American football’s elite NFL drew strong viewership levels across the 2025-26 regular season, which has become the second-most-watched campaign on record.
Across the regular season, the league averaged 18.7 million viewers per game broadcast window.
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This included all nationally telecast games except for the YouTube-exclusive season opener in Brazil between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs, which supposedly used flawed methodology in its measurements, and as such was discounted.
That 18.7 million figure is up 10% year-on-year on the figure from the 2024-25 campaign, and 7% on the year prior.
Crucially, it also makes the 2025-26 regular season the most-watched since 1989, when the record average of 19 million was set.
Each of the league’s five broadcast packages grew in viewership across the campaign.
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By GlobalDataNBC, 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 $111 billion in total worth.
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 viewership surge was led by Amazon’s Prime Video over-the-top service, which experienced its fourth-straight season of audience growth for its weekly Thursday Night Football, averaging 15.3 million (up 16%), the highest for any season of Thursday Night Football since the Thursday broadcast window was established in 2006, even including a season when the window was on linear TV, illustrating the growth and normalization of OTT viewership.
While its coverage grew more than any other, the mantle of most-watched NFL coverage network went to NBC, which averaged 23.5 million viewers (up 9%) for each Sunday Night Football window from a combination of its linear networks and the Peacock streaming service, which was also the highest number since it returned to the NFL broadcast landscape in 2006.
Close behind was Paramount-owned CBS, which drew 21.25 million per gameweek (up 11%) across its windows, including 25.83 million in each late Sunday doubleheader window, which was the highest of any individual broadcast window through the season.
Fox, which shares that Sunday late doubleheader slot (CBS and Fox alternate singleheader and doubleheader weeks to conform to NFL rules) averaged 25.28 million in the lucrative broadcast slot, meanwhile, up 9%, but across all broadcast windows averaged a lower 19.6 million, which was still also up 9% on 2024-25.
Disney-owned ESPN and ABC, which do not broadcast Sunday games, drew a combined 16.5 million (up 10%) across the season, including 15.8 million across their exclusive Monday Night Football slate.
This continued strong performance showcases the NFL’s stranglehold on US TV audiences, and similarly demonstrates how important streaming has become, with the likes of Peacock, Disney’s Disney+, Paramount’s Paramount+, Netflix, and Prime Video all notching strong gains as well.
Looking forward, NBC will broadcast the upcoming 2026 Super Bowl, taking place in early February after the NFL's post-season playoffs, which will doubtless be the most-watched game of the season, and potentially the most-watched telecast of 2026 in the US.
