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It’s not cheap to run a college athletic department in North Carolina — especially these days. In an industry newly defined by revenue sharing, NIL deals and the transfer portal, no UNC System can completely afford the costs of its own sports teams. And most aren’t coming close.
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The money pressures have to go somewhere. Part of that happens on the backs of students.
Skyrocketing athletic costs infringe on affordability at North Carolina’s public universities, according to a presentation by budget committee chair Kirk Bradley at a September UNC Board of Governors meeting.
“Mandatory athletics fees,” Bradley said, “raise every student’s cost of attendance and weigh heaviest at our access-focused universities.”
Here’s a look at how much students pay to support athletic departments at each school in the UNC System — and how those costs have changed over the past ten years.
The schools with the largest athletic budgets — UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University — charge the lowest athletic fees in the System. And neither has raised their fees in the past ten years. At NC State, students pay $232 per year, and at UNC-Chapel Hill, they pay $279 per year.
The school with the highest athletic fee is UNC Asheville, where students pay $906 per year to fund the public liberal arts school’s athletic budget. Despite the high number, student fees in Asheville generate the second-lowest amount of revenue in the System.
At just 2,600 students, “we don’t have the economies of scale that the larger schools have,” UNC Asheville spokesperson Eden Bloss told The News & Observer.
Student fees cover just 19% of UNC Asheville’s athletic budget. The only two schools where fees generate a lower percentage of the budget are NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, whose low fees cover just 5% of their budgets.
UNC Asheville points out that their athletic fees haven’t increased since the 2022-23 school year, when the school began receiving a share of tax revenues on sports betting.
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“Unlike universities in the UNC System who are members of larger conferences, the Big South Conference does not generate a large amount of media revenue that is shared with its institutions as a major revenue stream,” Bloss told The N&O in an email. “While our athletics department generates revenue from philanthropy, corporate partnerships, ticket sales, game guarantees, concessions, and other such areas, we simply do not generate enough funding to cover our expenses without student fees.”
UNC Asheville can pay for less than half of its athletic expenses with its athletics-generated revenue.
The second-highest athletic fee in the System is at Elizabeth City State University, where students pay $899. That’s close to the cost of tuition at the NC Promise school, which runs in-state students just $1,000 per year. Athletic fees cover approximately 40% of the total athletic budget at Elizabeth City State.
Elizabeth City State can cover 8% of its athletic expenses with athletics-generated revenue.
The school whose fees have increased by the widest margin over the last ten years is Fayetteville State University, whose fee went from $668 in 2016 to $858 in 2026. Now, the fee covers 61% of the HBCU’s athletic budget — the highest percentage in the System.
But still, Fayetteville State can only pay 11% of its athletic expenses with athletics-generated revenue.
Ten years ago, Fayetteville State had the third-lowest athletic budget in the system, above only NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, according to Kenny Spayd, the school’s chief financial officer.
“At that level, the fee did not adequately support the championship experience we wanted to provide our student-athletes,” Spayd told The N&O in an email. “The increases helped close that gap and strengthen the resources supporting their success.”
All told, UNC System students contributed more than $136 million in athletic revenue through their annual fees in the 2025 financial year.
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