DraftKings Week 1 NFL DFS Pricing: First Look At Salaries And Values (2026)

DraftKings Week 1 NFL DFS pricing dropped on July 31, and we pulled the full main-slate board straight from DraftKings' own data on August 1: 715 priced players across 12 Sunday games, topped by Jahmyr Gibbs at $8,000 and bottoming out at the $2,000 minimum. A first-look board like this is DraftKings telling you how it sees the 2026 season before a single snap, and this one has a very distinct shape: a running back on top of everything, a flattened quarterback tier, a tight end position that falls off a cliff after two names, and a massive cheap bottom. Every early edge in Week 1 NFL DFS roster construction comes from that shape, and by the end of this piece we will spend all $50,000 of the salary cap on one legal lineup built from these exact numbers. One caveat before any of it: this is the August 1 snapshot. DraftKings can and does reprice players between now and kickoff weekend, so we will re-check the board as Week 1 gets close.

The Quick Answer

DraftKings Week 1 pricing went live on July 31, 2026 for a 12-game Sunday main slate that kicks off September 13. Jahmyr Gibbs is the most expensive player at $8,000, quarterback pricing is compressed with Josh Allen topping the position at just $7,000, and 547 of the 715 players cost $4,000 or less. The full position-by-position breakdown, the values worth circling six weeks early, and a legal $50,000 lineup built entirely from this board are below.

Jahmyr Gibbs At $8,000 Tops The Entire Week 1 Board

The headline of this board is positional, not personal: a running back is the most expensive player on the slate, ahead of every wide receiver and every quarterback. Here is the top of the RB column.

The row that matters most is the first one. Gibbs at $8,000 is not just RB1 money; he costs $1,000 more than the most expensive quarterback on the slate and $200 more than Ja'Marr Chase, the top wide receiver at $7,800. Five backs (Gibbs, Robinson, Taylor, James Cook III and Chase Brown) are priced above every QB on the board. DraftKings is planting a flag that elite running back volume is the scarcest asset in Week 1, and any lineup that wants Gibbs has to earn him somewhere else on the roster. Hold that thought, because the position that funds him is coming up.

Week 1 QB Pricing Is Compressed, And That Changes How You Build

What makes the Gibbs tag playable is the position below it: the quarterback board is flat.

Only $1,000 separates Allen from the eighth-priced Goff, and the band just below is stuffed with projected starters: Baker Mayfield at $5,900, Trevor Lawrence at $5,800, Jordan Love at $5,700, down through C.J. Stroud at $5,200 and Kirk Cousins at $5,000. DraftKings also lists Kyler Murray with Minnesota at $5,500, one of the stranger lines on the board, and we are reporting that listing exactly as it appears rather than guessing at the story behind it.

The construction consequence is real. On a board where the top QB costs $7,000, punting quarterback saves you far less than usual, and paying up costs almost nothing. That pushes the actual leverage decisions to running back and wide receiver, and it makes a full stack with a mid-priced QB very affordable. If the difference between Lawrence and Allen is $1,200, the difference-maker in your lineup is not the quarterback salary, it is what the QB savings buy you elsewhere. If you are newer to these trade-offs, our NFL DFS primer walks through why volume, not salary, drives roster decisions.

The Tight End Cliff: Two Elites, Then Nothing Until $5,300

Quarterback is compressed; tight end is the opposite. Brock Bowers ($6,900) and Trey McBride ($6,800) are priced right alongside Saquon Barkley and Omarion Hampton near the top of the RB column, and then the position simply stops. The next tight end on the board is Colston Loveland at $5,300, a gap of $1,500 with nothing in between. Below him it thins fast: Tyler Warren $4,900, Kyle Pitts Sr. $4,700, Dalton Kincaid $4,600, Tucker Kraft $4,500, Sam LaPorta $4,400.

Then there is the row I keep coming back to on this entire board: Mark Andrews, Baltimore, $3,900. That is cheaper than Harold Fannin Jr. ($4,200) and Dallas Goedert ($4,100), down in the range where Dalton Schultz and Pat Freiermuth sit at $3,400. Whatever DraftKings is pricing into that number, a veteran with Andrews' track record at $3,900 is the kind of tag that quietly decides builds, because tight end is where cap relief hurts the least. The position gives you two clean paths: pay $6,800-plus for Bowers or McBride, or shop the sub-$5,000 bin and spend the savings on the Gibbs tier. There is barely a middle to buy.

How DraftKings Priced The Young Backs

The most aggressive statements on this board are the young players. Ashton Jeanty comes in at $6,600 with Las Vegas, and DraftKings lists Jeremiyah Love with Arizona at $6,400, which puts him above established veteran Josh Jacobs at $6,300. Bhayshul Tuten lands at $5,800 for Jacksonville, ahead of names like Bucky Irving ($5,700) and Jaylen Warren ($5,400). The aggression is not limited to the backfield: at tight end, Loveland's $5,300 is the third-highest number at the position, and Chicago's Luther Burden III sits at $5,500 in the receiver column.

Pricing unproven players up is a projection of volume, not production, and it cuts both ways for DFS. If the touches show up, these tags will look fair; if the depth charts break differently in September, this tier is where the board's biggest mistakes will live. This is exactly the tier to re-check when DraftKings reprices closer to Week 1, and it flows straight into the question the whole first look builds toward: where the mispricings already sit.

Week 1 DFS Values Worth Circling Now

Five rows on this board look mispriced enough to note in August, using only the salaries themselves.

Terry McLaurin at $5,700 sits in the same band as Alec Pierce ($5,700) and below Christian Watson ($5,900). The Jacksonville pairing is the oddest sequence on the board: DraftKings has Brian Thomas Jr. at $5,500, a hundred dollars below his own teammate Parker Washington at $5,600. Tee Higgins at $6,300 shares an offense with Chase at $7,800, a $1,500 gap between two receivers in the same passing game, which is the kind of spread that makes the cheaper side interesting in tournaments. DraftKings also lists DJ Moore with Buffalo at $5,600, another listing we are reporting as-is. Salary alone never makes a play, but salary is all anyone has in August, and these are the tags we will check first when NFL DFS projections, ownership and stacks hit the DataHub for Week 1. How DraftKings prices compare to the other site's board is its own edge; our DraftKings vs. FanDuel NFL DFS breakdown covers those structural differences.

Slate Shape: 12 Games And A Punt-Heavy Bottom

The Week 1 main slate is the Sunday 12-gamer: BUF@HOU, TB@CIN, BAL@IND, WAS@PHI, CHI@CAR, ARI@LAC, NO@DET, MIA@LV, GB@MIN, ATL@PIT, CLE@JAX and NYJ@TEN. The Thursday night opener, the late-afternoon window, and the Sunday and Monday night games are not part of it, so players from those games will not appear in main-slate player pools.

The board itself skews cheap: 547 of the 715 players, roughly three-quarters of the pool, are priced at $4,000 or less, with the minimum at $2,000. A bottom that heavy makes stars-and-scrubs builds wide open in Week 1 tournaments; our guide to DFS punt plays covers how to pick the cheap pieces without torching a lineup. Defense reinforces the cheap bottom, and the top of the DST board is compressed into a $400 window.

With only $400 separating the most expensive defense from the cheapest listed, defense is not a place this board asks you to make hard choices. The hard choices live at RB and WR, which is exactly what the promised lineup has to prove.

A Worked Example: One Legal $50,000 Lineup From This Board

Time to pay off the promise from the top: a legal DraftKings roster (QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, TE, FLEX, DST) built only from salaries on this board. This is an illustrative construction to show what the pricing shape allows, not our optimal lineup; nobody has a credible Week 1 projection in early August.

It spends the cap to the dollar, and every earlier section is load-bearing in it. The compressed QB board lets Lawrence in at $5,800 and pairs him with his own $5,500 receiver, Thomas Jr., the classic QB-plus-pass-catcher stack that captures correlated upside. The tight end cliff is why Andrews' $3,900 is here, and that single discount is what fits Gibbs' $8,000 tag alongside three mid-priced receivers. The real lesson of the 2026 Week 1 board sits right there: the cheap tight end and the flat quarterback tier are the funding sources for the expensive backs. When you are ready to take builds like this into an actual contest, our walkthrough on how to upload DFS lineups to DraftKings covers the CSV flow from the Sims, and NFL DFS late swap covers protecting the roster once games start.

More on this: NFL DFS Hub: Every Live Stokastic NFL Page · NFL Week 1 DFS Picks 2026 · DraftKings Vs FanDuel NFL DFS: Scoring & Strategy · NFL DFS Late Swap: How To Use Late Games To Win GPPs · NFL Week 1 DFS Injury Updates: Jeanty, Kamara & The Raiders Chalk Question

Pricing Is Half The Equation

A first-look board tells you where the salary pressure is; it cannot tell you who outscores it. That takes projections, ownership and simulations, and it is exactly the half of the equation Stokastic's NFL Sims handle once the season data arrives: thousands of simulated contests on top of these same salaries, surfacing the builds that win tournaments instead of the ones that just fit the cap. You can try the Sims free, and the rest of our Week 1 prep lives in the NFL DFS hub. Code NFLWEEK2 takes 10% off through Monday, September 21 any Stokastic NFL package.

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Week 1 pricing dropped six weeks early, and the shape of the board is the story: one $8,000 running back, a quarterback tier you can pay up at for pocket change, a tight end cliff with a $3,900 gift at the bottom, and 547 players at $4,000 or less waiting to be sorted. The salaries will move before September 13. The structure usually does not, and the structure is the edge you can bank now.