Overseas Limits, Impact Players and the Auction: How an IPL Squad Is Built
Why only four overseas players can play, how the Impact Player rule works, and what teams can and cannot do at the auction table.
Every IPL team is built under the same rules. There are limits on how many overseas players a squad can have, how many can play at once and how much a team can spend. Understanding those limits explains most of the decisions teams make, from the auction table to the toss.
The squad
Each franchise must have between 18 and 25 players, and no more than eight of them can be overseas players. The rest are Indian, split between capped players, who have played international cricket for India, and uncapped players, who have not.
Only four overseas players can play
This is the rule that shapes almost every IPL team sheet. However many overseas stars are in the squad, a team can field no more than four at once. Picking which four to use, and whether that means an extra fast bowler, a spinner or a big-hitting batter, is one of the most important calls a coach makes each week.
The rule also explains why good Indian players are so valuable. A team with strong Indian batters and bowlers can use its four overseas places exactly where it needs them.
The Impact Player
Since 2023, each team has named five substitutes at the toss and can bring one of them into the match as an Impact Player. The Impact Player replaces someone from the starting XI and can bat and bowl fully. The player who is replaced cannot come back.
There is one catch. If a team's starting XI already includes four overseas players, its Impact Player has to be Indian, so no team can have five overseas players on the field.
The rule changed the game. With an extra batter available, teams bat with less fear of losing wickets, and totals of 250 and more have become far more common. Captains now also go to the toss with two team sheets, one for batting first and one for bowling first, and name their XI after they know which it will be.
The auction
Players join teams through an auction. Every few years there is a mega auction, where squads are largely broken up and rebuilt, and in between there are smaller mini auctions to fill gaps.
At the 2025 mega auction, each team had a budget of ₹120 crore. Teams could keep up to six players from their old squad, through retentions and Right to Match cards, and the cost of each retained player came out of that budget. Under a new rule, an Indian player who had not played international cricket for five years counted as uncapped, which let Chennai keep MS Dhoni for ₹4 crore.
The auction itself broke records. Lucknow Super Giants bought Rishabh Pant for ₹27 crore, the most ever paid for a player at an IPL auction, shortly after Punjab Kings had paid ₹26.75 crore for Shreyas Iyer. At the other end of the scale, Rajasthan Royals paid ₹1.1 crore for 13-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi, who went on to hit a 35-ball hundred in 2025.
During the season
Squads are not completely fixed once the auction is over. Teams can sign replacements for players who are injured or unavailable, from players who were in the auction pool. What they cannot do is get around the overseas rules. Every replacement still counts toward the limit of eight in the squad and four in the XI.
Stats in this story are correct to the end of the 2025 IPL season.
