Carrie Underwood’s Sunday Night Football Pay in 2025: $1 Million a Week?

One seven-figure song, every Sunday night

One song. One primetime broadcast. Seven figures. That’s the reported deal bringing Carrie Underwood back to NBC’s Sunday Night Football in 2025: about $1 million per week, or roughly $18 million across the season. NBC hasn’t put a number on it, but entertainment trade chatter puts her compensation in that ballpark—an eye-popping figure that speaks to how much the network values those opening minutes.

Underwood’s role is simple to describe and hard to replace: she’s the voice that tells America the biggest game on TV is about to start. She’s been doing it for 13 seasons, and the opener—“Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” adapted from Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You”—has turned into a weekly ritual. It’s not a halftime show. It’s not a postgame concert. It’s a 90-second promise that the main event has arrived.

“It’s just very glam. It’s always great, it’s always exciting. It’s always fun,” Underwood said recently. She also loves the fan reactions: people stop her to say their kids know the song by heart, and families sing along as the broadcast comes on. That kind of ritual matters in a TV world where it’s hard to get millions to watch the same thing at the same time.

Tripp Dixon, Sunday Night Football’s creative director, says the open “sets the tone for the broadcast and pays tribute to the teams, star players and fans in a fun and dynamic way.” That’s not just ad-speak. The opener tees up the game’s storylines, shows off the league’s biggest faces, and wraps it all in a melody viewers recognize in seconds.

Underwood’s paycheck reflects the scale of what she’s walking into each week. Sunday Night Football is a ratings giant and a major ad magnet. The intro is the front door to NBC’s most valuable sports franchise, and the network treats it like it.

Why NBC pays big: branding, ratings, and a polished product

Sunday Night Football isn’t winning on accident. For years, it’s sat at or near the top of primetime, a rare live-TV juggernaut in a streaming-heavy world. The opener is the handshake, the visual identity, and the mood-setter. If you’re NBC, you want that handshake to be unmistakable—and reliably good.

That’s why the opening sequence looks like a mini music video every week. Production starts well before kickoff: stylized sets, custom wardrobe, LED-heavy staging, player cameos, team highlights cut to the beat, and a fresh edit to match that week’s matchup. When the season flexes to bigger games, the open flexes with it.

The song itself has a lineage. Pink launched the format in 2006. Faith Hill took over from 2007 to 2012. Underwood grabbed the mic in 2013, tried a new version called “Game On” in 2018, then returned to “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” in 2019 after fans made clear what they preferred. That course correction mattered. Familiarity is a feature, not a bug, when you’re building a brand that needs to hit the same way every Sunday.

The money conversation always raises eyebrows. A million dollars per week for a short performance sounds wild on its face. But in TV economics, a star who can set the mood for the year’s most-watched weekly program is more than a performer—they’re part of the product. The open helps NBC package a premium game with premium polish, which feeds into viewer habit and ad confidence.

Underwood’s run also tracks with how sports TV has changed. Leagues charge more for rights, networks fight to keep tentpole properties, and anything that strengthens the broadcast brand—announcers, graphics, camera tech, music—gets investment. The Sunday Night Football opener sits at that intersection of entertainment and sports, where a singer with arena-level reach can lift a sports telecast without stepping on the game.

What about the rest of her career? The SNF check is only part of it. Underwood’s business is diversified: arena tours, a Las Vegas residency, hit records, brand partnerships, a fitness app (fit52), and a best-selling wellness book. Industry estimates put her net worth north of $100 million, built over nearly two decades since her 2005 breakout. The football anthem just keeps that engine visible to the largest TV audience she’ll see all year.

There’s also the fan factor. Kids who don’t know the playbook know the chorus. Parents get a jolt of nostalgia from the Joan Jett hook. It’s a cross-generational cue that football time has started—just as familiar as the broadcast’s theme music, the first slow-motion catch of warmups, or the booth tossing to the sideline.

For NBC, this is about consistency. Same voice. Same melody. New highlight reel every week. It’s a steady ritual wrapped in fresh packaging, and it greases the wheels for everything that follows—the booth call, the coach’s scripted open, the first shot of the quarterback under the stadium lights.

Here’s how the role evolved and why it sticks:

• 2006: Pink launches the “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” format for NBC.
• 2007–2012: Faith Hill turns the song into a full-on tradition.
• 2013–present: Underwood becomes the show’s voice, with a brief pivot to “Game On” in 2018 before returning to the original format.
• 2025: Year 13 for Underwood, with reports pointing to a $1 million-per-week payday.

Strip away the fireworks and you’re left with a clean media logic. The NFL is still the country’s biggest shared TV event. Sunday night is the league’s prime showcase. And a familiar voice at the front end smooths the path into three hours of live sports that still command massive attention.

Is a million a week for an opener steep? Sure. But in the context of what Sunday Night Football delivers—audience scale, cultural reach, and a brand that sets the tone for the week—the number looks less like a splurge and more like a line item in a very deliberate strategy. The song starts, the room quiets, and the country settles in. That moment is what NBC is paying for, and Underwood has made it hers.