Women's State of Origin Explained: History, Format, Records
Women's State of Origin explained: the 1999 Interstate Challenge start, the 2018 rebrand, the move to a three-game series and the crowd records.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NRLW18 min read
- First interstate match
- 1999
- Rebranded as Origin
- 2018
- Matches in the Origin era
- 16
- Series played
- 9
- Series length since 2024
- 3 games
- Record crowd
- 26,022 in 2025
- First 3-0 series
- New South Wales in 2026
- Player of series medal
- Katrina Fanning Medal
Women's State of Origin is the annual rugby league series between New South Wales and Queensland, played over three matches in autumn each year and contested by the best players in the NRLW. It has carried the Origin name since 2018, it became a two-game series in 2023 and a three-game series in 2024, and its crowds have grown from under 7,000 for the first match to a record 26,022 in 2025.
That is the modern shape of it. What the modern shape hides is that this is one of the oldest continuous fixtures in Australian women's sport. New South Wales and Queensland have played an official interstate match every year since 1999, and for the first sixteen of those years Queensland won every single one. The Origin era, which is the part most people know, is only the most recent nine seasons of a much longer argument.
This guide covers both halves: where the fixture came from, how it became a three-game series, every result since the rebrand, what the crowds actually show, who is eligible to play and how the series fits around the NRLW club season.
What the series actually is
It is a representative fixture, not a club one. Players are selected for the state where they first played senior rugby league, and they play for that state regardless of where they live or which NRLW club pays them. A Queensland-qualified player at a Sydney club plays for Queensland. That is the whole idea, and it is the same principle the men's series has used since 1980.
The series is administered by the NRL, with the two state governing bodies — the New South Wales Rugby League and the Queensland Rugby League — selecting and preparing the squads. Each side has a full-time or near-full-time head coach, a camp of roughly two weeks before each match, and a squad drawn almost entirely from the twelve NRLW clubs.
The trophy is a shield, and the winner of the series holds it for a year. If the series is drawn on matches, as could happen in a two-game format, the aggregate score decides it.
Before Origin: the Interstate Challenge, 1999 to 2017
The fixture began in 1999 as the Women's Interstate Challenge. Queensland won the first match 16-6 in Brisbane. They then won the next fifteen as well.
That run — every match from 1999 to 2014 — is the most one-sided sequence in any long-running Australian representative fixture, and it happened for structural reasons rather than accidental ones. Queensland had a more organised women's competition through the 1990s and 2000s, a stronger central pathway and a habit of keeping squads together across seasons. New South Wales had more players but a more fragmented system.
The 2015 match was drawn 4-4, which at the time felt like a result in itself. New South Wales finally won in 2016 and won again in 2017. Those two victories came immediately before the rebrand, which is not a coincidence: a competitive fixture is a marketable one.
The 2017 decision and the rebrand
On 6 December 2017 the National Rugby League announced two things on the same day. The first was the creation of the NRLW, an elite national women's club competition. The second was that the Women's Interstate Challenge would be rebranded as Women's State of Origin.
The rebrand did more than change a name. It attached the fixture to the most valuable property in Australian rugby league, gave it a standalone broadcast slot rather than a curtain-raiser one, and made it part of the same commercial package sold to broadcasters and sponsors. It also, in practical terms, changed the eligibility rules within two years, tightening them to match the men's criteria.
Attaching a women's fixture to an existing men's brand is a strategy that has failed in several sports because the brand carries expectations the new event cannot meet. It worked here because the fixture already existed, already had a history and already had a genuine rivalry underneath it.
The first Origin match, June 2018
The first match under the new name was played on 22 June 2018 at North Sydney Oval. New South Wales won 16-10 in front of 6,824 people. Isabelle Kelly was named player of the match and took the medal for player of the series, which at that point was a single-match award.
North Sydney Oval is a small ground with a heritage grandstand and a hill, and choosing it rather than a large stadium was deliberate. A full small ground looks and sounds better on television than a quarter-full large one, and the NRL had watched other codes make the opposite mistake. The 2019 match went back to the same ground and drew 10,515 — enough to make the point that the ground was now too small.
One game, then two, then three
The expansion of the series is the clearest single measure of how quickly the women's game has grown.
- 9Series played
- 16Matches played
- 10NSW match wins
- 6QLD match wins
- 26022Record crowd
Counts matches and series from the 2018 rebrand to the 2026 series inclusive. It excludes the Women's Interstate Challenge era from 1999 to 2017, which was a single annual match under a different name.
A single annual match ran from 1999 all the way through to 2022 — twenty-four years of one game a season. In 2023 the NRL added a second match, giving the fixture a genuine series structure for the first time. In 2024 it went to three, matching the men's format.
The move to three games was not universally welcomed at the time. The argument against was that a small playing pool would be stretched by three high-intensity matches inside six weeks, and that a third game risked being a dead rubber with a smaller crowd. Both concerns turned out to have some substance — the 2026 third game, played after the series was already decided, drew the smallest crowd of any match since 2022 — but the overall attendance and broadcast numbers have justified the decision.
Every result since the rebrand
| Year | Format | Series winner | Matches | Combined crowd |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Single match | New South Wales | 1-0 | 6,824 |
| 2019 | Single match | New South Wales | 1-0 | 10,515 |
| 2020 | Single match | Queensland | 1-0 | 4,833 |
| 2021 | Single match | Queensland | 1-0 | 7,183 |
| 2022 | Single match | New South Wales | 1-0 | 11,321 |
| 2023 | Two matches | Queensland on aggregate | 1-1 | 31,247 |
| 2024 | Three matches | Queensland | 2-1 | 74,093 |
| 2025 | Three matches | New South Wales | 2-1 | 63,960 |
| 2026 | Three matches | New South Wales | 3-0 | 55,841 |
The 2020 and 2021 figures are pandemic-affected and should not be read as a decline. The 2020 match was moved and played under capacity restrictions in Queensland, and the 2021 match was similarly constrained.
The 2023 series and the aggregate rule
The two-game series in 2023 produced the only result in the fixture's history decided on points difference. Queensland won game one 18-10 at CommBank Stadium in Parramatta in front of 12,972. New South Wales won game two 18-14 at Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville in front of 18,275.
One win each. Queensland took the series because they had scored 32 points across the two matches to New South Wales' 28 — a margin of four. Tazmin Gray was named player of the series.
It is a clean illustration of why a two-game series is an awkward format. The rule is fair, it was published in advance and nobody disputed it, but deciding a representative series on four points of aggregate satisfies nobody. The move to three games the following year removed the problem entirely.
The 2024 series: three games for the first time
The 2024 series was the first played over three matches and it remains the best-attended. New South Wales won game one 22-12 at Suncorp Stadium in front of 25,492. Queensland took game two by a point in Newcastle, 11-10, in front of 25,782 — the largest crowd ever to watch a women's rugby league match in New South Wales at that point. Queensland then won the decider in Townsville to take the series 2-1.
Shannon Mato was named player of the series. The three matches drew a combined 74,093 people at an average of just under 24,700 per game, which are still the series records.
The Newcastle match is the one that changed the planning. A regional New South Wales city delivered a bigger crowd than Brisbane for a standalone women's fixture, on a Thursday night, with no men's game attached. Newcastle has hosted a match every year since.
2025 and the record crowd
The 2025 series opened at Suncorp Stadium on 1 May with 26,022 in the ground, which remains the record attendance for a women's rugby league match in Australia. New South Wales won it 32-12, their biggest Origin-era winning margin.
Game two moved to Allianz Stadium in Sydney, where New South Wales won 26-6 in front of 16,026 to seal the series with a match to spare. Queensland took the dead rubber in Newcastle 18-14, in front of 21,912 — a healthy crowd for a match with nothing on it, and the single most encouraging number in the series.
Olivia Kernick was awarded the Nellie Doherty Medal as player of the series. It was the last time the award carried that name.
The 2026 whitewash
New South Wales won all three matches in 2026, the first clean sweep of the three-game era. The scores were tight throughout: 11-6 in Newcastle on 30 April, 14-10 at Suncorp Stadium on 14 May, and 12-4 at Cbus Super Stadium on the Gold Coast on 28 May.
- New South Wales10
- Queensland6
Counts individual matches won under the Origin name from 2018 to 2026 inclusive, sixteen matches in total. It does not include the Women's Interstate Challenge era from 1999 to 2017, when Queensland won sixteen consecutive matches.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| New South Wales | 10 |
| Queensland | 6 |
Yasmin Meakes was named player of the series and became the first winner of the renamed Katrina Fanning Medal, honouring the Canberra and Australian halfback and Hall of Fame inductee.
The one soft spot was the third match. With the shield already decided, the Gold Coast fixture drew 11,816 — less than half the crowd of the opening match and the smallest since 2022. Every three-game series risks a dead rubber, and 2026 was the first year the risk was fully realised.
Who is eligible to play
Selection is on origin, meaning the state in which a player played her first senior rugby league. That has been the rule since 2019.
Before 2019 there was a residency pathway. A player could qualify for a state by living and playing there, which meant a number of players represented both states across their careers. That was tidied up when the series was aligned with the men's eligibility criteria, and the change had a real effect on squad composition — several established players moved sides or lost eligibility outright.
Players who have represented another nation at senior level are generally ineligible, though the NRL considers exceptions case by case. This matters more in the women's game than the men's, because a large share of NRLW players are qualified for New Zealand or a Pacific nation and the interaction between Test eligibility and Origin eligibility is not always obvious.
The medal for player of the series
The award was the Nellie Doherty Medal from its introduction until 2025, named for one of the pioneers of Australian women's rugby league. From 2026 it is the Katrina Fanning Medal, named for the Canberra halfback who played more than twenty Tests for Australia and was inducted into the Rugby League Hall of Fame.
Two players have won it twice: Isabelle Kelly, in 2018 and 2022, and Tazmin Gray, in 2021 and 2023. Olivia Kernick won the last Nellie Doherty Medal in 2025 and Yasmin Meakes the first Katrina Fanning Medal in 2026. Individual honours in this fixture are also a strong predictor of the Dally M Medal later in the year, though the two awards use entirely different voting systems.
Where the matches are played
Venue selection has been more adventurous than the men's series, partly by necessity and partly by design.
| Venue | City | Notable use |
|---|---|---|
| North Sydney Oval | Sydney | First two Origin matches, 2018 and 2019 |
| GIO Stadium | Canberra | 2022 match, 11,321 |
| CommBank Stadium | Parramatta | 2023 game one, 12,972 |
| Queensland Country Bank Stadium | Townsville | 2023 and 2024, both above 18,000 |
| Suncorp Stadium | Brisbane | Record crowd of 26,022 in 2025 |
| McDonald Jones Stadium | Newcastle | Used every year since 2024 |
| Allianz Stadium | Sydney | 2025 game two, 16,026 |
| Cbus Super Stadium | Gold Coast | 2026 game three, 11,816 |
The pattern is clear enough. Suncorp Stadium is the reliable big-crowd venue in Queensland. Newcastle and Townsville are the two regional grounds that consistently outperform expectations. Sydney is the hardest market, which is counterintuitive given how much of the playing talent comes from there, and the NRL has tried several different Sydney venues without settling on one.
What the crowd numbers actually show
Read carelessly, the attendance record looks like a straight line from 6,824 to 26,022 and then a decline. That is not what happened.
The single-match era from 2018 to 2022 produced one crowd per year, growing from under 7,000 to just over 11,000 outside the pandemic years. The multi-game era produces a series total, and that total peaked in 2024 at 74,093 before falling to 63,960 in 2025 and 55,841 in 2026.
Two things explain the fall, and neither is a loss of interest. The first is dead rubbers: the 2025 and 2026 series were both decided before game three. The second is venue capacity — the 2026 series used the Gold Coast rather than Townsville for its final match, and the Gold Coast has not yet shown it can fill a stadium for this fixture. The per-match average in a live series remains above 20,000, which was unthinkable in 2019.
Scheduling: why it comes before the club season
The women's series is played in autumn, finishing before the NRLW season starts. The men's series is played in the middle of the men's season, taking the best players out of club football for three separate weeks.
The women's arrangement is straightforwardly better and everyone involved knows it. Clubs do not lose players mid-competition, the eleven-round club season runs clean, players get a defined representative block with a proper camp, and the two competitions do not compete for attention. It exists because the women's calendar was designed in the 2020s with the men's example available to learn from. Retrofitting the same fix to the men's game is much harder, because the men's Origin window is worth too much money in its current slot.
What the players are paid
Origin match payments sit on top of an NRLW club contract. They were set at around 6,000 dollars per match in the early 2020s and have been revised at collective bargaining rounds since, so any specific figure carries a use-by date.
The structural point is more durable. Because the series sits outside the club season, those payments are genuinely additional income rather than a redistribution of club money — a player who makes an Origin squad earns for three matches she would not otherwise have played. With NRLW club contracts still short of a full living for most of a squad, three Origin games can represent a meaningful share of a player's football earnings for the year. The men's game handles representative payments differently, and the interaction with the NRL salary cap is one of the more technical parts of the men's system.
How it differs from the men's series
Beyond scheduling, the differences are mostly matters of degree. Matches are 70 minutes rather than 80, in line with NRLW club football. Squads are smaller in practical terms because the eligible playing pool is smaller. Venues rotate more widely and include regional grounds the men's series would not use.
The one genuine difference in character is the pace of change. The men's series has been three matches, in mid-season, with essentially the same eligibility rules since 1982. The women's series has changed format twice in four years, changed its eligibility rules once, and renamed its principal medal. Anybody writing about it needs to check the current arrangements rather than assume they match last season's.
For a broader comparison of how the two rugby codes differ in structure and law, see this guide.
The rivalry in playing terms
The two states play differently, and the difference has been stable enough over the Origin era to be worth describing.
Queensland have generally built around a heavy, mobile middle and a controlling half, playing for field position and forcing errors. Their two-year run of series wins in 2023 and 2024 was built on winning the middle third and taking their chances in tight matches — the one-point win in Newcastle in 2024 is the clearest example.
New South Wales have had the deeper pool of outside backs, drawn from the concentration of NRLW clubs in Sydney and Newcastle, and their best performances have come from getting the ball wide quickly. The 32-12 win in Brisbane in 2025 was that plan working perfectly.
The 2026 series was the exception to both descriptions: three low-scoring, defence-dominated matches decided by five, four and eight points.
Selection and coaching
Both states appoint a head coach on a multi-year basis rather than year to year, which was not the case in the Interstate Challenge era. Squads are named a fortnight or so before each match, with a full camp between games, and there is far more continuity in selection than there used to be — a settled Origin side now looks much more like a national squad in waiting than a scratch representative team.
The selection debate that recurs every year concerns dual-code and dual-sport athletes. Rugby sevens, rugby union and touch football all draw from the same pool, and a player who has spent a season in another code may or may not be available or match-fit in April.
How a player gets to an Origin jersey
The route from a suburban or country club to a state jersey now runs through a defined set of steps, which was not true a decade ago.
- Junior and club footballA player registers with a local club and plays in the district or regional girls' and women's competition in her state.
- State pathway squadsShe is identified through a representative carnival or academy programme and joins an under-age or development squad run by the state governing body.
- State leagueShe plays in the New South Wales or Queensland women's premiership, the competition immediately below the NRLW, where NRLW clubs do most of their recruiting.
- NRLW contractAn NRLW club signs her for a season, giving her professional preparation, a strength and conditioning programme and eleven rounds of elite football.
- Origin selectionThe state coach names her in a squad of about twenty for a two-week camp, and she qualifies for the state where she played her first senior rugby league.
- Australian selectionStrong Origin form is the main route into the Jillaroos squad for the Test window later in the year.
Describes the standard route as it operates in the mid-2020s. It is a description of the structure, not a guarantee of progression, and players regularly enter partway through it from rugby union, sevens or touch football.
The step that has changed most is the third. Before the NRLW existed, a player went from state league football straight to a representative jersey with no professional layer in between, which is why the standard of the fixture has risen so sharply since 2018. The step that has changed least is the first: junior club football in both states is still run by volunteers on suburban and country grounds, and every player in an Origin squad came through it.
How to get tickets and watch
Tickets go on sale through the NRL's official ticketing partner some months ahead, and unlike men's Origin they do not sell out within minutes. Prices are considerably lower, junior and family pricing is generous, and it is normally possible to buy a good seat a week out for a match that is not a series decider.
All three matches are broadcast live and free-to-air in Australia on the Nine Network, with coverage also on Fox League and streaming through the associated services. Sky Sport carries the series in New Zealand.
Kick-off is usually early evening on a Thursday, which suits a local crowd and a national television audience but makes travelling from interstate awkward. Check the fixture before booking anything, because the dates have moved earlier in the calendar twice since 2023.
If you can only go to one match, go to game one or game two. Game three has been a dead rubber in two of the last three series, and the atmosphere reflects it.
What the series has done for the wider game
The clearest effect has been on participation. Girls' and women's registrations in both states have risen every year since the rebrand, and the pathway from junior club football to a state jersey is now visible in a way it was not before 2018.
The second effect is commercial. A standalone women's fixture drawing 26,000 people and a free-to-air audience is a saleable product on its own terms, and that has fed directly into the payments, the club competition's broadcast deal and the willingness of NRL clubs to fund women's programmes. Australian women's sport has several models for this — the Women's Big Bash League took a different route through cricket's revenue-share system — but the Origin route of building around one enormous annual fixture has worked faster than most people expected.
What comes next
The obvious open questions are whether the series stays at three matches, whether a match is ever taken outside New South Wales and Queensland, and whether the venue strategy settles down. None has a firm answer.
A fourth question sits underneath all of them: whether the fixture stays a two-state contest at all. Rugby league's women's playing base is growing fastest outside New South Wales and Queensland in relative terms, and there is no representative fixture for a player from Victoria, Western Australia or the Northern Territory short of a national jersey. Nobody seriously proposes diluting Origin itself, because the two-state structure is the point of it, but a second-tier interstate competition running alongside the series has been raised repeatedly and would cost very little to trial.
The dead-rubber problem is the one most likely to force a change. Two of the last three series have been decided before the final match, and the crowd for that final match has fallen each time. Options discussed publicly include scheduling the biggest venue for game three rather than game one, or reverting to two matches with an aggregate rule — which nobody wants after 2023.
For more on Australian rugby league and the other codes, see the Australia section, the rugby index and the wider sports hub, which also covers cricket.