WPL 2027 retentions: 63 contracts, ₹66.85 crore, and what the lists show

The Women's Premier League published its retention lists for the 2027 auction on 28 September 2026: 63 retained players across the five franchises, for a combined ₹66.85 crore of contracts. That is the largest retention total the league has produced in any window we hold, and it comes ahead of an auction in Kochi on 28 October with only 27 places left to fill.

This article goes through what the lists show: how the money is spread across the clubs, who sits at the top, how the pay ladder is shaped, which roles the clubs kept, who was let go, and how this window compares with the ones before it. It also explains a pattern that matters for reading the numbers: retention in this league is done at the price a player was last contracted at, which means the 2027 figures are really a snapshot of what the 2026 auction decided. All amounts are nominal rupees.

What was announced, and what CricOptics holds

The league's own team pages list every player each club holds going into the auction. CricOptics has all 63 names, with their prices and the league's role labels, and every club's total matches the amount the league prints beside it as money spent. An earlier version of this article worked from the 55 names that could be tied to player records at the time and put the total at ₹58.5 crore. The eight names that were missing, among them Mumbai's Amanjot Kaur at ₹1 crore, are in now, which is why the totals here are higher.

For the earlier windows we hold only the names we could match: 53 of the 60 announced for 2024, 62 of 71 for 2025 and 16 of 17 for 2026. Those totals are floors, so the comparison later in this piece is a fair one only in the direction that matters. Even against floors, 2027 is the biggest.

The five clubs

The five lists are close in size and money, and different in shape.

Mumbai Indians hold the biggest bill: 12 players for ₹14.1 crore. Delhi Capitals kept 13 for ₹13.9 crore, Royal Challengers Bengaluru 13 for ₹13.85 crore and Gujarat Giants 15 for ₹13.75 crore. UP Warriorz kept the fewest and spent the least: 10 players for ₹11.25 crore, which leaves them ₹3.75 crore of the ₹15 crore cap.

Per player, Mumbai average about ₹1.18 crore, UP ₹1.12 crore, Delhi and Bengaluru ₹1.07 crore, and Gujarat ₹0.92 crore. Gujarat is the club keeping the most modest contracts, and Mumbai the fewest, bigger ones.

What differs most is how top-heavy each list is. UP Warriorz are the most concentrated: Deepti Sharma at ₹3.2 crore, Shikha Pandey at ₹2.4 crore and Meg Lanning at ₹1.9 crore are ₹7.5 crore of ₹11.25 crore, 67 per cent. At Mumbai the top three, Nat Sciver-Brunt at ₹3.5 crore, Amelia Kerr at ₹3.0 crore and Harmanpreet Kaur at ₹2.5 crore, make ₹9.0 crore of ₹14.1 crore, 64 per cent. At Bengaluru, Smriti Mandhana at ₹3.5 crore, Richa Ghosh at ₹2.75 crore and Ellyse Perry at ₹2.0 crore are ₹8.25 crore, 60 per cent, and at Gujarat, Ashleigh Gardner, Beth Mooney and Sophie Devine (₹3.5, 2.5 and 2.0 crore) are ₹8.0 crore, 58 per cent.

Delhi look different. Four players, Marizanne Kapp, Jemimah Rodrigues, Annabel Sutherland and Shafali Verma, are all on ₹2.2 crore. The top three are only 47 per cent of the bill, and below them is the deepest middle of the five: Chinelle Henry and Shree Charani at ₹1.3 crore each and Laura Wolvaardt at ₹1.1 crore.

The shape of the pay ladder

Across all 63 players the median retention is ₹0.65 crore, so half of those retained are on less than that. At the top, five players are on ₹3 crore or more: Gardner, Sciver-Brunt and Mandhana at ₹3.5 crore, Deepti Sharma at ₹3.2 crore and Kerr at ₹3.0 crore. Fifteen are on ₹2 crore or more and 23 on ₹1 crore or more. At the other end, 27 of the 63 are on ₹0.5 crore or less, 13 on ₹0.2 crore or less, and ten at the floor of ₹0.1 crore.

The top ten contracts alone are ₹29.05 crore, 43.5 per cent of the money. The other 53 players share the rest.

That is a steep ladder, and it is worth setting beside the IPL's, because the two leagues have very different scales. The top retained contract in the WPL is ₹3.5 crore. The top auction price at the IPL's most recent auction was ₹25.2 crore and the record is ₹27 crore. The shape is the same, a few contracts that stand out and a long tail of small ones, at roughly one-seventh to one-eighth of the scale.

Which roles the clubs kept

Using our own record of how each player has actually played where we hold one, and the league's label otherwise, the 63 are 24 bowlers, 18 batters, 14 all-rounders and seven wicketkeepers. The league's labels are loose, so these counts are a guide rather than a count to quote.

The money tells a different story from the headcount. The 14 all-rounders account for ₹28.15 crore, the largest share of any role, about ₹2.0 crore each. The 18 batters make up ₹19.2 crore, about ₹1.07 crore each. The seven wicketkeepers total ₹6.15 crore, led by Richa Ghosh at ₹2.75 crore and Beth Mooney at ₹2.5 crore. The 24 bowlers total ₹13.35 crore, about ₹0.56 crore each.

All-rounders are the best-paid group and bowlers the most numerous and least paid, which matches the pattern in the league's earlier auctions. Every club holds at least one wicketkeeper, but three of them have only one, and each of those is an uncapped player on ₹10 lakh: Mamatha Madiwala at Delhi, Rahila Firdous at Mumbai and Shipra Giri at UP Warriorz.

Retention at the same price

One feature of these lists changes how you should read them. For 51 of the 63 players our data holds a 2026 contract price, and in every one of those 51 cases the 2027 retention figure is exactly the same as the 2026 contract. For the other 12, most of them uncapped, we hold no 2026 price.

So a retention in this league is not a fresh negotiation. It is the club agreeing to keep a player at the price she was already contracted at, and the 2027 lists are a mirror of what the 2026 auction decided. To understand why a given player is on a given figure, look back at 2026, not forward to 2027.

That makes the 2026 repricing visible, because 2026 was a mega auction in which most squads were rebuilt. Among the retained players, some of the biggest rises on their best contract of 2023 to 2025 were these. Amelia Kerr went from ₹1.0 crore to ₹3.0 crore, Shikha Pandey from ₹0.6 crore to ₹2.4 crore, Sophie Devine from ₹0.5 crore to ₹2.0 crore, Hayley Matthews from ₹0.4 crore to ₹1.75 crore, Laura Wolvaardt from ₹0.3 crore to ₹1.1 crore and Meg Lanning from ₹1.1 crore to ₹1.9 crore.

The falls were just as sharp. Kashvee Gautam moved from ₹2.0 crore to ₹0.65 crore, Pooja Vastrakar from ₹1.9 crore to ₹0.85 crore, Sophie Ecclestone from ₹1.8 crore to ₹0.85 crore, Renuka Singh from ₹1.5 crore to ₹0.6 crore and Yastika Bhatia from ₹1.5 crore to ₹0.5 crore. Simran Shaikh, who cost ₹1.9 crore at the 2025 auction, is on ₹0.1 crore, and Prema Rawat, bought for ₹1.2 crore the same year, is on ₹0.2 crore.

The data cannot say why any contract changed. It could be form, availability or club needs, and this article does not speculate. It is enough to see that the middle of the list moved a long way in both directions and the clubs kept players on both sides of it.

Who was let go

The clubs released 29 players, and one more moved: Tara Norris went from UP Warriorz to Mumbai Indians after the lists came out, at her ₹10 lakh retention price. UP released the most, nine. Mumbai and Delhi let six go each, and Bengaluru and Gujarat four each.

The biggest names by last contract are Deandra Dottin at ₹80 lakh (UP), Grace Harris at ₹75 lakh (Bengaluru) and Kiran Navgire at ₹60 lakh (UP), then Danni Wyatt-Hodge (Gujarat), G Kamalini (Mumbai), Shweta Sehrawat and Sneh Rana at ₹50 lakh each. Most of the released players are back in the pool at bases of ₹10 to ₹50 lakh, Harris, Navgire, Kamalini and Rana among them. A few overseas names, including Dottin, Wyatt-Hodge, Lizelle Lee, Alana King and Amy Jones, do not appear in the pool list we hold.

How this window compares with the earlier ones

Put the four windows side by side. For 2024, 53 of 60 announced players matched, for ₹48.1 crore. For 2025 it was 62 of 71, ₹54.8 crore. For 2026, the mega auction, 16 of 17 for ₹32.9 crore. For 2027 it is all 63, for ₹66.85 crore. The 2026 window is the outlier, because a mega auction deliberately starts from a very short list and puts most of the players into the room.

The relationship between retentions and auction spending is the interesting part. At the 2024 mini auction the clubs bought 30 players for ₹12.75 crore against ₹48.1 crore retained: about 21 per cent of the money committed that year came from the auction. At the 2025 mini auction they bought 19 players for ₹9.05 crore against ₹54.8 crore retained, about 14 per cent. At the 2026 mega auction it was 67 players for ₹40.8 crore against ₹32.9 crore retained, 55 per cent.

So the league has two modes. In the small-auction years most of the money is committed before the auction starts and the room is a top-up. This year that is no longer just an inference from the past, because the league has published the numbers: 27 places and ₹8.15 crore across the five clubs. If every rupee were spent, the auction would be about 11 per cent of the money committed in this window, lower than in either earlier mini year.

What to watch

The money is lopsided. UP Warriorz have ₹3.75 crore and eight places, three of them overseas, while Mumbai have ₹0.9 crore for six places and no overseas place left, Bengaluru ₹1.15 crore for five, Delhi ₹1.10 crore for five and Gujarat ₹1.25 crore for three. The auction begins at 5:30 pm on 28 October. How far a price can climb depends on how many clubs can still afford to compete, and for most players that will be very few.

The repricing of 2026 matters too. Many players now on small contracts had much larger ones a year or two ago, and if a club thinks a player is worth more than the contract she is on, the auction is not the place to fix it, because retention at the same price appears to be the arrangement. That is part of why the lists of the mini years look so similar from one window to the next.

And will the top of the pay scale move? The best-paid retained players are on ₹3.5 crore and the highest price in the WPL's auction history is the ₹3.4 crore paid for Smriti Mandhana in 2023. Only one club, UP Warriorz, even has more than ₹3.4 crore to spend, and that would be most of its purse, so a new auction record looks unlikely. The right to match, which lets a club take back a player it released at the winning price, could still change who ends up where.

CricOptics's own forecast of the auction, club by club, is on the WPL 2027 auction page, and there is a separate article for each club on who it kept, who it let go and who it may chase.

The limits of this analysis

Role counts mix our own record with the league's labels, which are loose: the league lists Marizanne Kapp as a batter, for example. The comparisons with earlier windows rely on the names we could match for those years, so each earlier total is a floor and not an exact figure. And the 2026 prices behind the same-price finding cover 51 of the 63 players.

Within those limits the picture is clear. The league's clubs hold 63 retained players for ₹66.85 crore, spread across five lists of ten to fifteen, concentrated in the all-rounders and heavily top-weighted in all but one club. Those contracts are the 2026 auction's verdict, copied forward, and the room that follows will be a small one.