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The NFL is approaching the middle chunk of the 2025 regular season with even more momentum in its viewership.
The league concluded Week 5 with an average per-game viewership of 18.58 million, the highest level at this point of the season since 2010, and the second-largest such mark on record. The current figure is also up 8% from the comparable average last year and up 9% from 2023.
In recent years, October has often been a softer part of the schedule for NFL viewership, as the league faces greater competition from Major League Baseball playoffs and the start of new seasons for the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association. Even as MLB is posting its own robust gains this postseason, the most recent set of NFL games contained a series of notable achievements. Among them:
- CBS garnered its best Week 5 singleheader viewership since it regained NFL rights in 1998, averaging 19.6 million viewers for an early-afternoon window led by coverage of the Broncos-Eagles game.
- Fox averaged 20.3 million viewers for its America’s Game of the Week broadcast of Commanders-Chargers, helping fuel a 3% increase so far this season in that key late-afternoon Sunday slot.
- ESPN averaged 22.3 million for the Monday Night Football matchup between the Chiefs and Jaguars, by far the most-watched Week 5 MNF contest since it began airing those games in 2006. The Chiefs-Jaguars broadcast also ranks as the No. 10 most-watched NFL game of the season.
The top overall game of the season remains the Week 2 clash between the Eagles and Chiefs that averaged 33.8 million viewers and was a rematch of Super Bowl LIX in February.
Some of the NFL audience increases are due to Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel methodology, which brings in tens of millions of additional data points from set-top boxes and smart TVs and is designed to present a fuller picture of viewer behaviors. That process has also been a boon for college football.
The NFL, however, has strengthened its hold across not only sports but all of U.S. culture, as the league has now claimed the top 25 spots across American television since the start of the current broadcast season. The league, meanwhile, continues to segment its schedule effectively to create more stand-alone windows for individual games.
