New AEW Wrestlers Reportedly Outearning WWE NXT Stars

WWE NXT and AEW are each other’s biggest competitor in more ways than one.

As AEW Dynamite continues to dominate pro wrestling’s Wednesday night ratings war, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter (h/t 411Mania) reports that AEW newcomers are typically being paid more than WWE’s NXT stars. Although Meltzer notes that this varies, it is said to be a “general rule” that even lower card stars who have recently signed with AEW are out-earning the majority of NXT talents.

It was recently reported that most stars who have recently signed with NXT are doing so on “short-term” deals with a $60,000-per-year downside guarantee (that will soon increase to $80,000), which means that lower-tier AEW stars would generally be making at least that much when choosing to ink a new deal with pro wrestling’s n0w-No. 2 promotion. That’s significant because NXT has, generally speaking, been viewed as the biggest and most important stepping stone to full-blown super stardom in the world of pro wrestling over the last half-decade.

A significant portion of WWE’s main roster rose up through the ranks of NXT before making their way to Raw or SmackDown, with many of those stars being churned out by the WWE machine as a start-to-finish product of the Performance Center, a list that includes the likes of Alexa Bliss and Braun Strowman. Up until just over a year ago when AEW Dynamite first began airing on TNT, NXT was the go-to place for most of the world’s high-profile indie stars, with the likes of Adam Cole, Keith Lee, Damian Priest, Chelsea Green and a slew of others joining NXT to bolster its already star-studded roster.

That has changed a bit, however, since the launch of AEW and the first airing of Dynamite in October 2019. AEW has managed to scoop up a number of the most highly coveted independent wrestling stalwarts, like MJF, while also finding plenty of diamonds in the rough, such as Ricky Starks (who had previously worked as an extra on Monday Night Raw) and Darby Allin, who first rose to prominence in EVOLVE, which was directly affiliated with WWE for years.

What the creation of AEW has given the world’s top unsigned stars and fastest-rising ones that hadn’t existed, well, for essentially the previous two decades is a choice—the choice to decide whether signing with AEW, the world’s new clear No. 2 promotion, would be more beneficial and give them more exposure than it would be to join the already jam-packed NXT roster. That’s a tough call, too. NXT, after all, is now arguably more important to WWE than it has ever been, serving as both a feeder/developmental system and a third brand.

Throughout much of its existence, WWE has utilized non-televised live events to prepare newcomers and up-and-comers for the main roster, but with live events expected to now be a thing of the past, WWE doesn’t need to have as deep of a roster—for Raw or SmackDown—to run a handful of weekly live events. As a result, prospective AEW and WWE talents have the somewhat difficult task of deciding whether securing a lower spot on the AEW roster is a wiser career move than going to NXT, where a slew of incredibly talented former indie standouts have struggled to get on TV and many who’ve ultimately made it to the main roster floundered there as well.

As traditional live events near extinction, AEW has become a more attractive option that has fewer restrictions than NXT but still has the benefit of giving its stars exposure on national television—and judging by TV viewership, even more exposure than they’d get in NXT. What’s more, AEW stars have a straighter and quicker line to appearing on Dynamite than NXT stars do of navigating the topsy-turvy road to WWE’s main roster, which is problematic in and of itself due to its up-and-down booking.

With the pitfalls of WWE’s main roster becoming more and more apparent as even incoming AEW stars stand to earn more money for potentially fewer dates—and overall, less work—in AEW than they would have in NXT, WWE’s rival promotion is quickly becoming the go-to place for stars who didn’t even have this option at all just a couple of years ago.