NFL Draft Pick Value Calculator (Trade Chart)

Background.

This calculator prices both sides of an NFL draft-pick trade on two different charts, and the interesting part is where they disagree. Enter the overall pick numbers each team is sending, pick a chart, and you get each side's total, the gap between them, and the second team's return as a percentage of the first team's outlay.

The first chart is the one the trade market actually runs on: the Jimmy Johnson chart, which values the first overall pick at 3,000 points and slides down to 2 points at pick 224. It has never been published by the NFL — it originated inside the Dallas Cowboys and spread by imitation until it became the industry's shared currency. Its influence is documented in the academic literature: Massey and Thaler's paper in Management Science notes that all NFL teams have a table listing the value of each draft pick, that both sides refer to it when discussing trades, and that the resulting price curve fits observed trades extraordinarily well. Enter almost any real draft-day trade and you will find the two sides land within a few percent of each other, which is a striking thing to be able to check yourself.

The second chart is Chase Stuart's, built from Pro-Football-Reference's Approximate Value — that is, from what picks in each slot have actually been worth on the field — rather than from what they have traded for. It is much flatter than the Johnson chart at the top. On Johnson, the first pick is worth about 2.3 times the tenth; on Stuart it is worth about 1.7 times. That flattening is the whole substance of Massey and Thaler's central finding, the loser's curse: the trade market systematically overpays for the right to pick early, so the team moving down in a chart-neutral trade tends to come out ahead in expected production. Offering only the market chart would quietly take one side of a live research question, so this page offers both.

A scoping note stated plainly rather than buried. Both charts are defined for picks 1 through 224 — seven rounds of a 32-team draft. Modern drafts run to roughly 262 selections because of compensatory picks, and those later picks carry a value of zero on both charts. This calculator accepts them, values them at zero, and names them in the verdict line so you know it happened. It does not invent an extrapolation. Future draft picks are also out of scope: a pick two drafts away has no number yet, and Massey and Thaler measure an implied discount rate on future picks of roughly 174% per year — far too large to fold silently into a chart lookup.

The pick values themselves were read out of the nflverse draft_values dataset rather than typed from memory, because reciting 224 numbers from recall is exactly how a calculator like this goes quietly wrong. The dossier behind this page records the spot checks. Below the widget you will find the two charts compared shape by shape, guidance on reading a percentage return, why compensatory picks break the arithmetic, and the worked example of a real 2023 trade that the two charts score completely differently.

What is nfl draft pick value calculator?

A draft value chart assigns a number of points to every selection in the NFL draft so that trades involving different numbers of picks can be compared. The dominant one is the Jimmy Johnson chart, a trade-market convention with no official standing: it gives the first overall pick 3,000 points, the tenth 1,300, the thirty-second 590, the sixty-fourth 270 and the two-hundred-and-twenty-fourth just 2. Teams negotiating a trade add up the chart value of what each side is sending and aim to finish close to even, which is why real trades so often price within a few percent of chart parity. The alternative approach values picks by what they are expected to produce rather than what they cost. Chase Stuart's chart does this using Approximate Value, Pro-Football-Reference's attempt to put a single production number on each player-season. Because expected production falls off much more gently than trade prices do, the production chart is far flatter at the top, and a trade that is even on the market chart usually favours the team acquiring the larger number of later picks. That gap between price and value is the empirical result at the heart of Massey and Thaler's 'loser's curse' — the finding that top picks, despite costing the most, deliver the least surplus value relative to their cost. This calculator shows both numbers so the disagreement is visible instead of hidden behind a single answer.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter overall pick numbers, not round-and-slot. Pick 33 is the first selection of round two, pick 65 the first of round three. If your source gives you 'round 3, pick 17', convert it before entering.
2. 02Put the picks each team is sending in its own box. The calculator is symmetric — it does not care which team is 'trading up' — but the percentage output reads as the second team's return on the first team's outlay, so put the team you are analysing first.
3. 03Leave the second box empty to simply value one team's picks. The verdict line will tell you that is what happened rather than pretending a comparison was made.
4. 04Switch the chart dropdown and re-read. If the two charts agree, the trade is straightforward. If they disagree by more than about ten percent, the trade hinges on whether you believe the market price or the production estimate.
5. 05Read a return between about 95% and 105% as even; that is the band real trades cluster in. Outside it, the verdict names which side is giving up more and by how many points.
6. 06Watch for the compensatory-pick warning in the verdict. Any pick beyond No. 224 is valued at zero on both charts, and a trade whose balance depends on such picks is being scored incompletely.

The formula.

The arithmetic is a lookup and a sum. Each pick number is looked up in the selected chart, the values are added for each side, and three comparisons are reported: the raw difference, the second team's total as a percentage of the first team's, and a plain-language verdict.

The interesting content is in the charts themselves. The Johnson chart is steep by design because it is a record of prices, and prices reflect what decision-makers are willing to pay. Its top-heavy shape means a single early pick is worth an enormous quantity of later ones: pick 1 at 3,000 points is worth more than picks 33 through 64 combined. Massey and Thaler describe exactly this steepness and note that it has grown steeper over time — in their earlier sample the tenth pick was worth 60% of the first, and in the later sample only 39%.

Stuart's chart is derived instead from Approximate Value, so its shape reflects observed careers rather than negotiating positions. It falls off far more gently. That gap is not noise, it is the point: if the market prices early picks steeply and production falls off gently, then trading down is systematically underpriced. Running any real trade through both charts makes the effect concrete in a way a written argument does not.

The percentage output is a ratio, which means it needs a non-zero denominator. If the first team's picks all sit beyond No. 224 — where both charts assign zero — the ratio has no meaning, so the calculator returns 0 and the verdict says explicitly that no ratio can be formed rather than returning a division error or an infinity.

The arithmetic is carried out in exact decimal rather than binary floating point, which matters more than it sounds for the Stuart chart. Its values are given to one decimal place, and in ordinary binary arithmetic 23.2 + 6.6 evaluates to 29.799999999999997, which would propagate into a visibly wrong percentage. Exact decimal addition gives 29.8.

What the calculator cannot do: value players, value future picks, or account for conditional terms. Real trades routinely include all three. A pick swap plus a veteran quarterback is not a chart problem, and a 2027 second-rounder has no pick number to look up.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Massey, C. & Thaler, R. H. (2013). 'The Loser's Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft.' Management Science 59(7), 1479–1495. Source for the existence and provenance of the trade value chart ('All NFL teams have a table (sometimes called "the chart") that lists the value of each draft pick. The first pick is given a value of 3000...'), for the observation that the chart has grown steeper over time (the tenth pick falling from 60% to 39% of the first), and for the estimated 174% annual discount rate on future picks. Publisher landing page blocks non-browser clients; the working-paper PDF is cited.
2. [2]nflverse / nfldata — data/draft_values.csv. The machine-readable source of every pick value implemented on this page: column 'johnson' for the Jimmy Johnson trade chart and column 'stuart' for Chase Stuart's Approximate-Value chart, picks 1 to 262. Values were read programmatically from this file rather than transcribed. Spot values: pick 1 = 3000/34.6, pick 32 = 590/12.5, pick 224 = 2/0.1, pick 225 onward = 0 on both.
3. [3]nflverse / nfldata — data/trades.csv. Source of the worked example: the 27 April 2023 trade in which Detroit sent picks 6 and 81 to Arizona for picks 12, 34 and 168, recorded as an all-picks, same-season, non-conditional deal.
4. [4]Sports Reference LLC. Pro-Football-Reference glossary, entry for AV: 'approximate value. This is our attempt to put a single number on each player-season since 1960 so that we can (very approximately) compare across years and across positions.' The quantity Chase Stuart's chart is built from. Archived snapshot cited because the live page returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients.