Class Action Lawsuit Claims June 2026 NCAA Age-Based Rule Unfairly Limits Collegiate Athlete Eligibility

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) newly adopted age-based eligibility rule unlawfully restricts competition by limiting many college athletes’ opportunities to compete, receive athletic scholarships, and earn compensation through name-image-likeness (NIL) deals and direct revenue-sharing payments.

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The 36-page complaint explains that the NCAA’s age-based rule, adopted on June 23, 2026, generally replaced the organization’s eligibility framework for most athletes with a rigid age-based system that bars otherwise eligible collegiate athletes from competing solely because of their age.

According to the lawsuit, the new rule unlawfully restricts competition in the market for Division I athletes’ services by reducing opportunities to play, earn compensation, and increase their value to professional sports teams.

The suit relays that the age-based rule came during a fundamentally distinct era of college athletics in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s seismic 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, which rejected the broad reliance on “amateurism” as justification for compensation restrictions and paved the way to allow athletes to profit off the use of their names, images, and likenesses (NIL). More recently, the filing describes that the 2025 House settlement authorized D-I collegiate institutions to pay athletes directly through a revenue-sharing process, making an additional year of eligibility substantially more valuable to athletes than in years past.

According to the complaint, NCAA athletes for nearly 50 years operated under a “Four-in-Five Rule,” which allowed them to compete in four full seasons over a five-year eligibility window. The case says that the system accounted for injuries, development, adjustments to college academics, and other career-interrupting circumstances outside of an athlete’s control.

However, the case reiterates that the NCAA’s new rule instead starts a five-year eligibility clock granting five years of eligibility when an athlete first enrolls or with the academic year following their 19th birthday, whichever occurs first. The suit contends that this cutoff can cause athletes who delay college to work, care for family members or face other life circumstances to lose years of sports eligibility before even entering college.

“The NCAA’s rush to implement an ostensibly one-size-fits all age-based eligibility rule does not fit all but, instead, simply imposes a new and different set of unreasonable and arbitrary restrictions that arbitrarily and disparately cut short college athletes’ ability to compete and earn NIL,” the filing charges.

The complaint alleges that the age rule also fails to offer waivers for circumstances outside of an athlete’s control—like injury—and only provides exceptions for pregnancy, religious missions, and military duty. As such, affected athletes may be deprived not only of playing time but access to scholarships, NIL income and revenue-sharing compensation.

Furthermore, the lawsuit challenges the NCAA’s implementation of the rule, alleging that athletes who finished their fourth season of competition during the 2025-2026 academic year were denied the benefits of a fifth year, while current athletes who have not yet completed a fourth year have the opportunity to play under the four-in-five or age-based rule.

According to the complaint, the NCAA restrictions at issue are not about preserving amateurism or “advancing any legitimate procompetitive goal.” The case contends that the NCAA has already abandoned that rationale by permitting compensation via NIL and revenue sharing, and by recognizing multiple exceptions to the age rule in principle.

“Notably, and not accidentally, when it comes to restraining competition and establishing rules that ostensibly are intended to protect amateurism or the principles of college competition, the NCAA has decided it is the athletes, not other profit-recognizing wings of the market, that have to literally pay the price, further exemplifying that the NCAA’s justifications are pretextual,” the complaint asserts.

The plaintiff, a basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley, says he exhausted his fourth year of eligibility and graduated in 2026. According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff would have been eligible for an additional fifth year of competition under the NCAA’s new framework but was excluded because the organization declined to apply the rule retroactively, depriving him and many other athletes of opportunities to earn additional revenue.

The NCAA class action lawsuit seeks to represent all Division I student athletes who exhausted their fourth year of athletics at the end of the 2025-2026 academic year and were ineligible for a fifth year of competition under the age-based rule adopted on June 24, 2026, or who have forfeited/will forfeit eligibility because the age-based rule does not allow for waivers other than pregnancy, active-duty service and official religious missions.

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