FA Cup Qualifying Rounds Explained for Non League Fans
Six rounds stand between a Step 6 side and the first round proper. FA Cup qualifying explained for England's non-league pyramid, entry to prize money.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Domestic Cups20 min read
- Qualifying rounds
- 6
- First round played
- Extra Preliminary Round
- Ties from extra preliminary to the final
- 14
- Run by
- The Football Association
The FA Cup begins in the first week of August, on grounds with one stand and a tea hut, in front of a few hundred people. By the time most supporters start paying attention — the third round, in January, with the Premier League clubs finally in — the competition has already run for five months and disposed of several hundred clubs. Everything that happens before Christmas happens in the qualifying rounds, and it happens almost entirely in front of people who drove there.
More than 700 clubs enter in most seasons, which makes the FA Cup the largest knockout competition of its kind anywhere. The entry list is drawn from The Football Association's National League System, the pyramid of leagues sitting beneath the English Football League, and the clubs at the bottom of it are semi-professional or amateur outfits with volunteer committees and a groundsman who also runs the bar. This page is about them: how they get in, what they win, how far they have to travel, and why the six rounds of qualifying are the part of the competition that most resembles what the FA Cup was invented to be.
The shape of qualifying: six rounds before the competition proper
Six rounds sit in front of the first round proper. In order, they are the extra preliminary round, the preliminary round, and then the first, second, third and fourth qualifying rounds. The names are historical rather than logical — the "preliminary" round is not the first thing played, and has not been since the extra preliminary round was added to absorb a growing entry — and anyone new to the competition should simply learn the sequence rather than try to reason it out.
Each round is a single tie, drawn without seeding. The winner goes through. The loser is out of the FA Cup for that season and, for a Step 5 or Step 6 club, that can mean the end of the most lucrative fixture list it will play all year.
- Extra preliminary roundEarly August. Clubs from Steps 5 and 6 only, drawn in tight regional sections.
- Preliminary roundStep 4 clubs enter. Winners of the extra preliminary round come through.
- First qualifying roundStep 3 clubs enter, so National League North and South sides are still to come.
- Second qualifying roundStep 2 clubs enter. The first ties where a full-time squad may face a part-time one.
- Third qualifying roundNo new entrants. The field halves again, usually into the first week of October.
- Fourth qualifying roundNational League clubs enter. Winners reach the first round proper.
- First round properLeague One and League Two join. Around forty ties, still split north and south.
- Third round properPremier League and Championship clubs enter. Sixty-four clubs, one national draw.
The standard sequence of rounds in The FA's competition rules. Entry points by step are confirmed by The FA each season and have moved as the pyramid has been restructured.
The arithmetic that follows from this is the fact every non-league supporter knows by heart. A club entering at the extra preliminary round must win six ties to reach the first round proper, another two to reach the third, and then five more to reach the final. Fourteen wins. It has never been done, and the structure is arranged so that it almost certainly never will be, but the ladder is genuinely continuous — there is no point at which a small club is administratively excluded. That continuity is the competition's founding principle and it is still intact.
Dates move, but the rhythm is stable. Extra preliminary in the first half of August, preliminary a fortnight later, then a qualifying round roughly every three weeks through September and into the second half of October. The fourth qualifying round is the last weekend before the competition proper, and it is the one the national press start to notice, because the clubs still standing at that point are one win from the draw that might produce a Football League opponent.
Which step enters where, and why the ladder is uneven
The National League System is described in steps rather than tiers, counting down from Step 1 at the top. Step 1 is the National League, the fifth tier of English football. Steps 2 through 6 run below it, and there are divisions below Step 6 whose clubs are not eligible for the FA Cup at all — they play the FA Vase instead, or nothing national. Our guide to the steps of the non-league pyramid sets out how the levels relate to each other and how promotion moves between them.
Entry points are set by The FA before each season and published in the competition rules. In the shape that has held for most recent seasons, Steps 5 and 6 begin at the extra preliminary round, Step 4 at the preliminary round, Step 3 at the first qualifying round, Step 2 at the second qualifying round, and Step 1 at the fourth qualifying round. The gaps are not even, and they are not meant to be: the number of clubs at each step differs enormously, and the round structure has to deliver a clean field of the right size into the first round proper.
Look at the jump between Step 2 and Step 1. A National League North club has to survive three ties; a National League club, one division above it, has to survive one. That single gap does more to shape the first round proper than anything else in the rules, and it is why the non-league clubs who reach November are so heavily weighted towards the fifth tier.
There is a further wrinkle worth knowing. Clubs promoted or relegated between the close of one season and the FA Cup entry deadline are placed according to the step they will play in during the coming season, not the one they have just left. A club promoted from Step 4 to Step 3 in May enters at the first qualifying round in August, skipping two ties it would otherwise have played. Promotion is worth money in the FA Cup before a league fixture has even kicked off.
What a qualifying round win is actually worth
The FA publishes a prize fund schedule before the season, setting a fixed sum for the winners of each round. Losing clubs receive nothing from that fund in the qualifying rounds — this is a winners-only structure until the competition proper, where losers' payments appear in some rounds. The figure rises round by round as the ladder narrows, so a club which wins four qualifying ties collects considerably more than four times what a single win pays.
For context on how the numbers scale once the professional clubs are involved, the FA Cup prize money structure sets out the schedule from the first round proper onwards.
What matters at Step 5 is not the absolute size of the payment but its relationship to a club's ordinary income. A club at that level might take a modest four-figure sum through the turnstiles on a league Saturday. Its annual playing budget is a number the treasurer can hold in his head. Two FA Cup wins in August can move that budget by a visible percentage — enough to keep a striker who was thinking about dropping down a level for petrol money, or to replace a floodlight bulb array that has been on the maintenance list for three years.
The prize money is also unusual in being unconditional and immediate. League income arrives across a season and is largely spent by the time it is counted. Cup money arrives in a lump, at the start of the season, before the winter gas bill. Treasurers at this level talk about it the way farmers talk about weather.
Where the rest of the money comes from
Prize money is only one strand. The gate is the other, and the FA's competition rules govern how receipts and match expenses are treated at each stage. Clubs should always work from the current season's rules rather than assume last year's arrangement still applies, because the treatment of receipts has been revised more than once and the detail is not something to guess at.
Beyond the gate there is the bar, the food hatch, the programme, and for clubs that reach the later qualifying rounds an occasional streaming or broadcast fee. Then there is the tie nobody budgets for. A Step 4 club drawn at home against a Step 1 side in the fourth qualifying round can take more money in ninety minutes than it does in two months of league football, because the visiting support arrives in numbers and stays for three hours afterwards. That single fixture is often the difference between a club finishing its financial year in balance and not.
Regional draws and the travel they are designed to prevent
Every qualifying draw is regionalised. The FA splits the entry into northern and southern sections, and in the earliest rounds those sections are subdivided further, so a club in Cumbria is not paired with a club in Devon in the first week of August. The mechanics of ball allocation, the northern and southern splits and where the regionalisation stops are covered in detail in how the FA Cup draws are made.
The reason is money rather than kindness. A Step 6 club funds its own travel. A coach to a tie 200 miles away can cost more than the round's prize money pays, which would turn a cup win into a net loss and make the competition actively hostile to the clubs it exists to include. Regionalisation keeps the average journey short enough that the tie is worth playing.
It is not perfect. Regional sections are drawn on club numbers rather than on a map, so the boundaries fall where the arithmetic puts them, and clubs near a section edge can end up with a long trip while a club fifteen miles away gets a derby. Supporters at this level complain about it every August and the complaint is legitimate. The alternative — a genuinely national draw at Step 6 — would be worse for everyone.
Regionalisation persists further into the competition than most casual viewers realise. The first and second rounds proper are also split into northern and southern halves, which is why a first round tie between a Devon non-league side and a Cumbrian League Two club does not happen. Only from the third round is the draw fully national.
What the travel actually costs a small club
Work it through for a Step 5 side. A fifty-seat coach, a driver, fuel and the driver's hours put a round trip of any distance into three figures before anybody has eaten. Add a pre-match meal, because part-time players who have worked a shift that morning cannot arrive at a ground on nothing, and add the cost of covering the fixture the club is not playing at home that Saturday: the bar takes nothing, the food hatch takes nothing, and the volunteers who would have been working have a free afternoon the club would rather they did not have.
An away tie at Step 6, in other words, is a cost even when it is won. That is not an argument against playing away — the draw is the draw — but it explains why the regional sections are policed as carefully as they are, and why a club drawn 120 miles from home in the preliminary round will ring The FA to check the section boundaries before it books anything. It also explains a quirk that outsiders find strange: small clubs frequently prefer a home tie against a stronger opponent to an away tie against a weaker one. The stronger opponent brings supporters through the turnstile. The weaker one, 90 miles away, brings a bill.
Replays, extra time and how a qualifying tie ends
A drawn qualifying tie goes to a replay at the away club's ground, played in the following midweek. There is no extra time in the first match. In the replay, ninety minutes level takes the tie to extra time and then, if it is still level, penalties.
This is now one of the clearest differences between qualifying and the competition proper. The FA moved in 2024 to remove replays from the first round proper onwards, a change driven by fixture congestion at the top of the game and agreed with the Premier League and the EFL. The qualifying rounds kept theirs. Anyone reading a general explanation of how FA Cup replays work needs to hold both facts at once: replays are gone from the rounds most people watch, and alive in the rounds most people do not.
Non-league clubs were, on the whole, unhappy about the change even though it did not touch their own rounds directly, because the replay was the mechanism by which a Step 3 club that held a League One side to a draw earned a second payday. That has gone. Whether the compensation attached to the reform makes up for it is a judgement the clubs themselves are best placed to make, and they have not all reached the same conclusion.
A second replay does not exist. If a replay ends level after extra time, penalties settle it that night. The old sequence of second and third replays, which occasionally produced ties running to four or five matches, was abolished decades ago and is not coming back.
Crowds and the matchday take at qualifying level
An extra preliminary round tie between two Step 6 clubs might draw a hundred and fifty people. A preliminary round tie in a town with a football history behind it can draw four hundred. By the fourth qualifying round, with a Step 1 club visiting a Step 3 ground, a few thousand is possible, and the club will be counting the away allocation carefully because that is where the money is.
The pricing is a different world from the professional game. Admission at Step 5 or 6 is typically a single-figure sum in pounds, concessions lower, and under-16s are frequently free. There is no dynamic pricing, no membership tier, no ballot. You turn up and pay at the gate, usually in cash, occasionally to a man with a card reader who is apologetic about the signal. The contrast with how Premier League tickets are bought is total, and it is one of the reasons people who have given up on the top flight end up at Step 5 on a Saturday afternoon.
The revenue split inside the ground matters more than the headline attendance. At this level the bar and the food hatch often out-earn the turnstile, particularly for an evening replay when people arrive early and stay after. Clubs know this. It is why a cup tie with a decent away following is worth more than the gate figure suggests, and why the committee will happily lay on extra staff for a fixture that on paper draws six hundred.
The volunteer hours behind one qualifying tie
Count the jobs. Somebody marks the pitch on Friday evening. Somebody else checks the nets, replaces the corner flags that went missing in July, and puts up the sponsor boards. The programme has to be written, laid out, sent to a printer and collected. Turnstile operators need floats. The tea hut needs stock, and someone has to have driven to a cash and carry for it. A safety officer walks the ground. Stewards are briefed. The referee and his assistants need a room, tea and payment. Afterwards somebody hoovers the clubhouse and somebody counts the money.
At Step 6 all of that is unpaid. Not most of it — all of it, in a great many clubs, other than the players' expenses and the match officials' fees. The people doing it are usually the same eight or nine, and several of them have been doing it since before the current first team were born.
The FA Cup adds to that load rather than replacing it. A qualifying tie is an extra fixture on a ground that was already hosting league football, with extra crowd, extra scrutiny of the ground grading, and a competition rulebook that has to be complied with precisely, because a technical breach can cost the tie after it has been won. Club secretaries at this level spend the week before a cup match checking registration paperwork. It is not glamorous and it is the reason the competition functions at all.
Anyone who wants to see this from the inside rather than read about it will find that non-league clubs are conspicuously easy to join. Our guide to joining a grassroots club in England covers the routes in, most of which start with turning up twice and being handed a job.
Clubs that carried qualifying form into the third round
Chasetown are the benchmark. In 2007-08 the Staffordshire club, then playing at Step 4 in the Southern League, came through qualifying, won two rounds proper and reached the third round, where they led Cardiff City before losing. No club from that level had gone so far in the modern competition.
Marine did something comparable in 2020-21. The Merseyside club, at Step 4 in the Northern Premier League, won six ties to reach the third round and were drawn at home to Tottenham Hotspur — a tie played behind closed doors, which robbed the club of the crowd but not of the fixture. They sold virtual tickets instead, and a very large number of people who had never been to Rossett Park bought one.
Blyth Spartans, in 1977-78, reached the fifth round from the qualifying rounds, which remains one of the deepest runs by a non-league club since the war. Havant & Waterlooville, in 2007-08, reached the fourth round and twice led at Anfield before losing to Liverpool. Hereford United's win over Newcastle United in 1972, Ronnie Radford's goal and the parka-clad pitch invasion that followed it, is the single most replayed piece of footage in the competition's history, and it belongs to a Southern League club that had come through qualifying to get there.
The pattern in all of these is the same. The run is built in August and September, on hard pitches and then wet ones, in front of small crowds, in ties nobody films. The history of FA Cup giant-killings covers the third round upsets that make the highlights reels, but almost every non-league one of them has half a dozen qualifying wins underneath it.
Registration deadlines and the cup-tied rule
The competition rules set a deadline before each round by which a player must be registered with his club to be eligible for that round's tie. Miss the deadline and the player cannot play, regardless of whether he is fit, contracted and available. The exact timing is published each season and secretaries work to it obsessively, because fielding an ineligible player is the one mistake that can undo a win after the final whistle.
The second rule catches people out more often. A player who has appeared for one club in that season's FA Cup is cup-tied and cannot appear for another club in the same season's competition. At non-league level, where players move between clubs mid-season far more freely than in the professional game, this bites regularly. A striker signed in November may simply not be available for the second round, and the manager who did not check is the one who finds out on a Saturday morning.
Loan players are subject to the same principle, which complicates the arrangements clubs at Step 3 and Step 4 make with EFL academies. The mechanics of loans in the professional game are set out in the EFL loan rules; at non-league level the arrangements are looser, but the cup-tie restriction still applies.
Suspensions carry across competitions in a way that also surprises people. A player sent off in a league fixture serves his ban in the next matches his club plays, which can include a cup tie, and there is no mechanism for a club to choose which fixture the suspension covers.
There is a third category that trips up clubs rather than players: the paperwork of the tie itself. Team sheets have to be exchanged before kick-off with the players named correctly, substitutes listed, and the shirt numbers matching. At professional level a club employs somebody whose job includes this. At Step 5 it is done by a secretary in a portable cabin, twenty minutes before kick-off, with a biro. Most protests that reach The FA from qualifying rounds are about eligibility or team sheets rather than anything that happened on the pitch, and the penalty for getting it wrong can be expulsion from the competition with the opponent reinstated. Clubs that have been through it once never do it again.
Ground grading, floodlights and who can host
Not every club that enters can host every tie. The FA's National Ground Grading requirements set out what a ground must have at each step — barriers, hard standing, covered accommodation, dressing rooms of a stated size, floodlights of a stated intensity — and a club that does not meet the grade for the tie it has been drawn in may have to switch the fixture to the opponent's ground or to a neutral venue.
Floodlights are the most common sticking point at the bottom of the pyramid. Many Step 6 grounds have them; some do not. A club without lights can play a Saturday afternoon tie in August without difficulty, and cannot play a midweek replay in October at all. The competition rules provide for early kick-offs and for switching venues, but the practical effect is that a club without floodlights loses the home advantage it has earned in a replay.
Safety certification is the other constraint, and it becomes live precisely when the tie becomes attractive. A ground that comfortably holds the four hundred who watch league football may have a certified capacity that a visiting Step 1 club's away following would exceed. The club then chooses between capping the away allocation, which loses money, and applying for a temporary variation, which costs money and time. Some clubs at Step 3 and Step 4 have standing arrangements with a nearby larger ground for exactly this situation. It is one of the quiet ways in which stadium infrastructure in England shapes what a small club can earn from a single draw.
Why the qualifying rounds are the competition's centre of gravity
- 6Qualifying rounds
- 8Rounds in the competition proper
- 14Ties from extra preliminary to the final
Structural figures from the competition's round sequence. The number of entrants varies by season and is confirmed by The FA at entry.
Fourteen ties. Six of them played before the Football League clubs have entered, eight before the Premier League has.
The FA Cup is routinely described as having lost its magic, and the case is usually made from the top down: weakened teams in the early rounds, a third round scattered across four days for television, a final kicking off in the evening. Much of that criticism is fair and it is argued through properly in our piece on weakened teams in the domestic cups. But it describes the competition proper, which is a different thing from the competition.
In August none of it applies. A Step 5 manager picks his strongest available side because the prize money is real to him. The crowd is up on a league Saturday because the fixture matters. Nobody is resting anybody. The tie is decided on the day or in a replay four days later, in front of people who paid at a turnstile and will drink in the clubhouse afterwards. Whatever the competition has lost higher up, it has not lost that, and the reason is structural rather than sentimental — the incentives at Step 5 point the same way the FA Cup's original incentives did.
There is a second argument, less often made. The qualifying rounds are where the competition's claim to be genuinely open is either true or false, and the test is not whether a Step 6 club can win the cup. It is whether the ladder is unbroken and whether the entry rules exclude anybody who has earned a place. On that test the FA Cup still passes, which is more than can be said for several national knockout competitions elsewhere in Europe that admit lower-league clubs by invitation or regional quota rather than by right.
Go to one. The away days guide covers the practicalities of following a club around the country, and the broader picture is set out across our football section and the wider England guides hub. But an extra preliminary round tie needs no planning at all. Find a fixture within an hour of home, take a note and some coins, and stand behind the goal your club is attacking. That is where the competition starts, and it is the version of it that most closely resembles what the FA had in mind when the first entries were taken in 1871.