Fantasy Football Auction Values 2026: Price the Confidence

Updated Sep 7, 2026 · live draft market.

An auction value is the ceiling on what you should pay. It moves with your budget, your scoring and whoever is still on the board. The room sets one number. The board sets another.

This page prints both, then divides one by the other, and the receipts are at the bottom where you can check my arithmetic.

How these auction values are built

Start with the room. The draft market gives you the order people are actually picking in. We turn that order into dollars with one curve fitted to the real budget: 12 teams at $200 is $2,400 across 192 roster spots, a $1 floor, and a fast decay as the picks run later. The pick-1 player prices at $65.

The whole curve sums to $2,399. The shape is steep. The top three picks eat $189. The top twelve eat $669.

Pick 60 is worth $12, pick 100 is worth $5, and by pick 150 you are down to $2. That is the room's price. The board is next.

The Week 1 projection board hands every player a projected point total in PPR scoring and a rank at his position. Divide the dollar by the projection and you get the only number that compares a $65 running back to an $8 quarterback honestly. Call it price per point. It is the whole reason this page exists, and it is why the last column on every table below is the one I read first.

The board: top 40 by market price

Auction $ is the price the current draft order implies. Projected pts and board rank come off the Week 1 board. The last column is the first divided by the fourth. Every player here carries both a price and a projection; a player the board has nothing on would carry no rank and no quotient, and none of those made this list.

(Q) next to a name means the board had him Questionable when I pulled it.

By position: where the dollars go

Quarterback

The room buys two quarterbacks and sits down. Josh Allen goes for $26 and Drake Maye for $17, then it falls off a cliff. Look at the last column though. Allen is the most expensive arm per point at $1.35, and Maye at $1.05 is second, and the board has Maye thirteenth at the position.

Jalen Hurts heads the quarterback column at 21.07 and costs eight dollars. Thirty-eight cents a point. Eight dollars against Josh Allen's twenty-six is thirty-one cents on the dollar, and Hurts is the bigger projection of the two. I've been bidding in auctions for fifteen years and I have never watched the top number at a position go that cheap against the arm the room pays most for.

Running back

This is the expensive end of the market and it is priced tightly. Everybody in the top eight runs between $2.63 and $3.29 a point, which tells you the room has argued this position into something close to efficiency. Two exceptions. James Cook at $3.29 is the priciest point in the whole top forty.

The room takes him sixth among backs; this board says fourteenth. Saquon Barkley at $40 is $2.27, the cheapest point among the backs going in the first twenty picks.

Wide receiver

Same story, tighter. The first six receivers all price between $2.75 and $3.07 a point, so pick the one who falls to you and stop agonizing. A.J. Brown is the name I'd skip: $42, sixteenth among receivers here, $2.96 a point for a man the room drafts eighth.

Tight end

And here is where the money is. Tyler Warren, Questionable, costs $10 and comes back third at the position, 82 cents a point. That price is a bet on him suiting up; if he does not play, ten dollars is what you paid to find out. Harold Fannin is $9 and fifth, at 81 cents.

Trey McBride is a fine player at $29 and he is also the only tight end in this group priced over two dollars a point. Pay Warren money and put the other nineteen dollars into a receiver.

Price per point: what a dollar actually buys

Line the four positions up by what a projected point costs at the top of each and the market's shape is obvious. Running backs and receivers cost $2.60 to $3.30 a point. Tight ends start at $2.02 and fall to 56 cents. Quarterbacks start at $1.35 and fall to 38 cents.

The room spends its money where the scoring is scarce, which is the correct instinct, applied to a scarcity that this particular week does not support.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. A cheap point is not a good player. You start one quarterback and one tight end, so a $1 arm projecting 15 does not become a $30 asset just because the division looks pretty. What it does mean is that every dollar you spend above 38 cents at quarterback is a dollar you chose not to spend at $2.90 on a receiver, and that trade should be a decision rather than a habit.

Where the house disagrees with the room

Two orderings inside the same position: the room's draft order and the board's. Where those pull furthest apart is where your targets and your fades are hiding.

The board higher than the room, so buy at or under market. Saquon Barkley goes eighteenth overall and is seventh among backs, at $40. Breece Hall, Questionable this week, goes thirty-first and is ninth, at $28. Hall is the only name on this list carrying a tag, so treat the twenty-eight dollars as a bid you place after Friday's report, not before.

Omarion Hampton goes twenty-second and is eighth, at $34. Nico Collins goes twentieth and is seventh among receivers, at $37. Tetairoa McMillan goes thirty-second and is ninth, at $27, which is $1.82 a point in a market charging $2.90 at the top.

The board lower than the room, so let somebody else pay. James Cook goes eleventh, lands fourteenth among backs, and costs $49. A.J. Brown goes seventeenth and is sixteenth among receivers, at $42.

Drake Maye is the second quarterback drafted and thirteenth on the board, at $17. Kenneth Walker goes twenty-first and is fifteenth, at $35.

Two honest limits on those lists. The board's number is a Week 1 projection, not a season one, so a player with a soft opener can rank low here and still be worth his season price. And the board does not carry every name the draft market carries; a player missing from those lists is unranked here, not blessed here.

How to use the board in the room

• Write your walk-away line before nominations. Take the price per point you are willing to pay at each position, multiply by the projection, and that is your number. Stop when the bidding crosses it. The only dollar that costs you money is the one you go past.
• Nominate the expensive points early. The room pays full price for names while budgets are full. Let it have James Cook at $3.29.
• Buy your quarterback and tight end last. The cheap end of the curve is where a top-five number at either position is being given away for under a dollar a point.
• Track the pool, not your roster. Every dollar the room spends moves the replacement price. When budgets thin out, a $20 target becomes an $11 target. Re-read the curve, not your wish list.

Scoring moves the whole base. The ADP value-tier guide shows how far the market order drifts between formats. The auction and salary-cap primer handles roster construction under a cap. The rankings page carries the live projections these prices are divided against, and it refreshes weekly.

What would change these values

The draft-market snapshot refreshes several times a day. One preseason injury or depth-chart shuffle can move a player 20 picks in a week, and the curve is steep enough that 20 picks near the top is worth $15. The board re-runs weekly, so every quotient on this page moves with it. Re-price before your draft, not after it.

The Receipts Drawer

The number: 38 cents. Jalen Hurts, $8 against 21.07. Top of the quarterback column, eighth arm off the board. Tyler Warren at 82 cents is the same trade at tight end.

Where this breaks: the room wakes up in the last hour of your draft, quarterbacks and tight ends stop going for a dollar, and the whole edge closes before you get to use it. That happens in real auctions and you will feel it happening. Watch the second quarterback go; if he clears $20 the room is not asleep and you should take yours earlier than planned. At the table, spend at the top where the market is honest, then buy your last two starters for under a dollar a point.