FA Cup Rounds Explained: From Round One to the Final
Every stage from the extra preliminary round to Wembley, with the FA Cup rounds explained for English fans and each tier of the pyramid given its entry point.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Domestic Cups19 min read
- First final
- 1872
- Rounds in total
- 14
- Qualifying rounds
- 6
- Clubs in the third round
- 64
On a Saturday in early August, before the Premier League season has started and while most of England is still thinking about cricket, several hundred clubs play the extra preliminary round of the FA Cup. A team from the ninth or tenth tier, playing in front of a hundred and fifty people at a ground with a clubhouse and one covered terrace, is technically in the same competition that ends at Wembley nine months later. That connection is the whole point of the thing, and it is the reason the FA Cup remains structurally different from every other major domestic cup in Europe.
The Football Association has run the competition since 1871-72, when fifteen clubs entered and Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers 1-0 at Kennington Oval in the first final. The modern version has fourteen rounds. This page sets out what each of them is, who joins where, and why the third round in January carries a weight none of the others do.
The fourteen rounds, top to bottom
Six rounds of qualifying, eight rounds of the proper competition. That is the structure, and the names of the qualifying rounds have a slightly Victorian awkwardness that the FA has never tidied up.
The qualifying competition runs: extra preliminary round, preliminary round, first qualifying round, second qualifying round, third qualifying round, fourth qualifying round. Then the proper competition: first round, second round, third round, fourth round, fifth round, quarter-finals — formally the sixth round — semi-finals, and the final.
A club starting in the extra preliminary round would need to win six qualifying ties and then seven more to lift the trophy. Thirteen wins. No club has done it, and the deepest runs from that starting point have tended to end in the second or third round with a televised tie and a considerable amount of money in the bank.
- Extra preliminary roundPlayed in early August. Clubs from Steps 5 and 6 of the National League System begin the competition.
- Preliminary roundStep 4 clubs join. Still high summer, still before most league seasons are properly underway.
- First and second qualifying roundsStep 3 and then Step 2 clubs enter as the field halves each round.
- Third qualifying roundThe last round before National League clubs appear. Winners are two ties from the first round proper.
- Fourth qualifying roundStep 1 clubs enter. The 32 winners go through to meet the EFL.
- First round properLeague One and League Two clubs join, 48 of them, in a draw split north and south.
- Second round properTwenty ties, still regionalised, deciding who is in the hat in January.
- Third round properThe Premier League and Championship enter. Sixty-four clubs, 32 ties, an open draw.
- Fourth and fifth roundsThe field halves twice more. The fifth round is played midweek.
- Quarter-finals and semi-finalsEight clubs, then four. Both semi-finals are staged at Wembley.
- FinalOne match at Wembley, on a weekend now kept clear of Premier League fixtures.
The round sequence as set out in The FA Challenge Cup Competition Rules; entry points are adjusted by the FA each season according to the number of entries received.
Where each level of the pyramid comes in
Entry points are set by the FA and are pegged to a club's step in the National League System rather than to its name or history. The broad pattern has been stable for years, though the FA adjusts it when the number of entries shifts.
Clubs at Steps 5 and 6 — the ninth and tenth tiers — start in the extra preliminary round. Step 4 clubs come in at the preliminary round, Step 3 at the first qualifying round, Step 2 at the second qualifying round. National League clubs, Step 1, enter at the fourth qualifying round. League One and League Two enter at the first round proper. The Premier League and Championship enter at the third round.
The gaps between those entry points are not evenly spaced, and that is deliberate. A Step 6 club and a Premier League club are separated by ten rounds of the competition, which is roughly proportionate to the gulf between them. A National League club and a League Two club are separated by one round, which is roughly proportionate to that gap as well.
What this produces is a competition that funnels rather than filters. By the first round proper the non-league entry has been reduced from several hundred clubs to 32, and those 32 have each won four, five or six ties to get there. They are not lucky. They have been playing knockout football since August. Our guide to the FA Cup qualifying rounds covers that stretch of the competition in its own right, because it is a season in itself and most supporters never see any of it.
| Round | Clubs | Ties | New entrants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fourth qualifying | 64 | 32 | National League clubs |
| First round proper | 80 | 40 | League One and League Two, 48 clubs |
| Second round proper | 40 | 20 | None |
| Third round proper | 64 | 32 | Premier League and Championship, 44 clubs |
| Fourth round proper | 32 | 16 | None |
| Fifth round proper | 16 | 8 | None |
| Quarter-finals | 8 | 4 | None |
| Semi-finals | 4 | 2 | None |
| Final | 2 | 1 | None |
The one line in that table people misread is the third round. The field gets bigger, not smaller — 40 clubs come out of round two as 20 winners, and then 44 arrive from the top two divisions. It is the only point in any English knockout competition where the number of clubs left goes up.
Why the third round is the round that matters
Ask a supporter which round of the FA Cup they care about and the honest answer for most is the third.
The reason is arithmetic. It is the first round in which a non-league or lower-division club can be drawn against a Premier League side, and the first in which the draw is open rather than regionalised, so any of the 64 clubs can meet any other. A club from the sixth tier that has won five or six ties since August finds out in December whether the reward is a trip to a full Premier League stadium or a home tie against a Championship side in front of the television cameras.
For a small club, that draw is a financial event rather than a sporting one. A home tie against a big club with a televised kick-off can be worth more than a season's league gate receipts. Clubs have rebuilt stands on the proceeds of one afternoon in January.
The third round is traditionally played on the first weekend of January, though it has moved — some seasons it has started in early December, others later in January, and the FA has shifted it to accommodate broadcast schedules and the winter fixture pile-up. Treating the date as fixed is a mistake. Our page on the FA Cup third round goes into what the round has meant historically and why the giant-killing statistics are more complicated than the headlines suggest.
The argument about entering later
There is a periodic proposal that Premier League clubs should enter earlier, in the first or second round, on the grounds that it would generate more money for small clubs and make the competition feel less like two separate tournaments joined in January.
The counter-argument is practical: the top-flight fixture calendar in November is already congested with European commitments and league matches, and adding two cup rounds would produce weakened teams rather than glamour ties. The FA has never seriously pursued the change. Whether that is prudence or deference to the clubs with the loudest voices is a fair question, and the answer probably contains some of both.
Seeding and the north-south split
The qualifying rounds are seeded. The FA divides the entrants by step and by the previous season's finishing positions, and pairs seeded clubs with unseeded ones where the numbers allow, which is why a Step 2 club entering at the second qualifying round is more likely to draw a Step 4 side than another Step 2 side.
Geography does more of the work than seeding does. The qualifying rounds are split into northern and southern sections, and the first and second rounds of the proper competition are drawn the same way. The purpose is money. A Step 5 club with a hundred paying supporters cannot absorb a 300-mile round trip on a Saturday in September, and a competition that produced those fixtures at the bottom would lose entrants.
The split is not a rigid line across the middle of the country. The FA balances the two sections by the number of clubs in each, which means the dividing line moves from round to round and from season to season, and clubs in the Midlands can find themselves in either half. Supporters occasionally complain about this. There is no way to balance two halves of an uneven number of clubs without moving the boundary.
From the third round the draw is entirely open. No seeding, no regional split, no protection for anybody. The mechanics of the draw itself — the numbered balls, the timing, the fact that ties are drawn before the previous round is complete — are covered in our guide to how the FA Cup draws are made.
How many clubs enter the competition
The entry is enormous by the standards of any comparable competition. More than 700 clubs enter in a typical season, and the record is usually cited as 763 in 2011-12. The exact number changes annually because clubs fold, merge, move between leagues or fail to meet the entry criteria, and the FA publishes the accepted entry list each summer.
Entry is not automatic. A club must be affiliated to the FA through its county football association, must play at a level within the National League System that the competition admits, and must have a ground meeting the minimum requirements for the competition. That last point catches clubs out. A club playing at Step 6 on a pitch with no rail, no dressing rooms of the required standard or no floodlights where the round demands them will not be accepted, however well it is doing in its league.
The scale is easier to grasp by comparison. The competition takes in the twenty Premier League clubs, the 72 EFL clubs, the 24 National League clubs, the two divisions at Step 2, and then a rapidly widening base of regional leagues below that. By Step 5 and Step 6 the entrants number in the hundreds, drawn from every county in England, plus the small number of Welsh clubs that play in the English pyramid.
- 14Rounds in total
- 6Qualifying rounds
- 64Clubs in the third round
- 1872Year of the first final
Structural figures from the competition's format and history, not counts from any single season's entry list.
That base is the reason the competition takes nine months. It is also the reason the FA has resisted trimming the qualifying rounds despite periodic suggestions that six is more than the modern calendar needs. Removing a round would mean either excluding several hundred clubs from the competition entirely or giving a large number of them a bye, and neither is compatible with the competition's founding claim to be open to every affiliated club in the country.
Byes, exemptions and balancing the bracket
Several hundred entrants create an obvious problem. Knockout brackets want powers of two, and 700-odd is not one.
The FA solves it with exemptions and byes. Exemption is the systematic tool: clubs at higher steps are exempted to a later round, which is what the entry points described above actually are. A Premier League club is not given a bye to the third round in the casual sense — it is exempted from the first ten rounds by regulation, because of the level at which it plays.
Byes are the residual tool, used when the arithmetic still does not come out. Where a round has an odd number of clubs after exemptions, a bye advances one club without playing. These are rare in the modern competition and are allocated according to the competition rules rather than at anyone's discretion.
The result is a bracket that funnels several hundred clubs down to 32 non-league survivors by the first round proper, then down to 20 by the third, and does it without ever requiring a Step 6 club to play a Premier League one before both have earned it.
Why exemptions are not favouritism
Supporters new to the competition sometimes read the exemption structure as the FA protecting its wealthiest members, and it is worth addressing directly.
The alternative would be a competition in which a Premier League club plays thirteen ties to win the trophy, most of them against clubs eight or nine tiers below. Those ties would be one-sided, would clog an already full calendar, and would deliver almost no benefit to the small clubs involved beyond a single large gate. The exemption structure concentrates that value: instead of a hundred meaningless first-round mismatches, the competition produces a handful of genuine third-round ties between clubs that have each survived several rounds.
The honest criticism is a different one. Exemptions are pegged to league level, and league level is largely a function of money, so the structure does entrench the existing hierarchy. It is simply that no alternative has been proposed which does not entrench it more.
Semi-finals at Wembley, and why supporters object
Both FA Cup semi-finals have been played at Wembley Stadium since 2008. The change was driven by the cost of rebuilding the stadium, which opened in 2007 carrying substantial construction debt, and staging four Wembley occasions a season instead of one was part of how that debt was serviced.
Before then, semi-finals were played at large neutral club grounds. Villa Park hosted more than any other venue. Old Trafford, Hillsborough, Elland Road, Goodison Park and Highbury all took their turn. Wembley had been used occasionally from 1991, when Tottenham Hotspur played Arsenal there in the first semi-final staged at the old stadium, on the reasonable grounds that no neutral London ground could hold the demand for a north London derby.
Three objections are made to the current arrangement, and they carry different weight.
The first is about travel and cost. A supporter of a northern club faces a journey to London for a semi-final and, if the club wins, the same journey a month later for the final. That doubles the expense of a cup run for exactly the supporters least able to absorb it, and it is the strongest of the three objections.
The second is that playing at Wembley twice devalues the final. Reaching Wembley used to be the achievement; now it is the penultimate stage. Something was lost there, though it is hard to quantify and easy to overstate.
The third is about atmosphere, and it is largely aesthetic. A 90,000-seat stadium with two sets of supporters from clubs whose combined regular attendance is 50,000 will look and sound empty, and semi-finals played in a three-quarters-full national stadium do not carry the compression of a full Villa Park.
The FA's position has been consistent: the stadium has to be paid for and the revenue is needed. That is an honest answer rather than a satisfying one.
The ticket allocation question
A related complaint gets less attention and deserves more. A semi-final at a 40,000-seat club ground allocates roughly half the capacity to each set of supporters, with a small neutral section. A semi-final at Wembley has to fill 90,000 seats, and the clubs involved frequently cannot sell their full allocations.
The surplus goes to the FA's own distribution channels — county associations, affiliated clubs, sponsors, hospitality — which means a substantial number of people at an FA Cup semi-final have no connection to either club. That is defensible as a way of rewarding the grassroots game, and it is also why the noise in the stadium bears little relation to what two sets of supporters would generate in a smaller ground.
Clubs with large followings do not have this problem. Clubs with average home crowds of 20,000 reaching a semi-final for the first time in decades absolutely do, and they have the additional indignity of being asked to pay for tickets they cannot shift.
The final, and where it sits in the calendar
The final has been played at Wembley since 1923, when the first match at the original stadium — Bolton Wanderers against West Ham United, the game remembered for the crowd on the pitch and the white horse used to clear it — was played in front of an attendance nobody has ever established with confidence. Between 2001 and 2006, while Wembley was being rebuilt, the final was staged at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. It returned to the rebuilt Wembley in 2007.
The traditional slot is a Saturday in mid-to-late May, and for most of the twentieth century the final was the last domestic fixture of the season, kicking off at three o'clock. Both parts of that have eroded. Kick-off times have moved for broadcast, and league seasons have at times finished after the final rather than before it.
From 2024-25 the FA and the Premier League agreed that the final weekend would be kept clear of Premier League fixtures, restoring the final as a standalone occasion. That was part of a broader package of changes to the competition, which also removed replays from every round of the proper competition. In tournament summers the final has sometimes been brought forward to give the England squad preparation time, so the date is a convention rather than a fixture.
Ties level after ninety minutes now go to extra time and, if needed, penalties from the first round onwards. Replays survive only in the qualifying rounds. That change was contentious, and the reasoning behind it — congestion at the top of the calendar against income at the bottom — is set out in our page on how FA Cup replays work, along with what the loss of a replay actually costs a small club. The rules governing extra time and shoot-outs across English cup football are covered separately in our guide to cup tie extra time and penalties.
Prize money as you climb
The FA operates a prize fund that pays out at every round from the qualifying competition onwards, with the amount rising as clubs progress. The FA publishes the figures each season and revises them periodically, so any number quoted from a past season should be checked rather than assumed.
Two things about the structure are worth understanding, because they are frequently confused.
Prize money is only part of what a cup run is worth, and for a small club it is rarely the largest part. Gate receipts matter more. The FA Challenge Cup Competition Rules set out how receipts are handled between the two clubs in a tie, and a home draw against a much bigger club is the single most valuable thing that can happen to a non-league club's finances in a season. A televised tie adds a broadcast facility fee on top, paid by the FA out of its broadcast agreements.
The second point is that the money is not evenly distributed relative to need. Round-by-round prize money at the semi-final and final stage is large in absolute terms and negligible relative to a Premier League club's turnover. The same money at the fourth qualifying round is transformative for a Step 2 club. The FA has weighted payments towards the earlier rounds over time in recognition of this, and the argument that it should go further is a reasonable one. Our page on FA Cup prize money works through the distribution mechanism in detail.
Fixture clashes with league football
Every round of the FA Cup collides with somebody's league programme, and the collisions get worse the higher up you go.
In the qualifying rounds the clash is straightforward: non-league fixtures are postponed and rearranged, usually into midweek, and a club with a long cup run can find itself playing twice a week from October to January to catch up. For a part-time squad with players who work, that is a genuine problem, and it is one reason some clubs are ambivalent about progress.
In the proper competition the pressure moves to the calendar's edges. EFL clubs in the first and second rounds lose Saturdays that would have held league fixtures. From the third round, Premier League clubs are managing the cup alongside league matches, European commitments and the EFL Cup, which is why weakened selections in January are a recurring argument rather than an occasional scandal.
The removal of replays from the proper competition was largely a response to this. Fewer matches, fewer rearranged midweeks, less pressure on a calendar that had grown to accommodate expanded European competitions. The cost fell on clubs for whom a replay at a big ground was the payday of the decade, which is why the change was defended by some of the people who make the fixture list and resented by most of the people who fill the small grounds.
Whether the trade was worth it is not settled, and honest observers on both sides accept the other's point. What is clear is that the pressure did not come from the FA Cup's own structure — fourteen rounds has been the shape of it for a long time — but from everything that grew up around it.
How the clashes actually get resolved
The mechanism is less mysterious than it looks. The FA sets its round dates for the following season well in advance, and the Premier League and EFL build their fixture lists around those dates rather than the other way round. Where a league fixture falls on a cup weekend for a club still in the competition, that league fixture is postponed and rearranged.
The knock-on effects land in February and March. A club that has gone deep in both domestic cups accumulates postponed league fixtures which then have to be squeezed into midweeks already occupied by rearranged games, and the resulting run of matches is where injuries and squad rotation arguments come from. A club knocked out in January has a clear calendar and, frequently, a better league finish.
That is an uncomfortable incentive built into the structure, and it is one of the reasons managers of clubs fighting relegation have been open about prioritising league survival over a cup run. It is easy to condemn and hard to argue with.
Following the competition from August
The competition is easier to follow from the start than most people assume, and it is more enjoyable that way.
Draws for the qualifying rounds are made and published by the FA through the summer and autumn, usually with less ceremony than the televised third round draw. Match dates are published as fixed round dates rather than as individual kick-off times, so an extra preliminary round Saturday will have several hundred ties kicking off at three o'clock.
Admission at that level is cheap, turnstiles take cash, and there is no segregation. A tie between two Step 5 clubs in the first week of August is a decent way to spend an afternoon and costs less than a Premier League programme. The clubs themselves are usually the best source of information about their own tie, since local coverage of qualifying rounds ranges from thorough to nonexistent depending on the town.
If you want to track a single club through the competition, start in August rather than January. The stories that make the third round interesting — the club that has won five ties, the striker who works as a plasterer, the ground that has to install temporary seating for a televised tie — all happened months before the cameras arrived. For more on the English game's structure and the competitions that sit alongside the cup, see the football section.