Circa Survivor for 2026 is still a few months from kickoff, at the beginning of the NFL regular season. But Circa Sports already kicked off registration with a huge announcement of guaranteed money across its three contests.

Circa Survivor is the biggest of those and has a monstrous guaranteed pot of $20 million for the 2026 contest. Circa Survivor Grandissimo, a high-stakes pool, has a $4 million guarantee, while the Circa Million weekly picks contest remains at $6 million.

2026 Circa Survivor

Massive Money

Just two years ago, Circa Survivor was already booming as a high-paying NFL survivor-style contest: Picking one team per week to just win its game, and you can only use each team once.

In its fifth year at the time, the guarantee was $10 million, with entrants paying $1,000 per entry (max 10).

But the actual prize pool went well beyond that, thanks to a record 14,266 entries, bumping the number to $14,266,000. That prompted Derek Stevens, who oversees Circa Sports as the owner of Circa Las Vegas, to bump the 2025 guarantee to $15 million.

Once again, the actual pool went well beyond that, with 18,718 entries hiking the prize to $18.718 million. So on May 20, Stevens announced that the 2026 Circa Survivor guarantee will be $20 million.

If past performance is any indicator of future results, Circa expects to easily surpass the 20,000 entries required to cover that guarantee.

Circa Survivor Grandissimo

Last year marked the debut of Circa Grandissimo, the $100,000-per-entry Survivor-style contest. Stevens, Benson and the Circa team weren’t quite sure how well it would go, setting a $1.5 million guarantee and hoping to get well beyond the 15 entries to cover that purse.

Much like its predecessor, Circa Grandissimo far exceeded the needed entries, drawing 69 to boost the purse to $6.9 million. The contest ended after Week 13, with six entries tying for the win to claim $1.15 million apiece.

Seeing that success, Stevens & Co. are bumping the Circa Survivor Grandissimo guarantee to $4 million for 2026. It’ll take 40 entries to cover that purse, but the expectation is for triple digits.

Circa Million

This is Circa Sports’ original picks contest, launching in 2019. Contestants make five NFL picks per week against the spread. It’s $1,000 per entry, and the past two years, the guaranteed prize pool was $6 million, including the standard $1 million to the winner.

In both 2024 and 2025, total entries fell a few hundred short of the 6,000 needed to cover that guarantee – 5,617 in 2024 and 5,685. So Circa had to make up the difference of more than $300,000 each time.

That led Stevens to keep the guarantee at $6 million for the 2026 Circa Million, the eighth year of the contest.

One notable change this year: Bumping the max number of entries from five to 10.