league minimum salary plus $375,000 from the books, so a mid-salary veteran stays expensive even after he's sent down — and he has to survive waivers to get there at all. See the salary cap guide for how that math shapes the rest of the roster.

Mid-season

Most in-season movement involves exempt prospects, so waivers never come up. The hard decisions arrive when a team wants to demote a struggling veteran who isn't exempt and has to weigh the roster benefit against the odds of a rival claim.

At the trade deadline

The deadline has a waiver wrinkle: a player claimed within a set window before the deadline can't be flipped again at the deadline, which stops teams from using the wire as a backdoor trade chain. The league publishes the exact cutoff date each season. It's why you see a burst of waiver activity in the days just before deadline week, as teams get their moves in ahead of the freeze.

Why the wire matters

Most fans never see waivers mentioned in a highlight package, but the wire shapes every team's bottom six. A club that lands two useful claims a year — a fourth-line center, a third-pair defenseman, a backup goalie — has effectively been handed free NHL players. A club that loses a useful depth piece because it had to choose between him and a younger asset has paid a quiet tax on its own cap planning.

When depth transactions start flying in late September or the week before the deadline, that's the wire working in the background.

The bottom line

Waivers are a free-agent market that runs inside the league all season, ordered by reverse standings and settled in 24 hours. The system exists to stop NHL talent from being hoarded in the minors, and it forces every general manager to answer the same question at camp, at midseason and at the deadline: is this player worth the risk of losing him for nothing?

For the contract structure behind most waiver-exempt players, see the entry-level contracts guide. For what happens when those contracts expire, see UFA vs RFA.