CBS earns most-watched Sunday afternoon NFL package for third-consecutive season

For the third-consecutive season, CBS finishes atop the NFL broadcasting ranks, though all networks set multiyear records with a lift from Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel methodology and expanded out-of-home viewing measurements.

CBS averaged 21.25 million viewers for the 2025 NFL regular season, up 11% versus last year’s figure and topping Fox, its Sunday-afternoon competitor. Fox, for its part, averaged 19.6 million viewers for the 2025 NFL regular season, up 6% versus its season-long average for 2024 and its best season since 2015. NBC, the NFL’s primetime partner, averaged 23.5 million viewers for Sunday Night Football, marking the most-watched primetime show in America for the 15th consecutive year.

It should be noted, Nielsen measures the streaming audiences for CBS and Fox, while NBC’s streaming audience is measured via Adobe Analytics, making comparison of the above figures apples-to-oranges.

The CBS versus Fox battle was much closer when looking at the 4:25 p.m. ET national window. The late-afternoon timeslot, which is regularly the NFL’s most-watched window, averaged 25.83 million viewers on CBS, barely edging Fox’s 25.3 million viewers.

It is just the third time since 2007 that CBS has finished at the top of the pack. Until the 2023-24 season, Fox’s NFC-heavy package dominated the category, earning the title of most-watched NFL package each year 16 times in a row.

The balance of power has clearly shifted, however. For one, the NFL’s schedule is much more flexible now than it was for Fox’s decade-plus of viewership dominance. Under the new scheduling protocols, Fox gets more AFC games while CBS gets more NFC games, all with the goal of maximizing NFL viewership in the aggregate by distributing the best games to the most markets, regardless of conference or network affiliation. The AFC has also had the star quarterback edge in recent years, with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Lamar Jackson all residing within the conference. And although scheduling is more balanced nowadays, CBS still gets an AFC-skewing package.

As for pregame programs, both Fox and NBC maintained dominance in their respective windows. Fox NFL Sunday beat out The NFL Today on CBS for the 32nd consecutive season, averaging 4.4 million viewers per episode. NBC’s Football Night in America averaged 8.8 million viewers, marking its 20th consecutive year as the most-watched studio show on television.

Of course, all of this breaking of long-held records can at least partially be attributed to Nielsen’s new methodologies, which have generally served to increase live sports viewership as compared to prior years. To be sure, some of it is the NFL’s growing popularity. But with new baselines being set, it’ll be interesting to see if networks can maintain this level of growth over the next several years, when Nielsen’s methodologies will (presumably) be more stable.