AFLW Explained: Format, Seasons and Growth
AFLW explained: the eighteen clubs, a twelve-round season from August to November, sixteen a side under the 5-6-5 rule and 17-minute quarters.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished AFLW18 min read
- First season
- 2017 with eight clubs
- Clubs in 2026
- 18
- Home-and-away rounds in 2026
- 12
- Players on the field
- 16 a side
- Starting structure at centre bounces
- 5-6-5
- Quarter length
- 17 minutes with limited time-on
- Interchange rotation cap
- 60 per team per match
- Most premierships
- Adelaide with three
The AFLW is the national Australian rules football competition for women, run by the AFL and played by eighteen clubs carrying the same names and colours as the men's sides. The 2026 season is twelve home-and-away rounds starting in early August, followed by a four-week finals series that ends with a Grand Final on the last weekend of November. It is played sixteen a side, with five on the interchange bench, in quarters of 17 minutes.
That is the AFLW explained in a paragraph, but the numbers move. This competition has changed its club count four times, its season length five times, its quarter length once and its time of year twice since it started in February 2017 with eight clubs and a seven-round season. Very little about the AFLW has been stable except the direction, which has been consistently upward.
What has not changed is the shape of the game. Sixteen a side on grounds built for eighteen produces more space, more one-on-one contests and a lower-scoring, more contested style than the men's competition. The rule set is deliberately different — a smaller ball, a last-disposal out-of-bounds rule between the arcs, a 5-6-5 starting structure at centre bounces — and those differences are choices rather than accidents. This guide covers where the league came from, how a season actually works, every premiership so far, what the players are paid, and what is coming next.
Where the competition came from
Women had been playing Australian rules for more than a century before 2017. The Victorian Women's Football League and its equivalents in other states ran competitions for decades on almost no money, and the sport's participation numbers among women and girls were rising sharply through the 2010s.
The AFL's move was prompted by two exhibition matches between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs, played in 2013 and repeated in the following years, which drew television audiences nobody had forecast. The league formally established the competition on 15 September 2016 and gave licences to eight clubs. The first season began the following February.
The speed of it mattered. There was no long lead-in, no reserve competition feeding ready-made professionals. The first lists were assembled from state league football, from cross-code recruits and from women who had played rugby, basketball, cricket and Gaelic football.
The 2016 signing period and the first lists
The eight foundation clubs did not simply hold a draft. Each was allowed to sign two marquee players from anywhere in the country at an elevated salary, a number of priority players with existing connections to the club, and up to two rookies who had not played competitive Australian rules in the previous three years. Everyone else went into a draft held on 12 October 2016, with players allocated to state-based zones.
That structure was built for one purpose: to spread the small number of genuinely elite players across eight lists so no club was hopeless in round one. It largely worked, and the detail of how the competition recruits now is covered in the AFLW draft and pathways guide.
Season one, 2017
Eight clubs, seven rounds, a Grand Final on 25 March 2017. Adelaide beat Brisbane 4.11 (35) to 4.5 (29).
The football was raw and everybody knew it. What was not in doubt was the audience. The opening match at Princes Park drew a crowd large enough that the gates were locked with people still outside, and the season's television numbers were far ahead of what the AFL had projected. Whatever the competition's problems were, demand was not one of them.
Expansion, stage by stage
The league grew in four steps rather than continuously.
Number of clubs fielding a team in each AFLW premiership season. Two separate seasons were played in 2022, and the figure for that year reflects the second of them.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 8 |
| 2018 | 8 |
| 2019 | 10 |
| 2020 | 14 |
| 2021 | 14 |
| 2022 | 18 |
| 2023 | 18 |
| 2024 | 18 |
| 2025 | 18 |
| 2026 | 18 |
Geelong and North Melbourne came in for 2019, taking it to ten. Gold Coast, Richmond, St Kilda and West Coast followed for 2020, taking it to fourteen. Essendon, Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and Sydney entered for the second 2022 season, completing the set of eighteen.
Each expansion diluted the talent pool in the short term and deepened it in the medium term, because four new lists meant roughly 120 more contracted players and four more high-performance programmes producing them. The clubs that entered late — particularly Port Adelaide and Hawthorn — arrived into a competition where the pathway was already producing genuinely developed teenagers rather than converts.
The two seasons of 2022
The AFLW played two full premiership seasons inside one calendar year. Season six ran in the summer, in the traditional January-to-April window, and Adelaide won it. Season seven began in late August and finished in November, and Melbourne won it.
This was the mechanism for moving the competition out of summer and into spring. Playing two seasons in one year let the AFL shift the calendar without a gap year, and it also let the four new clubs enter at the earliest possible point. It leaves an oddity in the record books that will never be tidied: two premierships in the same calendar year, listed as S6 and S7.
Why the season moved out of summer
The original February-to-March window put the AFLW directly against cricket's Big Bash and the Australian Open, competed with the Australian summer's heat and the school holidays, and finished just as the men's season began — meaning the AFLW's finals were played into an audience already looking elsewhere.
Moving to an August start put the AFLW in the back half of the men's home-and-away season and then gave it clear air through October and November, once the men's Grand Final is done. The trade-off is that the AFLW opening rounds now compete with the run to the men's finals, which is why the league schedules high-profile double-headers early. The 2026 season opened with a St Kilda and Carlton AFLW match at Marvel Stadium preceding the men's fixture between the same clubs.
How the 2026 season is structured
Twelve home-and-away rounds from early August, then four weeks of finals, with the Grand Final on the last weekend of November.
Twelve rounds across eighteen clubs means no club plays every other club. Each side misses five opponents entirely, which makes the fixture uneven by construction. The AFL weights it toward rivalries, geography and broadcast value, and the resulting imbalance is the standard complaint about the competition's ladder — the same complaint made about the men's fixture, only sharper because twelve games is a small sample to separate eighteen teams.
Percentage does heavy lifting as a result. In a twelve-game season two clubs finishing level on points is common, and the tiebreak arithmetic works the same way as it does in the men's competition, explained in the ladder and percentage guide.
The finals series
Since 2022 the AFLW has run a top-eight finals series across four weeks, using the structure the men's competition used before its own 2026 rewrite.
The top four earn a double chance. First plays fourth and second plays third in qualifying finals, with the winners going straight to preliminary finals and the losers dropping into the second week. Fifth to eighth meet in elimination finals, and the losers are out. Week two pairs the qualifying-final losers against the elimination-final winners in semi-finals. Week three is two preliminary finals. Week four is the Grand Final.
The Grand Final is not played at a fixed venue. It goes to the home ground of the higher-placed finalist, which means the decider has been staged in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane in different years. There is no AFLW equivalent of the men's contractual lock on the MCG, and the league has been in no hurry to create one.
Sixteen a side, and what that changes
The single biggest structural difference from the men's game is the number of players. Sixteen on the field with five on the bench, against eighteen with five on the bench following the 2026 changes to the men's competition.
Two fewer bodies per side on a full-sized oval is a lot of space. It produces cleaner one-on-one contests, more genuine leading room for forwards, and a game that rewards a player who can win the ball in a duel rather than one who thrives in a pack. It also makes the AFLW's contested-possession numbers look different to the men's, because there are simply fewer players available to arrive at a contest.
The trade-off is that fatigue matters more. Sixteen players covering the same ground as eighteen means more running per player, which is part of why the bench holds five rather than four and why the rotation cap sits at 60.
The 5-6-5 starting structure
At every centre bounce and centre ball-up, each team must have five players inside its defensive 50-metre arc and five inside its attacking arc. That leaves six in the middle: three midfielders, a ruck, and a player on each wing.
The rule exists to stop the flooding and rolling zones that made the sport unwatchable at various points in its history, and to guarantee that the moment after a goal produces a genuine contest with forwards isolated one on one. It is the AFLW's version of a structure the men's competition ran under a different set of numbers, scaled down for sixteen a side.
Coaches work around it in the seconds after the ball is cleared, exactly as they do in the men's game. The rule governs the instant of the bounce, not what happens two seconds later.
Seventeen-minute quarters and the clock
An AFLW quarter is 17 minutes. For the first 15, the clock stops only for goals and serious injuries. For the last two minutes, it stops for every stoppage, which means the closing period of each quarter runs on the same basis as a men's match.
This is a deliberate compromise. It keeps total match time manageable for a semi-professional competition where most players hold other jobs, while ensuring that the part of a quarter where matches are actually decided is played out properly rather than being cut short by a running clock.
Quarters were 15 minutes until 2023. The two-minute increase was small in isolation but adds roughly eight minutes of football to every match, and it noticeably raised scoring.
The other rule differences
Ball size. The AFLW uses a size four ball, one size down from the men's size five. It is easier to mark and easier to handball cleanly, and it was chosen for the same reasons other sports adjust equipment.
Last disposal out of bounds. Between the two 50-metre arcs, if a player is the last to touch the ball before it crosses the boundary, the opposition gets a free kick at the point it went out. This removes the incentive to bang the ball off the ground to relieve pressure and cuts the number of boundary throw-ins substantially.
Throw-ins ten metres in. Where a boundary throw-in does happen between the arcs, it is taken ten metres inside the line rather than on it, which gives the ruck contest room and reduces the scrum against the fence.
Sixty rotations. Clubs are capped at 60 interchange rotations per match, excluding injury assessments, blood rule changes and anything done at a quarter break.
Taken together these rules push in one direction: keep the ball moving, keep the ground open, reduce stoppages.
Every premiership so far
| Season | Premiers | Runners-up |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Adelaide | Brisbane |
| 2018 | Western Bulldogs | Brisbane |
| 2019 | Adelaide | Carlton |
| 2020 | Season abandoned, no Grand Final | — |
| 2021 | Brisbane | Adelaide |
| 2022 S6 | Adelaide | Melbourne |
| 2022 S7 | Melbourne | Brisbane |
| 2023 | Brisbane | North Melbourne |
| 2024 | North Melbourne | Brisbane |
| 2025 | North Melbourne | Brisbane |
- Adelaide33.3%
- Brisbane22.2%
- North Melbourne22.2%
- Melbourne11.1%
- Western Bulldogs11.1%
Premierships won from 2017 to 2025 inclusive, counting both 2022 seasons. The 2020 season was abandoned without a Grand Final and is not counted.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Adelaide | 3 |
| Brisbane | 2 |
| North Melbourne | 2 |
| Melbourne | 1 |
| Western Bulldogs | 1 |
Brisbane's record is the strangest line in the competition's history: five Grand Final losses against two wins. They have been the most consistently strong club of the AFLW era and have the smallest premiership return relative to their finals record.
North Melbourne's undefeated 2025
North Melbourne won every match they played in 2025 — twelve home-and-away games and three finals — and beat Brisbane by 40 points in the Grand Final in front of 12,741 people. It was their second premiership in a row.
Perfect seasons are rare in Australian football at any level, and doing it across a twelve-game home-and-away programme is harder than the small number of matches suggests, because a twelve-game season gives a side almost no room to have an off day and recover. Their midfielder Ash Riddell won the league best and fairest with 23 votes in the same year.
The awards
The AFLW best and fairest is the competition's Brownlow equivalent, voted three-two-one by the field umpires after each home-and-away match. Ash Riddell won it in 2025.
The leading goalkicker award goes to the player with the most home-and-away goals — the AFLW has no Coleman Medal, and the naming difference is explained in the Coleman Medal guide. Port Adelaide's Indy Tahau set the record in 2025 with 25.
There is also a rising star, won in 2025 by Sydney's Zippy Fish, plus goal of the year, mark of the year, an All-Australian team of sixteen, and club best and fairests. They are presented together at the league's own awards night in late November.
What the players are paid
The AFLW is semi-professional. Most players hold jobs, study, or both, and train on a schedule built around that.
Under the collective bargaining agreement running to the end of 2027, each club pays its players across four tiers: two on tier one, six on tier two, six on tier three, and the remainder on tier four. Average payments rise across the life of the agreement, roughly doubling from where they sat at the start of the deal.
The AFL and the players' association have moved to replace the tier structure with a conventional salary cap, which gives clubs the flexibility to pay one player substantially more if they choose. The tier system's virtue was that it guaranteed a floor. Its weakness was that it made it almost impossible to pay a genuine superstar what she was worth, which is the same tension the men's competition manages through its salary cap.
Crowds, venues and television
AFLW matches are mostly played at smaller grounds — suburban ovals, boutique stadiums and regional venues — rather than the largest arenas. That is a deliberate choice about atmosphere as much as economics. Six thousand people at a tight suburban ground reads better on television and feels better in person than six thousand in a stadium built for 50,000.
The exceptions are the marquee fixtures. The 2019 Grand Final at Adelaide Oval drew 53,034, still the competition's record crowd, and double-headers attached to men's matches at Marvel Stadium put AFLW football in front of audiences that would not otherwise seek it out.
Every match is broadcast, on free-to-air and on the AFL's streaming service. The league's own figures put total attendance across a season above a million and viewership in the millions, placing it consistently among the most watched women's competitions in Australia alongside cricket's WBBL and netball.
Scoring, and why the totals look low
An AFLW score of 6.4 (40) is a solid winning total. That reads as low against a men's match, and the reasons are structural rather than a comment on skill.
Quarters are 17 minutes against 20 plus time-on, so there is roughly half the playing time. There are two fewer players a side, which means fewer bodies to hold territory once a team gains it. Kicking distance across the whole competition is shorter, so moving the ball 100 metres takes more disposals and gives the defence more chances to intervene. And the grounds are full size, built for a men's game, which stretches sixteen players a long way.
The trend is upward and measurable through the goalkicking award. The 2017 leading goalkicker, Carlton's Darcy Vescio, finished on 14. By 2023 the mark had risen to 20, shared by Melbourne's Kate Hore and Eden Zanker. In 2024 it was 21, shared by Geelong's Aishling Moloney and Brisbane's Taylor Smith. In 2025 Port Adelaide's Indy Tahau reached 25.
That is a rise of roughly 75 per cent in the leading tally across nine seasons, in a competition whose season length has moved around underneath it. Longer quarters from 2023 account for part of it. The rest is players who have now spent five or six years in professional high-performance programmes kicking further and more accurately than the same players did as converts.
Competitive balance and the gap at the bottom
Expansion has a cost that shows up on the ladder. Every time the AFLW added four clubs, it spread the same pool of experienced players thinner, and the first two or three seasons for a new club have typically been hard.
Twelve rounds makes this worse rather than better. A short season gives a developing club almost no chance to build form and no room to recover from a poor start, and it magnifies the effect of an uneven fixture. A side that draws four of the top six in its twelve matches is fighting a different season to one that does not.
The counterweight is the draft, which allocates picks in reverse ladder order and gives the bottom clubs first access to each year's best teenagers. That mechanism has worked reasonably well — the clubs that entered in 2020 and 2022 have generally become competitive faster than the equivalent expansion clubs did in the men's competition, largely because a short list turns over quickly and one good draft can change a team.
North Melbourne's back-to-back premierships in 2024 and 2025, after entering in 2019, show the ceiling is reachable. Brisbane's seven Grand Finals across the competition's history show that reaching it is a different problem to staying at the top of it.
What an AFLW match day is like
Small, close and quick. Most home-and-away matches are played at grounds holding a few thousand people, with the crowd close enough to the boundary to hear players calling for the ball, which is not an experience available at a men's match at the Gabba or the MCG.
Gates are cheap and often free for members. Queues are short. Food is a barbecue and a coffee cart rather than a full stadium concourse. Players sign autographs on the fence after the siren as a matter of routine, which was standard at men's matches decades ago and is not now.
The football itself is over in about two hours including breaks, against roughly three for a men's game. That makes it a genuinely easier proposition with children, and the AFLW's crowds skew younger and more family-heavy than the men's competition as a result.
The exception is the marquee round, where a club moves an AFLW fixture to a large stadium or attaches it to a men's game. Those matches are a different experience entirely, and they are where the competition picks up most of its new audience.
Where the players come from
Very differently from where they came from in 2017. The first lists were built from state leagues and cross-code recruits. Current lists are dominated by players who came through a structured under-18 pathway, principally the Coates Talent League Girls in Victoria and Tasmania and the equivalent state programmes elsewhere, feeding a national draft each December.
Cross-code recruitment has not stopped — netballers, basketballers, Gaelic footballers and rugby players still arrive, often through the rookie signing period — but it is now a supplement rather than the foundation. The whole pathway, from junior football to draft night, is covered in the AFLW draft and pathways guide.
Tasmania and what comes next
A nineteenth licence has been allocated to the Tasmania Devils, who will field an AFLW side alongside the men's club later this decade. That will be the first genuine expansion since 2022 and the first time the competition has an odd number of clubs, which creates its own fixturing problem.
Beyond that, the questions facing the AFLW are about season length and professionalisation rather than club numbers. Twelve rounds is short for eighteen teams. Lengthening it requires paying players more, which requires the broadcast and commercial revenue to support it, which requires the audience to keep growing. Each of those depends on the others, which is why the competition has moved in careful increments rather than one leap.
The players' association has pushed consistently for a longer season on the argument that twelve rounds is too short to develop a genuine professional career, and that a player cannot reasonably give up outside work for a four-month commitment. The league's position has been that lengthening the season without the revenue to support it puts the whole competition at risk. Both are defensible, and the next collective bargaining agreement from 2028 is where the argument will be settled.
There is also a question about where the AFLW sits in the calendar long term. August to November works while the men's finals dominate September, but it puts the AFLW Grand Final in the same month as the Melbourne Cup carnival and the start of the cricket season, and competing for attention in November is not obviously easier than competing for it in February.
Common misconceptions
"The AFLW plays the same rules as the AFL." It does not. Different team size, different ball, different starting structure, different out-of-bounds rule, different quarter length.
"AFLW players are full-time professionals." They are not. Most work or study alongside football.
"The AFLW season is in summer." It was until 2022. It now runs August to November.
"The Grand Final is at the MCG." It is hosted by the higher-placed finalist and has been played in several states.
"Every club has always had a team." Eighteen clubs was reached only in the second 2022 season, six years after the competition began.
"AFLW players are all converts from other sports." They were in 2017. Most current draftees have played nothing but Australian football since they were children.
"The AFLW is the same competition as the old women's state leagues." It sits above them. The Victorian, South Australian, Western Australian and Queensland women's state leagues still run, and they feed the AFLW rather than competing with it.
How to follow it
Fixtures, ladders and live scores are on the AFL's own AFLW pages and app, and every club publishes its own match-day information. Tickets are cheap and often free for club members, and the smaller venues mean you can generally turn up on the day.
If you are coming to the sport from outside, the AFLW is arguably an easier entry point than the men's competition. Fewer players on the ground makes the structure of a passage of play visible in a way it often is not in a men's match, and the shorter quarters make a full game a manageable two hours. For the wider Australian sporting calendar, the Australia hub and the sports section set out where the AFLW season sits against everything else.