American football’s NFL has set viewership records for its slate of Thanksgiving Day games this year, with the Dallas Cowboys' thrilling 31-28 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs becoming the league’s most-watched regular-season game ever.
The late afternoon game on the CBS network averaged 57.2 million viewers – surpassing the previous high of 42.1 million for the New York Giants-Cowboys on Thanksgiving in 2022.
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National network Fox had initially set a new record earlier in the day for its coverage of the Green Bay Packers vs. Detroit Lions, which drew 47.7 million viewers and became the most-watched early Thanksgiving game on record, up 27% from last year's Chicago Bears-Lions game (the previous recordholder).
The average viewership across all three games – including Cincinnati Bengals vs. Baltimore Ravens – was 44.7 million, the highest Thanksgiving Day average on record (records date back to 1988).
The figure surpasses the previous high of 34.5 million set last year and marks the fourth consecutive year the NFL has set a Thanksgiving Day viewership record.
The primetime game on NBC between the Bengals and Ravens averaged 28.4 million viewers, up 7% from the 2024 primetime Thanksgiving Day game between the Miami Dolphins and Packers.
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By GlobalDataDigital streaming across platforms for the three games delivered an average minute audience of 2.2 million – the highest for the US holiday and up 58% from last year.
The NFL has been seeing an upward trend in viewing figures throughout the 2025 season.
The league set an International Games viewership record by averaging 6.2 million viewers in six games from Dublin, Berlin, Madrid, and London.
An average of 17.7 million viewers have watched each game this season, a 6% rise on 2024.
The NFL's single-game record is 127.7 million viewers from the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl triumph over the Chiefs in February.
NBC, Fox, CBS, ESPN/ABC, and Amazon hold domestic NFL rights in a deal that began at the start of the 2023 season and runs through 2033 – the combined deals are reportedly valued at more than $100 billion.
CNBC recently reported that the NFL could begin renegotiating its media rights deals as soon as 2026, four years ahead of the current agreement's opt-out clause.
The league’s regular season will conclude on January 4, with the playoffs to begin the following week.
