The AFL Ladder and Percentage Explained: How Ranking Works
How the AFL percentage ladder works: premiership points, the percentage formula, every tie-breaker in order, and why a ratio decides finals places.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Competition18 min read
- Points for a win
- Four
- Points for a draw
- Two each
- Points for a loss
- None
- Percentage formula
- Points scored divided by points conceded times one hundred
- Break-even percentage
- One hundred exactly
- First tie-breaker
- Percentage
- Final tie-breaker
- A draw by lot
- Matches per club in 2026
- Twenty-three across twenty-five rounds
The AFL percentage ladder is the table that ranks the competition's eighteen clubs through the home and away season, and it works on two numbers. The first is premiership points: four for a win, two for a draw, nothing for a loss. The second is percentage, which is the total points a club has scored divided by the total it has conceded, multiplied by a hundred. Points come first. Percentage separates anybody level on points.
That is the whole system, and it is simpler than the ranking arrangements used in most competitions anywhere in the world. There are no bonus points, no reward for losing narrowly, no head-to-head rule applied before percentage and no seeding committee. Twenty-three matches, four points a win, and a ratio to break ties.
What makes it distinctively Australian is the choice of a ratio rather than a difference. Football competitions in Europe use goal difference, subtracting one number from another. Australian rules chose division, and the consequence is a figure that Australian supporters read as fluently as they read the score, quote in conversation without explanation, and watch move during a match. This guide covers how it is calculated, every tie-breaker behind it in order, what the number is actually telling you, and where it misleads.
The ladder itself
An AFL ladder has the same columns everywhere it is published: club, played, wins, draws, losses, points for, points against, percentage and premiership points. Clubs are sorted by premiership points descending, then percentage descending.
In 2026 the competition ran twenty-five rounds with each of the eighteen clubs playing twenty-three matches, so a club that won every match would finish on ninety-two premiership points. Nobody has ever come close to that. The ten highest-placed clubs qualify for the finals under the format introduced in 2026, which is set out in full in our guide to the AFL finals system.
Premiership points: four, two, nothing
The scoring of the ladder is deliberately blunt.
| Result | Premiership points | Effect on percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Win | 4 | Rises if the margin is large relative to the total |
| Draw | 2 each | Neutral for both clubs |
| Loss | 0 | Can rise or fall depending on the score |
| Bye | 0 | No change, no points recorded either way |
The important row is the last one in the middle column. A loss earns nothing at all, but it still changes percentage, and that is where most newcomers get caught out.
What AFL percentage actually measures
Percentage answers one question: across everything a club has done this season, has it scored more than it has let in, and by how much proportionally?
The formula is:
Percentage = (points for ÷ points against) × 100
A club that has scored 1,800 points and conceded 1,500 has a percentage of 120. A club that has scored 1,500 and conceded 1,800 has a percentage of about 83.3. A club that has scored exactly as many as it has conceded sits on 100, which is the break-even line and the number Australian commentators refer to when they say a club is trying to "get above the hundred".
Both totals include every point scored in every match, which in Australian rules means goals worth six and behinds worth one. A behind in the third quarter of a match already lost still moves the number.
A worked illustration
The following figures are constructed purely to show the arithmetic. They are not real match results.
Suppose a club plays five matches and produces these scores.
| Match | Club score | Opponent score | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 95 | 78 | Win |
| 2 | 62 | 110 | Loss |
| 3 | 104 | 101 | Win |
| 4 | 88 | 88 | Draw |
| 5 | 71 | 74 | Loss |
Points for total 420. Points against total 451. Divide 420 by 451 and multiply by a hundred and the percentage is about 93.1. The club has two wins, a draw and two losses, worth ten premiership points, but its percentage sits below the break-even line because one heavy defeat in match two outweighed two narrow wins.
Now change one thing. If match two had finished 62 to 80 rather than 62 to 110, points against would be 421, and the percentage would be about 99.8. Same record, same ten points, thirteen percentage points better. That single change would be enough to move the club several places on a crowded ladder in August.
Why a ratio rather than a difference
Australian rules is a high-scoring game. A typical AFL match produces something in the region of a hundred and seventy to two hundred points between the two clubs, and individual sides pass a hundred regularly. A season total for a club sits somewhere around fifteen hundred to two thousand points.
Against numbers of that size, a raw points difference would be extremely sensitive to blowouts. A single hundred-point win would carry the same weight as twenty-five four-point wins. Because percentage divides one seasonal total by another, one aberrant result gets absorbed into a large denominator rather than dominating the table.
The trade-off is that percentage is harder to compute in your head than goal difference, and it behaves in ways that surprise people. It is not linear. Improving from 90 to 100 requires less scoring than improving from 140 to 150, because in the second case the denominator is already being divided into a much larger number.
Reading the AFL percentage ladder in August
By the last month of the home and away season, the percentage column is doing real work. Positions seven to ten in particular are usually occupied by clubs level or nearly level on premiership points, and percentage is the only thing between them.
Three habits help.
- Count games, not points. Australians describe gaps in games rather than points, because four points equals one game. A club "two games clear" is eight premiership points ahead.
- Look at points against before points for. Defensive consistency drives percentage far more reliably than occasional big scores, because it protects the denominator week after week.
- Ignore percentage before about round eight. The number is unstable while the sample is small and tells you almost nothing about the club's real standing.
- Positions qualifying for finals55.6%
- Positions missing finals44.4%
A structural split of the AFL competition by finals qualification under the ten-team finals format introduced in 2026. It counts ladder positions, not clubs of any particular standard.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Positions qualifying for finals | 10 |
| Positions missing finals | 8 |
The tie-breakers in full
AFL regulations set out the ranking sequence, and it runs deeper than most supporters realise. The order is:
- Premiership points. Highest first. This is the only measure that matters until clubs are level.
- Percentage. The club with the higher percentage is placed above. This resolves the overwhelming majority of ties.
- Head-to-head premiership points. If clubs are still level, the premiership points each won in the home and away matches played between them are compared.
- Head-to-head percentage. A fresh percentage is calculated using only the points scored for and against each other in those matches, and the higher figure is placed first.
- A draw by lot. If clubs are still tied after all of that, position is decided by lot drawn by the league's Executive General Manager Football.
Steps three onwards have effectively never been needed at AFL level. Percentage is carried to enough decimal places that two clubs producing an identical ratio across twenty-three matches is close to a mathematical curiosity.
Percentage and the finals cut
Since 2026 there are ten finals positions rather than eight, which changed where percentage bites. It used to be that the eighth position was the crowded one and everything below it was academic. Now the ninth and tenth positions are worth a knockout final in the wildcard round, so percentage matters to a third of the competition rather than a handful of clubs.
It also matters at the top. The double chance goes only to the four clubs seeded highest, so a percentage difference of a few points in round twenty-three can decide whether a club plays a qualifying final it can afford to lose or an elimination final it cannot.
Percentage and the bottom of the ladder
At the other end, percentage sorts out draft order among clubs level on points. Priority picks and the ordering of the national draft follow ladder position, so a club that finishes seventeenth rather than eighteenth on percentage alone gives up a marginally better selection. The wooden spoon, the informal award for finishing last, is also decided this way when two clubs finish level.
This produces the least edifying situation the ladder can generate: two struggling clubs in the last round, each of whose supporters would prefer a heavy defeat. The AFL has never adjusted the system to address it, on the reasonable ground that the alternatives are worse.
How much a big win is actually worth
Coaches talk about "chasing percentage" late in the season, and the phrase gets used loosely. The honest arithmetic is that it depends entirely on where the club already sits.
For a club whose season totals are around 1,600 points for and 1,600 against, winning by fifty points in a match where the club scores 110 and concedes 60 lifts the season totals to 1,710 and 1,660, which moves percentage from 100 to about 103. Three points. For a club sitting on 130 with the same totals proportionally, the same win moves the number less, because the ratio is already stretched.
That is the reality behind the "percentage boost" that television graphics promise. A single result rarely moves a club more than two or three percentage points that late in a season, which is often enough to matter and never enough to rescue a bad year.
- 18Clubs on the ladder
- 23Matches per club
- 4Points for a win
- 4Ranking steps after points
Structural figures for the AFL ladder under the 2026 competition format. The tie-breaker count is the number of ranking steps set out in the regulations after premiership points.
Draws and how they land
Draws are rare in Australian rules but not vanishingly so, because the game's scoring granularity includes single points. When a home and away match finishes level, each club takes two premiership points and the scores are added to both the for and against columns, leaving percentage untouched by the match itself in relative terms.
Finals are different. Every final, including the Grand Final since 2016, is resolved by extra time rather than left drawn, because a finals series needs a result. Before that rule the Grand Final was replayed the following week, which last happened in 2010.
Byes, split rounds and comparing clubs fairly
The AFL fixture is not symmetrical. Clubs play twenty-three matches across twenty-five rounds, which means each club has bye rounds, and those byes are not scheduled simultaneously. For several weeks each winter the ladder therefore compares clubs that have played different numbers of matches.
No premiership points are awarded for a bye and no scores are recorded, so percentage is unaffected. The distortion is only in the points column, and Australian supporters handle it instinctively by talking about games in hand. The ladder is not adjusted for it, and no notional points are allocated.
The fixture itself is uneven in a deeper way as well, since each club plays five opponents twice and the rest once, so the strength of an individual club's draw affects both its points and its percentage. That is a structural feature of a competition with eighteen clubs and a twenty-three-match season, and there is no ladder mechanism that corrects for it.
What percentage does not tell you
Percentage is a summary, and summaries hide things.
It does not distinguish between a club that is consistently ten points better than everyone and a club that alternates between annihilating weak opponents and being annihilated by strong ones. It does not know when in the season results happened, so a club that was poor in March and excellent since August looks the same as one trending the other way. It does not adjust for injuries, for the difficulty of the draw, or for whether matches were played at home.
Analysts in Australia use ratings systems and adjusted margins to fill those gaps, but none of them appear on the ladder. For ranking purposes, the AFL has chosen a measure that is transparent, arithmetically simple and impossible to argue about, and accepted that it is a blunt instrument.
Percentage beyond the AFL
The same convention runs through Australian football at every level. The AFL Women's competition uses it, as do the VFL, the SANFL in South Australia, the WAFL in Western Australia and effectively every country and suburban league in the country. A parent reading an under-fourteens ladder in regional Victoria is reading the same formula that decides a minor premiership.
Other Australian codes went different ways. Rugby league's National Rugby League uses points differential rather than a ratio, which reflects a lower-scoring game where a subtraction stays meaningful. Cricket's Sheffield Shield uses a bonus points system that rewards batting and bowling performance in the first innings regardless of the eventual result, and the Big Bash League uses net run rate, which is a rate rather than a ratio. Set against those, the AFL's percentage is the simplest ranking measure of any major Australian competition.
Where ladder position pays out beyond September
Finishing high on the AFL percentage ladder buys more than a finals draw. Ladder position at the end of one season feeds directly into the shape of the next one, in three ways that clubs think about carefully.
The fixture is weighted. Because each club plays five opponents twice and the rest once, the league uses the previous season's ladder to decide which of those double-up matches each club gets. Clubs that finished nearby on the ladder tend to be paired, which produces a harder draw for a successful club and an easier one for a struggling club. It is a mild competitive balance mechanism, and it is one of the reasons the AFL fixture is openly uneven rather than a straight round robin.
The draft order runs in reverse ladder order, so the club finishing eighteenth picks first in each round of the national draft, subject to academy bids, father-son bids and any priority selections the league grants.
And the broadcast schedule follows position too. Clubs that finish high are given more Friday night and Saturday night matches, which are worth money in match-day revenue and exposure. A club that climbs from fourteenth to fifth will notice the difference in its own fixture the following March, before a ball is kicked.
Percentage across venues and travel
Percentage does not distinguish between a hundred-point win at home and a two-point win in another time zone, which is one of its blind spots in a competition spread across a continent.
The effect is visible in the ledgers of interstate clubs. A Perth club playing at Optus Stadium or a Brisbane club at the Gabba will usually post a much stronger points-for figure at home than away, because opposition sides arrive after long flights and because the grounds themselves differ. Ground dimensions matter in Australian rules more than in most sports: the Melbourne Cricket Ground is a large open oval, Marvel Stadium is narrower and roofed, and Adelaide Oval and the Sydney Cricket Ground are different again in shape and surface.
A club that plays half its matches on a tight ground under a roof and half on wide open ovals is generating its percentage from two quite different games. None of that is adjusted for on the ladder, and no proposal to adjust it has ever gained traction, because any correction would require the league to rank its own venues.
What happened in shortened and disrupted seasons
The ladder's arithmetic is unusually robust to disruption, which was tested during the 2020 season. That year the competition was cut short, quarters were shortened, and the number of matches each club played was reduced.
Premiership points continued to work exactly as before, because four points is four points regardless of how long a quarter runs. Percentage also continued to work, because it is a ratio: shorter quarters produced lower scores on both sides of the equation, so the figures stayed comparable within the season even though they are not comparable with any other year.
That is a genuine strength of a ratio over a difference. A goal-difference table in a shortened, lower-scoring season would compress towards zero and lose most of its ability to separate clubs. Percentage simply rescales. It is also the clearest reason not to compare percentage figures across eras, since the same number can be produced by very different games.
How clubs talk about the ladder internally
Coaches in Australia rarely discuss percentage publicly before the last month of a season, and there is a reason for the reticence. Publicly chasing margins looks like disrespect towards an opponent, and it invites the accusation that a club is playing for a number rather than a result.
Behind closed doors it is treated as a planning input rather than a target. Football departments run scenarios in the last five or six rounds, working out which combinations of results put the club in the top four and how much percentage would need to change to move a position. That analysis affects small decisions rather than large ones: whether to keep a settled forward line on the ground late in a match already won, whether to rest a player in a round where the opponent is weak, whether to risk a returning player in a match that is likely to be tight.
It very rarely affects game plans. There is no realistic way to manufacture forty points of margin on demand against an AFL side, and coaches who chase it tend to be punished. The instruction that survives contact with September is the ordinary one: win the game.
Following the ladder as a newcomer to Australian sport
If the AFL percentage ladder is your first encounter with Australian competition tables, a few conventions will save you confusion.
Australians say "percentage" without qualification and mean this specific figure. They say a club is "a game and a half clear", meaning six premiership points, because half a game is the two points a draw is worth. They call finishing first the minor premiership and the last-placed club the wooden spoon. And they treat the number 100 as the meaningful line rather than zero.
Other Australian competitions run on their own logic. The Big Bash League uses net run rate, the Australian Open has no table at all because it is a straight knockout, and rugby league's salary cap arrangements shape its table in ways explained in our NRL salary cap guide. The differences between the two rugby codes, which run their own competition structures through the same winter, are covered in our comparison of rugby league and rugby union. For cricket's version of a domestic table, our cricket section is the starting point.
Common misreadings
Four mistakes come up repeatedly.
- Treating percentage as a win rate. It is not. A club can be above 100 with a losing record, and clubs regularly are.
- Assuming a win always helps percentage. A narrow win in a low-scoring match will often drag a strong club's percentage down.
- Comparing percentages across seasons. Scoring levels move with rule changes and coaching trends, so a percentage of 125 in one era is not equivalent to 125 in another.
- Using early-season percentage to predict anything. Before about round eight the figure is dominated by one or two results.
The 2026 season as an example
Fremantle finished the 2026 home and away season on top with nineteen wins and four losses, taking the club's first minor premiership since 2015 and only the second in its history. The Dockers sealed it with a twenty-four point win over Adelaide in round twenty-three, went unbeaten at Optus Stadium across the home and away season, and equalled the record of nineteen home and away wins in a season set by West Coast in 1991.
A record like that makes percentage almost irrelevant at the top, which is the ideal outcome: the tie-breaker exists for the crowded middle. That same round twenty-three fixture mattered to Adelaide for the opposite reason, since the Crows needed the result to secure a top-six place and the bye that comes with it.
A last-round scenario, worked
Percentage is easiest to understand when you watch it decide something. The following scenario is constructed to show the mechanics and does not describe a real season.
Two clubs go into the last round level on sixty premiership points, fighting for the tenth position and the wildcard final that comes with it. Club A has scored 1,690 points and conceded 1,640, a percentage of about 103.0. Club B has scored 1,745 and conceded 1,720, a percentage of about 101.5. Club A is ahead by a point and a half.
Both win in the last round. Club A wins 82 to 70, so its totals become 1,772 and 1,710, a percentage of about 103.6. Club B wins 118 to 76, so its totals become 1,863 and 1,796, a percentage of about 103.7. Club B has overtaken Club A on the last day by a tenth of a percentage point, without either club losing.
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that Club A did nothing wrong. It won its match, in the middle of a season where it had outscored its opponents all year, and finished eleventh. The second is how small the difference was. Had Club B kicked one behind fewer, the order would have reversed.
That is the AFL percentage ladder working exactly as designed. It is unforgiving in a way that a head-to-head tie-breaker would not be, and it is the reason Australian supporters watch garbage time in dead matches in the last round with more attention than the scoreline seems to deserve. A goal in the final minute of a match already won is not meaningless in this competition. It is a fraction of a percentage point, and fractions of a percentage point have decided finals places.
Where to look it up
The AFL publishes the live ladder on its own site, updating as matches are played, and every club carries the same table. That is the authoritative version and the one used to determine finals qualification.
Ladder predictors, which let supporters guess remaining results and see the projected table, are widely used in Australia through August and September. They are useful for understanding scenarios and useless as evidence, because they have to assume both results and margins. When a finals place genuinely hangs on a decimal, use the league's own figures.
For the wider Australian sporting calendar and how the football season sits alongside cricket, tennis and motorsport, our Australia hub and the sports index are the places to start, and the Brownlow Medal guide covers the individual award decided across the same twenty-three rounds that build the ladder.