IPL Retention, Season by Season Guide

A retained player costs the franchise a fixed deduction from its auction purse. The deduction follows a set slab for each retention slot, and it can differ from the player's actual salary. This is the distinction readers most often get wrong: the salary is what the player is paid, but the deduction is what the franchise cannot spend at the auction. The deduction is the budget-relevant number.

The 2025 mega auction is the cleanest example. Each franchise had a 120 crore purse. The retention slabs were 18 crore for the first capped retention, 14 for the second, 11 for the third, then 18 and 14 for the fourth and fifth, with uncapped retentions costing 4 crore each. A team retaining the full six players had 79 crore blocked before the auction began and walked in with 41 crore to spend. Retention is not free, and at the top end it is deliberately expensive: the fourth and fifth slots cost as much as the first two, to push teams toward the auction instead.

There is a further wrinkle. If a player's agreed salary is higher than the slab for his slot, the higher figure is deducted. The slab is a floor, not a ceiling. A franchise cannot retain its captain cheaply and pretend the deduction is small: the rules charge the maximum of the two numbers.

Retention rules are rewritten before every mega auction. The numbers below are the slabs and limits for each cycle, from the IPL's regulations for that season.

Two earlier cycles set the pattern. The inaugural 2008 auction had no retention framework at all: squads were built from scratch, with marquee "icon" players signed directly. The 2011 mega introduced the first retention window, and the shape has been renegotiated every cycle since.

The first retention rules were priced in dollars against a $9 million salary cap: $1.8 million for the first player retained, $1.3 million for the second, $900,000 for the third and $500,000 for the fourth, with a maximum of three Indians among the four. Using all four slots cost $4.5 million against the cap, half the entire budget, before a single auction bid. Contemporary owners complained loudly: the pricing meant retention only made sense for genuine superstars, and everyone else should go back into the pool.

The responses defined franchises for a decade. Mumbai Indians kept their spine: Tendulkar at $1.8m, Harbhajan at $1.3m, Pollard at $900,000, Malinga at $500,000. Chennai kept Dhoni, Raina, Vijay and Morkel, the core of their early titles. Royal Challengers kept exactly one player: Virat Kohli, at $1.8 million. It was the beginning of the never-auctioned legend.

And Kolkata Knight Riders kept nobody. They released their entire squad, including icon Sourav Ganguly, and rebuilt from zero around Gautam Gambhir, bought for $2.4 million. It was the boldest use of the retention window ever: the decision that retention, at those prices, was for other teams. Two championships later, it looked like genius.

The 2014 cycle allowed five retentions at 12.5, 9.5, 7.5, 5.5 and 5.5 crore, and introduced the Right to Match card as retention's companion (see our guide to the Right to Match card). Mumbai kept five: Rohit Sharma at 12.5 crore, Malinga at 9.5, Pollard at 7.5, Harbhajan at 5.5 and Ambati Rayudu, the core of a team that would dominate the decade's second half. The lesson of 2014 was that the league had decided continuity was good for business, and was willing to let rich teams stay rich to get it.

The 2018 cycle cut direct retentions to three (15, 11 and 7 crore) and paired them with two RTM cards: keep your three most irreplaceable players at fixed prices, and buy back two more at market prices. Mumbai's choices showed the logic: Rohit at 15, Hardik Pandya at 11, Jasprit Bumrah at 7, the three pillars. Then they used their RTM cards at the auction to reclaim Kieron Pollard for 5.4 crore and Krunal Pandya for 8.8 crore, the latter the most expensive uncapped buy in IPL history at the time. Retention chose the spine; RTM recovered the flesh.

The 2022 mega auction was the biggest reset yet: ten teams, with two new franchises in Lucknow and Ahmedabad, a 90-crore purse, four retention slots, and no RTM cards at all. The slabs were 16, 12, 8 and 6 crore for four players (42 total), 15, 11 and 7 for three, 14 and 10 for two, 14 for one, and 4 crore for an uncapped retention. The two new teams were allowed to pick three players each from the released pool before the auction.

Twenty-seven players were retained by the eight existing franchises, and the lists read like a roll of the league's royalty. Chennai kept Jadeja at 16, Dhoni at 12, Moeen Ali at 8 and Ruturaj Gaikwad at 6. Mumbai kept Rohit at 16, Bumrah at 12, Suryakumar Yadav at 8 and Pollard at 6. Delhi kept Pant, Axar Patel, Prithvi Shaw and Anrich Nortje. Punjab, in contrast, kept only two: Mayank Agarwal and the uncapped Arshdeep Singh, at 4 crore. Punjab were choosing the auction over continuity, and they walked into the mega with money to burn. Three years later, they would spend 18 crore of it buying Arshdeep back with an RTM card: a neat parable about the price of letting go.

The 2025 structure folded retention and RTM into a single six-player allowance (maximum five capped, maximum two uncapped), with the deliberately punishing 18/14/11/18/14 slabs. Notice the direction of travel across the whole table. The league keeps making continuity more expensive at the margin and pushing more players into the auction pool, while giving franchises flexible tools to keep the players they truly cannot lose. The 2025 structure is the most generous and the most expensive at once: keep anyone, but pay for it.

Retention does not happen in a vacuum; the auction pool it draws from keeps changing shape. CricArcade's auction data shows the capped/uncapped split shifting hard: 108 capped lots against 96 uncapped in 2022, then 119 capped against 283 uncapped in 2023. Franchises are retaining from a pool that is increasingly young, Indian, and uncapped, which is one reason the later retention slabs bite: the players worth keeping are worth more. The uncapped retention price, 4 crore in both 2022 and 2025, is the league's quiet subsidy for developing young talent: keep your discovery cheap, or watch someone else buy him.

Retention and the Right to Match card are alternative continuity tools, and the 2025 structure makes the tradeoff explicit: six slots to be split between the two however a franchise likes. Retain a player and he never enters the auction; his price is the slab. Release him and use RTM, and his price is whatever the market decides, matched at the end. The first is certainty at a fixed cost; the second is flexibility at a market cost. Which one a franchise chooses, player by player, is the whole strategy of the pre-auction window.

The master strategists mix them. Retain the players whose auction price would exceed their slab: the Kohlis, the Bumrahs, the proven match-winners the room would fight over. Release the players whose market price might come in below their slab, and RTM them back cheaper, or let them go if the room disagrees with your valuation. Every retention list is a set of bets about what the auction room will do. The franchises that read the room best win the auction before it starts.

Retention limits, slabs and purse figures follow the IPL's regulations and announcements for each season, as reported at the time. The 2011 figures are in US dollars against that season's $9 million salary cap; later cycles are in crore rupees. Capped/uncapped lot splits are from CricArcade's IPL auction data (longlist figures). The 2026 season's records were the latest in the dataset at the time of writing.

Retention is one part of a wider system. For how the rest of an auction runs, start with our guide to how IPL auctions work. The difference between a mega auction, where retention matters, and a mini auction, where it barely applies, is the subject of mega auctions and mini auctions. The buy-back option that pairs with retention is covered in the Right to Match card, and the other big constraint on a retained squad, how many overseas players it can carry, is explained in overseas player rules in the IPL.

• IPL 2025 auction retention rules: six retentions per team, Right to Match returns (ESPNcricinfo)
• IPL franchises allowed to retain up to five players, 2018 (ESPNcricinfo)
• IPL 2022 auction purse swells to INR 90 crore (ESPNcricinfo)
• MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah retained by IPL franchises, 2022 (ESPNcricinfo)
• CricArcade IPL auction archive: every auction, 2008 to 2026
• Figures computed with scripts/build-guide-facts.ts over the archive's scorecards

• Why a Captain Matters: Bowling changes, fields at the death, and holding a side together in a chase: what a T20 captain actually decides, and why the vice-captaincy is a real choice.
• How IPL Auctions Work: Purse caps, retention and overseas-player limits: the mechanics behind a T20 franchise auction, and how the game puts you through the same calls.
• How Real Careers Become In-Game Ratings: Every player is built from real career numbers. How an average and a strike rate become a rating, and the trick that makes a higher rating actually buy survival.
• Why Your 99-Rated Star Still Gets Out: Peak seasons in T20 cricket look almost superhuman. Why CricArcade keeps its very best players clearly great without letting them become un-dismissable.
• Play T20 Franchise Manager, or browse every guide.