The English Football Pyramid Explained Level by Level
Every level of the English football pyramid explained, from the Premier League to county leagues: steps, ground grading and how promotion links the UK system.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished EFL & Promotion19 min read
- Top-flight clubs
- 20
- Clubs per EFL division
- 24
- Clubs at levels 1 to 4
- 92
- Fully professional levels
- 4
A club that wins the Northern Premier League Premier Division does not go up to the National League. It goes up one rung, into the National League North, and only if a Football Association inspector has signed off its ground before the end of March. That one sentence contains most of what people get wrong about the English pyramid. It is not a single ladder. It fans out as it descends, and the result on the pitch is only half of what decides whether a club moves at all.
England runs the deepest connected league system in world football. Ninety-two clubs occupy the four professional divisions administered by the Premier League and the English Football League. Underneath them the FA operates the National League System, and underneath that sit county leagues affiliated to the county FAs. Every one of those competitions is joined to the ones above and below it by promotion and relegation, which means a side playing on a municipal pitch in Cumbria is separated from Anfield by nothing except results and paperwork.
The paperwork is the hard part.
Levels and steps: two numbering systems for the same ladder
Ask a supporter of a Premier League club how far down the pyramid a team is and they will answer in levels. Ask someone who watches football at Step 4 and they will answer in steps. Both are correct, and the mismatch causes endless confusion.
Levels count from the top. Level 1 is the Premier League, level 2 the Championship, and so on downwards without limit. It is the numbering used by neutral reference sources and by anyone describing the system as a whole.
Steps are the FA numbering, and they begin where the FA jurisdiction over league competition begins. Step 1 is the National League, which is level 5. Step 2 is level 6, Step 3 is level 7, and the pattern holds all the way down. Every FA regulation about promotion, ground grading and league allocation is written in steps, so anyone reading the source documents needs to be able to convert on sight: add four to the step and you have the level.
The word "non-league" is a third layer of vocabulary and a historical fossil. It means anything below level 4, and it dates from the era when "the League" meant the Football League and there was only one of it. The term survived the founding of the Premier League in 1992. It survives the fact that the National League is, self-evidently, a league.
| Level | Step | Competitions at that level | Typical status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | — | Premier League | Fully professional |
| 2 | — | EFL Championship | Fully professional |
| 3 | — | EFL League One | Fully professional |
| 4 | — | EFL League Two | Fully professional |
| 5 | Step 1 | National League | Mostly full-time |
| 6 | Step 2 | National League North, National League South | Mixed full and part-time |
| 7 | Step 3 | Four regional premier divisions | Part-time |
| 8 | Step 4 | Eight regional divisions | Part-time |
| 9 | Step 5 | Regional feeder leagues | Semi-professional to amateur |
| 10 | Step 6 | Regional feeder leagues | Amateur, some paid players |
| 11 | Step 7 | County leagues inside the system | Amateur |
Below Step 7 the structure continues in most counties, through further divisions of the same county leagues and then into district competitions, but it stops being a single national scheme. How many rungs exist under a given town is a question about which county FA you are standing in.
Levels 1 to 4: the ninety-two
The professional block is the part of the pyramid with a fixed shape. Twenty clubs in the Premier League, twenty-four in each of the Championship, League One and League Two. Ninety-two in total, a number that entered the vocabulary of English football long before the Premier League split away, and one that a certain sort of supporter treats as a collection to be completed.
Those four divisions answer to two bodies. The Premier League runs level 1 under its own handbook and its own broadcast contracts. The EFL runs levels 2, 3 and 4 under its own regulations. The FA sits above both as the national association, sanctioning the competitions and administering the disciplinary system, but it does not run the professional leagues day to day.
- 20Premier League clubs
- 24Clubs per EFL division
- 92Clubs at levels 1 to 4
- 46League matches a Championship club plays
Division sizes set by the Premier League handbook and EFL regulations, not a count from any particular season.
The three EFL divisions each carry twenty-four clubs, which produces a forty-six match league season and a fixture calendar with no real parallel in Europe. That is a substantial part of the identity of the English second tier, and it comes with costs that deserve their own page — why the Championship plays 46 games sets out the arithmetic and what it does to squads.
Movement inside the professional block is simple by comparison with everything below it. Three go down from the Premier League and three come up from the Championship, two automatically and one through the play-offs. League One and League Two are wider: four go up from League One, three go up from League Two, and the trapdoor at the bottom of the EFL takes two clubs into the National League. The particulars of the bottom division are covered in League Two promotion and relegation.
There is a legal distinction here that matters more than it looks. Membership of the EFL is contractual: each member club holds a share in the company, and the regulations govern what that share entitles it to and what conditions attach to keeping it. The same is true of the Premier League. A club relegated out of the EFL surrenders its place; a club promoted into it acquires one, subject to meeting the entry criteria. Beneath level 4 nothing of that kind exists. A club at Step 4 is affiliated to a county FA and a member of a competition, and it can leave, be expelled or move sideways without a share changing hands. The pyramid is therefore two different legal animals joined at level 5, which is why the boundary between the National League and League Two generates so much litigation.
Level 5 and the trapdoor into the National League
Until 1987 the bottom of the Football League was not a trapdoor at all. It was a committee. The four clubs finishing last in the old Fourth Division applied for re-election at the annual general meeting, and the incumbents almost always won the vote, because the clubs casting it were the clubs who might need the same favour in three years. Non-league champions could win their division five seasons running and get nowhere.
Automatic promotion and relegation between the Football League and the Conference began in 1986-87. Scarborough went up, Lincoln City went down, and the pyramid finally became a pyramid.
Level 5 is now the crossover point between two economies. Some National League clubs are full-time, run recognisably professional operations and have been in the EFL within living memory. Others are part-time and could not carry a full-time wage bill for a season. The gap between the top and the bottom of that single division is the widest anywhere in the system, and it explains why the division is so volatile.
Two clubs come up into the EFL each season: the champions directly, and one more through a play-off involving the clubs immediately below them. That play-off has been reshaped more than once, expanding from a four-club field to a larger one with a preliminary round for the lower qualifiers. The mechanics are set out in how National League play-offs work, and what a promoted club actually inherits is covered in National League promotion to the EFL.
Promotion at this point is conditional in a way it is not higher up. A National League champion must satisfy EFL entry criteria covering its ground and its finances. A club can win level 5 on the pitch and be refused the place.
Steps 2 to 4: where the pyramid stops being one ladder
Below the National League, the system splits, and then splits again.
At Step 2 there are two divisions, North and South. At Step 3 there are four. At Step 4 there are eight. The doubling is not decorative — it is the direct consequence of trying to keep travel affordable for clubs whose players hold down jobs. A Step 4 side cannot send a squad three hundred miles on a Tuesday night and have everyone at work on Wednesday morning.
The Step 3 and Step 4 divisions are operated by three long-established competitions: the Northern Premier League, the Southern League and the Isthmian League. Their historical territories overlap awkwardly in the Midlands and around the edges of London, which is why the boundary between them moves. A club in Northamptonshire or Bedfordshire can find itself reallocated between the Southern League and the Isthmian League without having moved a yard.
The 2018 restructure was the biggest recent reshaping of this part of the system. It added a fourth division at Step 3 by splitting the Southern League premier division into Central and South sections, and expanded Step 4 from six divisions to eight. The motive was travel again: the Step 3 divisions had grown geographically unwieldy, and adding a division let the FA redraw every boundary at once.
What regionalisation costs a supporter
The upside is obvious. The downside is that it makes the pyramid harder to read. Two clubs at the same step, both in strong form, can face wildly different routes upward depending on which parallel division they sit in — one might be in a league full of former Football League clubs, the other in a league of village sides having a good season. Strength of division is not equalised across a step, and nobody claims otherwise.
Steps 5, 6 and 7 and the county leagues below
At Step 5 the system widens sharply. The divisions here are the classic feeder leagues, most of them named for a county or a region and many of them a century old or more: competitions covering the north west, the eastern counties, the Midlands, Wessex, the south western peninsula. Step 6 doubles the count again. Step 7, the bottom of the National League System proper, is where county-level football joins the ladder.
Below Step 7 the pyramid does not stop, it stops being uniform. County leagues run further divisions, district leagues sit under those, and in some areas the chain of promotion continues for several more rungs before it dissolves into competitions with no promotion attached. Whether your local Saturday side is at level 12 or level 15 is not a question English football answers centrally.
The county FAs are the administrative bodies underneath all of this, responsible for sanctioning competitions, registering clubs and running discipline at grassroots level. What they actually do, and why a club needs one, is set out in the county FA guide. For the numbering below level 5 in more detail than this page goes into, non-league steps explained works through it step by step.
How promotion links every level together
The mechanism is the same at every rung and the details change constantly.
Champions go up. Below the champions, a group of clubs enters a play-off for a second promotion place, and the size of that group varies by step and by division. Relegation works in reverse, with the number of clubs going down determined partly by results and partly by arithmetic — because the divisions below are regional and the divisions above are not, the number of clubs each division must release or absorb has to balance across the whole step.
That balancing act is the most misunderstood feature of the system. A club can finish in a relegation place and stay up because a club above it failed a grading inspection, or because a division elsewhere at the same step ended up short. A club can finish third and go up because two teams above it declined promotion. Nothing is settled until the FA publishes its allocations, usually in May, and even then an appeals window follows.
- Declare intentThe club tells its league before the published deadline that it wishes to be considered for promotion.
- Pass ground gradingThe ground must meet the grade required by the step above, assessed by inspection before the end of March.
- Finish in a promotion placeChampions go up automatically; the clubs below them enter a play-off for the remaining place.
- Satisfy financial and governance checksThe receiving league examines accounts, ownership and, higher up, the corporate structure behind the club.
- Accept the allocationThe FA places the club in one of the parallel divisions at the step above, on geographical grounds.
The sequence set out in the FA National League System regulations, described in order rather than as a guarantee of promotion.
One more wrinkle. Promotion is not compulsory. A club can win its division and decline to go up, usually because the ground work required is beyond its means or because the travel at the next step would break a part-time squad. It happens most often at Steps 5 and 6, and it is one of the quieter tragedies of the non-league game.
Ground grading: the rule that decides more promotions than form does
The FA National Ground Grading scheme runs from Grade A at the top of the system down through the alphabet, with each step attached to a grade. Grade A is the Step 1 standard, Grade B applies at Step 2, and the sequence continues downwards. A club seeking promotion has to meet the grade of the step above, not the one it currently plays at.
What the grades specify is unglamorous and expensive: covered accommodation, a minimum number of seats, hard standing around the pitch, the ability to segregate supporters, dressing room dimensions, floodlighting to a defined intensity, a designated area for match officials, pitch barriers set back a fixed distance from the touchline. The higher the grade, the more of it, and the more it costs.
Floodlights are the requirement that ends most promotion runs before they start. Installing a compliant set is a serious capital project at the lower steps and considerably more once the required light intensity climbs, and a club playing on a pitch it rents from a parish council may not even have the right to erect them. Planning consent, not football, is the obstacle.
The timing rule is the cruel part. A club must hold the higher grade by a deadline within the season it is seeking promotion, which in practice means the end of March, with a preliminary inspection earlier in the campaign flagging what still needs doing. A club sitting top of its division in February therefore had to commit the money the previous summer, on the strength of a season that had not yet happened. Get that wrong in either direction and you have either wasted a promotion or wasted the budget.
Because the deadlines are published and the inspections documented, the outcome is rarely a surprise inside the club. It is frequently a surprise to supporters, who discover in April that the title they are chasing does not come with a promotion attached.
Groundsharing, and the loophole that is not one
A club that cannot bring its own ground up to grade sometimes looks at playing elsewhere. Groundshares are permitted, and plenty of clubs have taken promotion while renting a bigger neighbour's stadium, but the FA treats a share as a temporary arrangement rather than a permanent solution. Approval is normally conditional and time-limited, with the expectation that the club is working towards its own compliant ground, and the distance between the shared ground and the club's own community is a factor in whether permission is granted at all.
The objection is not bureaucratic pedantry. A club renting a ground twelve miles away tends to lose the supporters who walked to matches, and losing them is what kills clubs at these steps. The regulations are trying, imperfectly, to stop a club buying a promotion it cannot sustain.
Lateral moves: how the FA decides which league you play in
At Steps 2 and below, a club does not choose its division. The FA allocates clubs each summer, and the allocation is redrawn every year rather than inherited from the last one.
The stated basis is geography, and the practical test is aggregate travel: which arrangement of clubs across the parallel divisions produces the least total mileage while leaving every division with the right number of teams. Because divisions must be filled to a set size, and because promotions, relegations, resignations and expulsions never balance neatly, some clubs get moved sideways to make the numbers work. A club can play in the Northern Premier League one season and the Southern League the next with its league position unchanged.
Clubs can object, and objections are heard. The arguments that carry weight are concrete ones — a demonstrably longer average journey, the loss of established local derbies, a pairing that creates a policing problem. The argument that does not carry weight is a preference for the other division on footballing grounds.
For supporters, a lateral move is a real loss. It can strip three or four short away trips out of the calendar and replace them with motorway journeys, and it can end a fixture that has been played twice a season for decades. It is also the price of a system holding more clubs than any tidy structure could accommodate.
How many clubs are actually in the system
Nobody should quote a precise national total with confidence, because the figure changes weekly. Clubs fold, merge, resign mid-season, get expelled for non-payment, and reform under new names. What can be stated exactly is the shape at the top: ninety-two clubs at levels 1 to 4, twenty-four at Step 1, and somewhere in the mid-forties across the two Step 2 divisions, which have carried between twenty-two and twenty-four clubs each at various points.
Beneath that, the arithmetic runs away from you. Four divisions at Step 3 and eight at Step 4, each holding around twenty clubs, is already several hundred clubs before you reach the feeder leagues. Step 5 and Step 6 together account for well over a thousand more. Add the county leagues and the men's league pyramid runs to thousands of clubs, with the FA registration systems handling many times that number of players once youth and Sunday football is included.
The consequence worth understanding is competitive rather than statistical. A pyramid this wide means the number of clubs with a mathematical route to the Premier League is enormous and the number with a realistic one is tiny. Those two facts sit uncomfortably together, and English football has never resolved the tension between them.
Could a club really climb from the bottom to the top?
There is no rule preventing it. No closed shop at any level, no franchise system, no clause in the regulations saying a club founded last year cannot one day play in the Premier League. That openness is the feature the English system is admired for abroad, and it is genuinely unusual.
The obstacles are practical and they compound. Each promotion requires a ground meeting a higher grade, so a club climbing seven steps has to rebuild its stadium repeatedly, each time to a standard it has never needed before. Each step upward increases travel, which increases the payment a player expects for the time it costs him. Somewhere around Step 2 the squad has to go full-time, which converts a hobby into a payroll. By level 5 the club needs a ground satisfying EFL entry criteria. By level 2 it needs to survive the Championship financial rules while competing against clubs receiving parachute payments from the division above.
Clubs have made large parts of the journey. Several current EFL members were playing county-level football within the past few decades, and the record of sides that made the jump into the Football League from outside is documented in non-league clubs that reached the Football League. What almost nobody has done is the full climb without money arriving from outside football at some point on the way.
The honest summary is that the pyramid is open in law and steep in practice, and the steepness increases the higher you get.
How the shape of the pyramid has changed
The system has never been static. The Football League began in 1888 with twelve clubs and grew by absorbing rivals and adding divisions, a story told properly in the history of the Football League. The regional Third Divisions North and South were merged into national Third and Fourth Divisions in 1958. The Premier League broke away in 1992. The Football League renamed its divisions as the Championship, League One and League Two in 2004.
Below the professional game, the biggest structural change was the creation of a second national tier of non-league football. What is now Step 2 was formed when the Conference added North and South divisions in 2004, which for the first time gave clubs at level 6 a route upward that did not depend on being placed into whichever regional league happened to have a vacancy. The Conference itself was rebranded as the National League in 2015.
The 2018 Step 3 and Step 4 restructure was the most recent large reshaping. The pandemic-affected seasons that followed produced the strangest episodes in the pyramid history: campaigns abandoned at different points in different divisions, promotions decided on points-per-game formulae, and relegation suspended at several steps because the FA judged it unfair to demote a club on the strength of a partial season.
That episode is worth remembering for a reason beyond its novelty. It demonstrated that the pyramid rules are not laws of nature. They are decisions taken by committees, revised when they stop working, and argued about bitterly whenever they change.
Finding a table for any level of the system
For levels 1 to 4, the Premier League and the EFL publish tables on their own sites and every broadsheet carries them.
For Step 1 and Step 2, the National League publishes its own. For Steps 3 and 4, the Northern Premier, Southern and Isthmian leagues each run a site and publish their divisions there, often with better statistical depth than anything above them, because the people compiling them are volunteers who care.
Below Step 4, the reliable source is the FA Full-Time system, the platform county FAs and local leagues use to publish fixtures, results and tables. It is not elegant, and finding the right league requires knowing its name, but it is the primary record rather than a copy of one. Club sites and league pages generally pull from the same data.
One warning about tables at the lower steps. Fixtures are postponed for weather far more often than in the professional game, so a table in January can be close to meaningless — a side with four games in hand may be a division-winning team or a struggling one, and the points column will not tell you which. Read the played column first. It is the habit that separates people who follow non-league from people who glance at it.
More of the English game, from the professional divisions down to the grassroots, is collected on the England sport hub, and the wider football section sits at /sports/football.