Women's County Cricket Competitions in England

English women's cricket has been restructured three times in a decade, and each restructure retired the previous set of trophies. A supporter who last paid attention in 2019 would find that the county championship she followed no longer exists, that the eight regional teams which replaced it also no longer exist, and that the two competitions those regions contested have been renamed and handed to counties.

The result is an unusually confusing honours board for a game with so much continuity in its playing personnel. This page is the record: which competitions are played now, which counties are in which tier, who has won what since 1997, and where The Hundred fits. It is deliberately a reference rather than a narrative — the argument about why the structure kept changing is set out in the companion guide to women's domestic cricket in England.

What is played now

Since 2025 the professional women's game in England and Wales has been run through first-class counties rather than regions, and it has two domestic competitions plus a franchise tournament.

• The Women's One-Day Cup, a fifty-over competition, which replaced the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy. It is sponsored as the Metro Bank competition, mirroring the men's fifty-over cup.
• The Women's T20 Blast, sponsored as Vitality Blast Women, which replaced the Charlotte Edwards Cup and sits alongside the men's competition described in the guide to the T20 Blast.
• The Hundred, in which eight city franchises field women's sides in the same badges as the men's, usually in double-headers.

Both county competitions are played in two leagues with promotion between them, which is the significant departure from what came before. The regional era had a single division of eight with no way in and no way out.

League One and League Two

League One began in 2025 with eight counties: Durham, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Somerset, Surrey, Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire. Two of those field under different names in Twenty20 — Warwickshire as Birmingham Bears, Nottinghamshire as The Blaze, the latter carrying over the identity of the regional side it succeeded.

League Two began with ten counties split into northern and southern groups, each playing eight group matches before knockouts. Expansion into the top tier is scheduled rather than earned in the early years: Yorkshire joined League One in 2026, Glamorgan follow in 2027, and two further counties are due to receive top-tier status in 2029, which takes League One into double figures.

Tier	2025 composition	Scheduled change
League One	Eight counties, single division	Yorkshire 2026, Glamorgan 2027, two more 2029
League Two	Ten counties, North and South groups	Reduces as counties are promoted

The pre-set promotions are the most criticised feature of the design. A county can be elevated on the strength of its facilities, finances and pathway rather than its results, which is defensible as investment policy and awkward as sport. The counterargument is that the men's County Championship took a century to reach an equilibrium and the women's game does not have a century.

Champions since the county takeover

The early honours are split between old regional powers rebuilt as counties and clubs with no previous women's pedigree at professional level.

Season	One-Day Cup, League One	T20 Blast, League One	League Two winners
2025	Lancashire, beating Hampshire	Surrey, beating Birmingham Bears by five wickets	Yorkshire (one-day), Middlesex (T20)
2026	—	The Blaze, beating Durham by ten wickets	Glamorgan (T20)

Two things stand out from a short record. The first is that Surrey and Lancashire, the two counties with the deepest resources, won the inaugural editions, which is what the critics of a tiered structure predicted. The second is that Yorkshire and Glamorgan both won League Two titles in the seasons immediately before their scheduled promotions, which at least makes the elevations look less arbitrary than they might have.

The regional era, 2020 to 2024

For five seasons the professional structure consisted of eight regional teams, each drawing on several counties: Central Sparks, Northern Diamonds, North West Thunder, South East Stars, Southern Vipers, Sunrisers, The Blaze and Western Storm.

They contested two competitions. The Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy, at fifty overs, ran from 2020 to 2024 and was named for the England captain who drove the creation of the first women's World Cup. The Charlotte Edwards Cup was launched as the Women's Regional T20 and renamed in 2021 after the modern game's defining England captain; it ran through the 2024 season.

Season	Heyhoe Flint Trophy	Charlotte Edwards Cup
2020	Southern Vipers	Not contested
2021	Southern Vipers	South East Stars
2022	Northern Diamonds	Southern Vipers
2023	Southern Vipers	Southern Vipers
2024	Sunrisers	The Blaze

Southern Vipers were the era's dominant side, with three fifty-over titles and one Twenty20 title in five seasons. The competition formats moved almost every year — the Heyhoe Flint Trophy alone used north-and-south groups, a single round-robin with playoffs, a full home-and-away double round-robin, and then a double round-robin with semi-finals across its five editions — which tells you the administration was experimenting rather than settling.

Before the regions

The Women's County Championship ran from 1997 to 2019 and grew from sixteen teams in three divisions to roughly thirty-five by its final season, with the divisional structure redrawn at least four times along the way. A second-tier County Challenge Cup was added in 2004, the competition reached five divisions in 2008, contracted to four in 2012 and to three from 2017.

Kent were the most successful county with eight titles, including the last one in 2019. Sussex and Yorkshire won six each; Lancashire and Hampshire won once apiece. National sides from outside England also competed at various times: Scotland from 2007, Wales from 2008, the Netherlands from 2009, and Ireland between 2009 and 2015.

On top of that amateur base sat the Kia Super League, a six-team Twenty20 competition that ran for four seasons from 2016 to 2019 with Lancashire Thunder, Loughborough Lightning, Southern Vipers, Surrey Stars, Western Storm and Yorkshire Diamonds. The format was a round-robin with the top three going to a Finals Day at a neutral ground; from 2018 the group stage became home and away.

Season	Kia Super League champions
2016	Southern Vipers
2017	Western Storm
2018	Surrey Stars
2019	Western Storm

The Super League was wound up to make room for The Hundred, and its own history is instructive: it demonstrated that a women's Twenty20 competition could draw a crowd and attract overseas players, and it left the amateur tier beneath it untouched. That is the reason the next restructure went further.

The Hundred, and how it fits

The Hundred's women's competition began in 2021 with eight teams sharing badges and grounds with the men's sides. It is the highest-paying and highest-profile domestic cricket an English woman can play, and it is not part of the county tier structure at all — it occupies a block of the school holidays and draws players from every county and from overseas.

Its mechanics are covered in the guide to how The Hundred works and its wider position in the summer on The Hundred page. Two consequences for the county game are worth naming. It removes the best players from county squads for several weeks in high summer, which weakens the county competitions at their commercial peak. And it changed the audience: double-headers at Test grounds put women's cricket in front of crowds an amateur county championship could never have reached, a shift examined in the guide to how women's cricket grew.

The tier below the professional game

Beneath the two county leagues sits the recreational structure, which is where the professional pipeline actually starts and where most women who play cricket in England will spend their whole playing lives.

Club cricket for women expanded very fast in the fifteen years to the mid-2020s. More than 850 clubs offered women's and girls' cricket by the end of the ECB's Inspiring Generations strategy period, against fewer than a hundred in 2009 — a nine-fold increase in provision, and the single most consequential number in this entire article. The board committed twenty million pounds specifically to transforming women's and girls' cricket by 2021, spread across participation, the pathway, performance, profile and workforce.

Underneath that sits the entry-level programming the board runs for both sexes: All Stars Cricket for five- to eight-year-olds, delivered in blocks of eight weekly sessions at thousands of clubs, and the schools work done with Chance to Shine, which has introduced several million children to the game since 2009. County age-group teams and county academy or emerging-player squads then bridge the gap between club cricket and a professional county contract.

The structural point is that no restructure of the professional tier does anything for a fourteen-year-old unless her nearest club runs a girls' section. That is why the participation spending and the tier reform are best read as one programme rather than two.

The season, in order

The women's professional calendar now runs roughly as follows. April and May belong to the fifty-over competition, which starts earlier than the Twenty20 tournaments because the grounds are available and the internationals have not begun. The T20 Blast occupies late May through July, interleaved with home internationals. The Hundred takes a block from late July into August. September holds the closing rounds and finals, plus any late international series.

Fixtures are shared with the men's programme at most counties, which means women's matches are played at the main grounds surveyed in the guide to English cricket grounds as well as at outgrounds and second-team venues. Where a county's men's side is at home in the Blast, the women's fixture will often be the earlier half of a double-header.

What the record actually shows

Three restructures in ten years is a lot, and the honours boards above allow a plainer assessment than the arguments do.

The county championship era produced almost no professional players and concentrated success in a handful of well-organised counties. The regional era produced a professional playing group quickly and concentrated success in one region. The county era is two seasons old and has so far concentrated success in the two richest counties. In other words, every version of the structure has been won by whoever was best resourced, which suggests the structure was never the main variable.

What has changed decisively is the number of women paid to play cricket in England, which rose from a handful of centrally contracted internationals before 2020 to full professional squads at eight counties and growing. That is the outcome the restructures were for, and on that measure they worked. The earlier generations who played for nothing are covered in the guide to England's women's cricket pioneers, the international side's story in the guide to England women's cricket history, and the rest of the English game on the cricket in England hub.

One further gap is worth naming. There is no multi-day domestic competition for women in England, and no plan for one has been published. England's women play Test cricket only in the Ashes and in occasional one-off matches against other opponents, and they prepare for those with no red-ball domestic cricket at all. Every batter selected for a Test has learned the format in the format.

Sources and method

Competition names, tier composition, promotion schedules and season champions are taken from the ECB's published domestic structure announcements and from competition records for each tournament named. Winners' tables reflect completed seasons only; where a season is incomplete or a competition was not contested, the cell is left blank rather than filled. Format descriptions are those in force for the seasons stated, and several of these competitions changed format between editions, so the description should not be read back onto earlier years. Salary levels and contract counts move annually and are described in general terms rather than enumerated. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.