Guide
FA Cup format explained: rounds, entry and the draw
How the FA Cup works from the extra preliminary round to Wembley: who enters at which round, how the draw is made, why replays went, and what each round pays.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Guide17 min read
On a Saturday in early August, weeks before the Premier League has kicked a ball, a club with a clubhouse bar and a stand holding a few hundred people plays a match that could in theory end at Wembley the following May. Two hundred and nineteen ties go ahead that afternoon in the extra preliminary round. Almost none of them will be reported anywhere outside a local paper. All of them are the FA Cup, and the trophy lifted in May has been reachable from every one of them since the first ball was kicked.
That is the FA Cup format explained in a sentence: a single unbroken knockout that opens nine tiers down the English pyramid in August and closes with one match at Wembley in May, with clubs joining at six separate entry points according to the division they play in. Nothing about it is a group stage, nothing about it is seeded, and no club at any level is protected from anybody.
The current edition took 743 entries. Of those, 651 began in the qualifying competition, fighting over 32 places. The other 92 are the Premier League and English Football League clubs, who are handed their entry rounds and never have to qualify at all.
Where the competition actually starts, and how far down it reaches
Eligibility runs from the Premier League down to level nine of the English pyramid, with level ten clubs held in reserve to fill vacancies. That is a span most national cups do not attempt. It puts a club playing in front of a hundred and fifty people in the same competition, on the same sheet of paper, as one playing in front of sixty thousand.
The practical consequence is that the FA cannot simply draw everybody together and start. A field of several hundred clubs has to be reduced to something a bracket can handle before the professional game arrives, and it has to be reduced without asking a tier nine club to drive four hours on a Tuesday. Both of those constraints shape the qualifying competition: six rounds, regionalised at the bottom, with the entry points staggered so that the strongest non-league clubs join late and play fewer matches.
Only after that reduction is complete does the competition proper begin, and the numbers from that point are tidy. Eighty clubs in the first round, forty ties, forty winners. It stays halving cleanly all the way to the final.
- 743Clubs accepted into the competition
- 651Clubs starting in the qualifying competition
- 32Qualifying places in the first round proper
- 14Matches needed to win it from the first round of all
Structural figures for the competition as scheduled, not results.
The six qualifying rounds, and who joins at each one
The qualifying competition is not one long slog for everybody. It is a staircase, and where a club steps on depends on where it sits in the National League System.
The extra preliminary round is by far the largest. Some 438 clubs enter it, drawn from levels eight and nine, producing 219 ties on the opening weekend. Two weeks later the preliminary round adds 53 more from level eight, and the 272 clubs still involved play 136 ties.
The first qualifying round brings in 88 clubs from level seven. That takes the field to 224 and produces 112 ties. The second qualifying round adds 48 clubs from the two regional divisions at level six, making 160 clubs and 80 ties.
The third qualifying round adds nobody. It is the one purely reductive round in the qualifying competition, taking 80 survivors down to 40 and nothing else. Then the fourth qualifying round brings in the 24 clubs of the National League, level five, joining the 40 who fought their way there. Sixty-four clubs, 32 ties, 32 winners, and those 32 winners are the ones who appear in the first round proper draw alongside the professional game.
Look at that shape and the design becomes obvious. The FA is not staging a fair fight between levels five and nine. It is staging a filter, weighted so that the clubs with the least money play the most matches to get through, and the clubs closest to the EFL are dropped in near the end with a short run to make.
That sounds unjust until you count from the other side. A National League club needs one win to reach the first round proper. A level nine club needs six. The tier nine club that manages it has beaten six opponents and earned the right to be in the same pot as a professional club, and every one of those six wins was a home or away tie against a real opponent, not a lottery.
What the qualifying rounds ask of a part-time club
The staircase looks neat on paper. Lived through, it is a demanding autumn.
A club entering at the extra preliminary round is playing cup football every second Saturday from early August until the middle of October while its own league programme is also under way, and any drawn tie adds a midweek replay on top. Squads at that level are small, players hold full-time jobs, and a Tuesday night away fixture two counties over is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.
That is why the northern and southern split in the early qualifying draws matters more than it appears to. It is not a competitive device, it is a cost control, and it is the difference between a manageable trip and one that costs a club a coach hire it cannot recover from the gate.
The reward for surviving it is real but narrow. Six wins take a club to the first round proper, where the prize money multiplies and the possibility of a professional opponent arrives. Five wins take it nowhere at all beyond the fourth qualifying round fee. There is no partial credit in a knockout, which is the whole point of one, and it is why non-league managers talk about the competition in terms of specific rounds rather than in terms of a run.
The first round proper, and why the calendar jumps
The first round proper is played in early November, and the field is 80: the 32 qualifiers plus the 48 clubs of League One and League Two. This is the round the wider football public first notices, because it is the first time a full-time professional club can be drawn against a part-time one.
The gap in resources at this stage is wider than most people assume. A League One club is a full-time operation with a squad on professional contracts and a training ground. A club that has come through six qualifying rounds is very often a group of players who train two evenings a week and work during the day. The competition does nothing to soften that. There is no handicap, no aggregate, no second leg.
What the format does give the smaller club is the draw, and the draw is genuinely blind. Forty ties, forty winners, and the second round in early December takes those 40 down to 20 across 20 ties. The clubs still standing after that are the ones who get the reward the whole qualifying competition has been pointing at.
The third round: forty-four clubs walk in at once
In early January the Premier League and the Championship enter together, 44 clubs joining the 20 second round survivors to make a field of 64. That is the single biggest structural event in the competition and the reason the third round draw is treated as an occasion rather than an administrative step.
It is worth being precise about what happens to the odds at that moment. A club that has won eight matches to get there is dropped into a pot where 44 of the other 63 names are full-time professional clubs from the top two divisions, and the draw gives it no protection whatsoever. It can be sent to a Premier League ground on a Saturday lunchtime, and the tie will be decided in ninety minutes plus whatever extra time is required.
From there the halving continues without further entrants. Thirty-two ties in the third round, 16 in the fourth in mid-February, eight in the fifth in early March, four quarter-finals in early April. Two semi-finals follow later that month and the final is played in May. The competition never adds a club after the third round, which is why the arithmetic gets simple and the drama gets concentrated.
- League One and League Two clubs48
- Winners of the qualifying competition32
Composition of the first round proper. The 32 qualifiers are the survivors of 651 clubs.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| League One and League Two clubs | 48 |
| Winners of the qualifying competition | 32 |
How the draw is made, and why nobody is seeded
The FA Cup draw is the plainest mechanism in the competition. Each surviving club is given a number, the numbers go in a pot, and they come out in pairs. The first club out of each pair is at home. That is the whole of it.
There is no seeding. There is no protection for clubs from higher divisions, no split between top-half and bottom-half names, and no attempt to keep the biggest clubs apart until later. The competition proper has been drawn on that basis since regionalisation was dropped after the 1997-98 season, and it is the single feature that generates most of what people like about the tournament.
The qualifying rounds do use regions, and for a plainly practical reason. Splitting the early draws into northern and southern sections keeps journeys short for clubs whose travel budget is a real constraint on whether they can field a team at all. The regional split is dropped from the third qualifying round onwards, once the field is small enough that a national draw does not send anyone across the country every fortnight.
Home advantage is therefore assigned by luck rather than by merit or by league position. A ninth tier club drawn at home to a League One club keeps the tie at its own ground, which is where the money and the noise both come from. That is not a concession the format makes on purpose. It is a by-product of a draw that refuses to look at who anybody is.
The cup-tied rule, and the change that relaxed it
Entry rules do not stop at clubs. They apply to players, and the FA Cup has a specific restriction that catches people out every January.
The principle is that a player may appear for only one club in a season's competition. It exists to stop a wealthy club still in the tournament from simply buying the best player from a club that has been knocked out and fielding him in the next round, which would turn the later stages into an auction rather than a knockout.
That principle has been loosened in one direction. A player who has appeared for a club in the qualifying competition, or in the rounds proper, may now turn out for one further club in the rounds proper, provided he appears for only a single club in any given round. In plain terms, a young player on loan at a non-league club through the autumn is no longer locked out of the competition for the rest of the season if he goes back to his parent club in January.
The restriction is competition-specific rather than general. Being ineligible in this tournament has no bearing on availability in the League Cup, and the two competitions keep entirely separate registers. Loan players, in particular, are worth checking before a January tie, because a squad that looks unchanged on paper may have two or three names in it who cannot be selected.
Why the third round sits in January, and the rest of the calendar
The dates are not arbitrary. Each round is placed where the domestic and European calendars leave a weekend, and the shape of the season follows from that.
The qualifying competition runs from early August to the middle of October, in fortnightly steps, because that is the period when the professional game is not competing for weekends and non-league clubs can play midweek replays without wrecking their own league programme. The first round proper lands in early November and the second in early December, both slotted between international breaks.
The third round then waits until January. The reason is fixture load rather than tradition: December is the heaviest month in the English league calendar, and dropping forty-four top-division clubs into a cup round in the middle of it is not workable. January gives the round a weekend where the Premier League and Championship can both stand down.
From there the rounds spread out. The fourth is in February, the fifth in early March, the quarter-finals in early April, the semi-finals late in that month and the final in late May. The spacing widens deliberately as the field narrows, so that clubs still involved in European competition and a league title race are not being asked to play three times a week in the spring. Every one of these dates is provisional until the broadcasters have picked their matches, and ties are routinely moved by a day or two.
Replays are gone from the first round onwards
For most of the competition's history a drawn tie in the rounds proper meant a second match at the other club's ground. From the 2024-25 season that stopped. Under an agreement between the FA and the Premier League, replays were removed from the first round proper onwards, and every tie from that point is settled on the day.
The mechanism that replaced them is straightforward. A tie level after ninety minutes goes to two periods of fifteen minutes, and if it is still level after a hundred and twenty the winner is found on penalties. That applies uniformly, from the first round through to the final, with no distinction between a Premier League tie and one between two clubs from League Two.
The reason given was calendar congestion, and the calendar argument is real: European competition now takes more midweek dates than it used to, and a replay has to be squeezed into a week that no longer has room. The cost fell almost entirely on the smaller clubs, because a replay at a big away ground was one of the few ways a lower division club could turn a good result into a serious payday. The competition's answer was to raise the published prize fund instead, which is a different kind of money and does not depend on the draw.
Replays did not disappear everywhere. They survive in the qualifying rounds, where drawn ties between clubs outside the EFL are played again once. So a level eight club can still earn a second bite and a second gate, right up until it reaches the first round proper and the rule changes underneath it.
What each round actually pays
The FA publishes a round-by-round prize fund, and reading it in order tells you more about the competition's economics than any commentary.
The qualifying rounds pay in the hundreds and low thousands. A winner in the extra preliminary round receives £1,125, and the figure roughly rises through each round to £9,375 for a fourth qualifying round win. Winning every one of the six qualifying rounds is therefore worth a little over £23,000 in prize money, which for a club at level nine is not pocket change but is not transformational either.
Then the scale changes. A first round proper win pays £47,750, more than double the entire qualifying haul, and the losing club still takes £15,800. A second round win is £79,500 and a third round win £121,500. From the fourth round the figures run into the hundreds of thousands, the semi-finalists are paid in seven figures, and the winner of the final receives more than two million pounds.
Two things follow from that curve. The first is that reaching the first round proper is the single most valuable thing a non-league club can do in a season, because the step from £9,375 to £47,750 is the steepest proportional jump anywhere in the fund. The second is that the prize money is not the whole story lower down: gate receipts from a tie against a bigger club, and any broadcast fee if the tie is selected, can dwarf the published figure. The fund is a floor, not a total.
Extra time, penalties and the video assistant
The playing rules across the competition are not uniform, and the differences track the facilities available rather than the round.
Every tie from the first round is decided on the day using extra time and, if required, penalties. That much is constant. What is not constant is video review, which is only in operation at grounds equipped for it. In practice that means the later rounds and ties held at Premier League stadiums, and it means two clubs in the same round can play under materially different officiating conditions.
If you want the detail of how those reviews are conducted and what the officials are allowed to look at, the mechanics of video review are worth reading separately, because the FA Cup applies the same protocol rather than a competition-specific one. The point for the format is narrower: a lower league club hosting a tie is very often playing without it, and the same tie played at the opponent's ground would have it.
Semi-finals and the final at Wembley
Both semi-finals are played at Wembley, and have been since the 2007-08 season, when the rebuilt stadium needed the fixtures to help pay for itself. They are single matches, with extra time and penalties if needed, and the winners return to the same pitch for the final about a month later.
That arrangement is the most argued-over piece of the modern format. The case against it is that it removes the reward for reaching a final by making the final venue familiar, and that it turns a neutral semi-final at a large club ground into a longer and more expensive trip for supporters. The case for it is money: two extra sell-out fixtures at the national stadium is a substantial line in the FA's accounts, and that revenue funds a great deal beneath it.
The final itself is a single match on a Saturday in late May. It is the last domestic fixture of the English season, and since the removal of replays it has been given a weekend of its own rather than sharing a date with the final round of league matches.
What the winner gets, and how the place moves
Winning the FA Cup earns a place in the following season's Europa League. That is the standing reward and it does not depend on league position, which is the point: the cup is the one route into European football that is open to a club having an ordinary league season.
The place moves if it is not needed. Should the winner have already qualified for Europe through the Premier League table, the Europa League entry passes down that table to the highest-placed club that has not otherwise qualified. In seasons when a leading club wins the cup, the practical beneficiary is a club that finished sixth or seventh and never reached the final.
For a club outside the top flight the European place is theoretical rather than real, but the money is not. A run to the later rounds is a material event in the accounts of any club in the EFL, and the further down the pyramid you go the larger it looms relative to everything else. That relationship, between a single knockout run and a club's entire financial year, is one of the reasons movement between divisions and cup progress are so often discussed together in England.
The whole ladder, in order
- Extra preliminary round, August438 clubs from levels eight and nine play 219 ties. This is the largest round in the competition and it happens before the professional season has started.
- Preliminary to second qualifying53 more level eight clubs, then 88 from level seven, then 48 from the two level six divisions. The field falls from 272 to 160 to 80 across three rounds.
- Third and fourth qualifying, autumnThe third qualifying round adds nobody and halves the survivors to 40. The 24 National League clubs then enter at the fourth qualifying round, and 32 winners go through.
- First round proper, NovemberThe 32 qualifiers meet the 48 clubs of League One and League Two. Forty ties, and no replay: extra time and penalties settle everything from here.
- Second round, DecemberForty winners play 20 ties. The 20 survivors are the clubs who will be in the pot when the top two divisions arrive.
- Third round, JanuaryThe Premier League and the Championship enter, 44 clubs at once, making a field of 64 and 32 ties. The draw is unseeded and national.
- Fourth round to quarter-finalsSixteen ties in February, eight in March, four in April. No club enters after the third round, so the bracket simply halves.
- Semi-finals and final, WembleyBoth semi-finals are played at the national stadium in late April, and the final is a single match there in May. The winner takes a Europa League place.
The full sequence for the current edition. Club counts are those scheduled at the start of the season.
What the competition deliberately does not have
Half of understanding a format is knowing what has been left out, and the FA Cup has left out most of the devices other competitions use.
There is no group stage anywhere in it. Every one of the fourteen possible matches is elimination, which means a club can be out of the competition in ninety minutes having done nothing wrong beyond losing a shoot-out.
There are no two-legged ties at any stage, including the semi-finals. That is unusual among major domestic cups and it is the reason away goals have never been a consideration here: there is no aggregate score to apply them to.
There is no bye for the holders. Winning the trophy earns a club the right to defend it from its normal entry round and nothing else, so a Premier League holder starts again in January alongside everybody else in the top two divisions.
There is no seeding, no protected path and no attempt to arrange the bracket so that the strongest clubs meet late. Two of the best sides in the country can be paired in the third round, and regularly are.
And there is no consolation route. A club knocked out is out, with no drop into a secondary competition and no repechage. Compare that with the European structure, where losing sides in the qualifying rounds of one tournament are moved sideways into another, and the difference in philosophy is stark. The FA Cup makes a single, blunt promise: win your match or go home.
What the format rewards, and what it punishes
Read the structure as a set of incentives and a few things stand out.
It rewards squad depth at the top and squad availability at the bottom. A Premier League club needs six wins spread across five months, which is easy to rotate through. A National League club needs eight, several of them in the autumn while its league season is running, and it has perhaps eighteen fit players.
It punishes clubs that draw. Since the removal of replays there is no second chance and no second gate, so a lower division club that holds a bigger one for ninety minutes at home now faces thirty extra minutes and a shoot-out rather than a lucrative trip. The format has quietly made the underdog's best-case scenario worse.
It rewards the home draw more than it used to, for the same reason. With replays gone, being drawn at home is the only way a smaller club gets the money from the tie, and the draw hands that out at random. A club can beat three professional opponents and still be worse off financially than one that lost a home tie in the first round.
And it still, stubbornly, refuses to seed. The absence of seeding is not sentiment; it is the mechanism that makes any given tie possible, and it is why a competition with such an enormous resource gap between its entrants remains worth watching from August.
How to follow a cup run without being misled
A few habits make the competition much easier to read as it unfolds.
Check which round a club has entered at before judging its run. A National League club in the second round has won two ties. A level eight club in the second round has won eight, and those are not the same achievement described with the same words.
Watch the draw for venue rather than opponent. For a smaller club the ground the tie is played at frequently matters more than who it is against, because that is where the gate money and the broadcast selection both come from.
Ignore aggregate thinking. There is none, at any stage. Every tie in the modern competition is one match, and that changes how managers pick sides: a rotated eleven that loses does not get a second leg to fix it.
Track the fourth qualifying round if you want the best fixtures of the autumn. It is the round where the National League meets clubs that have already won five ties, and it decides who is in the draw when the professional clubs appear.
The FA Cup is not a complicated competition. It is a very long one, built so that entry is genuinely open and so that the draw never protects anybody, and every apparent quirk in it turns out to be either a travel constraint at the bottom or a calendar constraint at the top. For more on how English club football fits together beneath the top flight, the structure of the Championship and the way domestic broadcast money is shared out both bear on why a cup run matters so much to clubs outside the Premier League. There is more football writing of this kind across our football section and in the full article archive.
Common questions
How many rounds are there in the FA Cup?
Twelve numbered rounds plus the semi-finals and the final, which makes fourteen matches for a club entering at the very bottom and winning the thing. Six of those rounds are qualifying rounds contested by clubs outside the Premier League and the EFL, and six are the rounds proper. A Premier League club enters at the third round and needs six wins.
When do Premier League clubs enter the FA Cup?
At the third round, which falls in early January. They come in alongside the Championship, adding forty-four clubs to the twenty survivors of the second round to make a field of sixty-four. That is why the third round draw is the one that gets a television slot of its own.
Are there still replays in the FA Cup?
Not from the first round proper onwards. Every tie from the first round to the final is settled on the day, with thirty minutes of extra time and then penalties if needed. Replays do survive in the qualifying rounds, where clubs outside the EFL play a second match if the first is drawn.
How does the FA Cup draw work?
Numbered balls are drawn in pairs, the first out of the pot at home, with no seeding and no protection for bigger clubs. From the third qualifying round onwards the draw is national, so any surviving club can meet any other. The qualifying rounds before that are split into northern and southern sections to keep travel affordable.
What does the FA Cup winner get in Europe?
A place in the following season's Europa League. If the winner has already qualified for European football through its league position, the place passes down the Premier League table to the highest-placed club that has not qualified.
How much money does a non-league club make from an FA Cup run?
Winning all six qualifying rounds is worth a little over twenty-three thousand pounds in prize money at current rates, and a first round win adds nearly fifty thousand on top. The published fund rises steeply from there, and gate receipts and any broadcast fee sit outside it entirely.
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