PAGE: /guide/posting-system

Meta description (paste into Excerpt field): How the NPB posting system works: the release fee tiers, the 45-day window, why it exists, and how Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Matsuzaka reached MLB.

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  "headline": "The NPB Posting System, Explained",
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The NPB Posting System, Explained

Every winter, the same question hits American baseball Twitter: “What does ‘posted’ mean?” Here’s the answer, start to finish.

The posting system is the mechanism that moves players from Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball to Major League Baseball before they’ve earned the right to leave on their own. In NPB, a player needs nine years of service time to become an international free agent. That’s most of a career. The posting system is the shortcut — but only the player’s NPB team can open the door, and MLB teams pay for the privilege of walking through it.

How it works today

The current rules are simple once you see them laid out:

The NPB club decides to post the player. The player can ask, lobby, even negotiate it into his contract — but the club holds the key. Posting happens in the offseason window (November 1 to December 15).
All 30 MLB teams get 45 days to negotiate. There’s no exclusive bidding anymore. Any team can talk to the player, and the player chooses.
The signing team pays the NPB club a “release fee” on top of whatever contract the player signs. The fee is calculated from the contract’s guaranteed value:
- 20% of the first $25 million
- 17.5% of the next $25 million (from $25M to $50M)
- 15% of everything above $50 million
If no deal happens in 45 days, the player goes back to Japan and can’t be posted again until the following November 1.

A few details worth knowing. If the player later earns bonuses, escalators, or option-year money, the MLB team owes a supplemental 15% of those amounts too. Minor-league deals carry a flat fee of 25% of the signing bonus. And the release fee doesn’t count against MLB’s luxury tax calculations — it’s a transfer payment, not salary.

Run the math on a big contract and you see why NPB clubs play along. A $300 million deal generates a release fee of about $46.9 million: $5M + $4.375M + $37.5M. The club loses its star but gets paid like it sold one.

Why it exists

The system was born from two disasters in the 1990s. Hideo Nomo exploited a loophole by “retiring” from NPB in 1995 and signing with the Dodgers — Japan got nothing. Then Hideki Irabu was traded to an MLB team he flatly refused to play for. NPB and MLB rewrote their working agreement in 1998, and the posting system was the result: a way for players to move earlier, clubs to get compensated, and everyone to avoid another Nomo.

The three eras

The rules have changed twice, and each era has a different flavor:

The blind-bid era (1998–2012). MLB teams submitted sealed bids just for the right to negotiate; only the winner could talk to the player. This produced the famous monster fees — the Red Sox bid $51.1 million just to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka in 2006, and the Rangers paid $51.7 million for Yu Darvish in 2012. The player saw none of that money.

The capped era (2013–2017). Fees were capped at $20 million, and every team willing to pay it could negotiate. This is the system Shohei Ohtani was posted under — the Nippon-Ham Fighters got exactly $20 million while Ohtani, restricted by MLB’s international amateur rules because he was under 25, signed for a minor-league deal and a bonus of roughly $2.3 million. The most lopsided transaction in modern baseball.

The percentage era (2018–present). The current sliding-scale system ties the fee to the contract, which finally aligned everyone’s incentives: the better the player does in negotiations, the more his old club earns.

Posting vs. waiting for free agency

Why doesn’t every star just get posted? Because the club decides, and clubs have reasons to wait: pennant races, fan pressure, or squeezing out more prime years. Some players skip posting entirely — Hiroki Kuroda and Kosuke Fukudome simply played out their nine years and left as free agents, no fee attached. Others never get the door opened at all. When you read that a player “will be posted this winter,” it means the club has agreed to let the market decide — and that’s when the 45-day clock, and the fun, begins.