FPL Price Changes Explained: Rises, Falls, Selling Price
FPL price changes explained for UK managers: why a player rises or falls by £0.1m overnight, how the sell-on fee halves a profit and what team value means.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Fantasy Premier League23 min read
- Size of one price step
- £0.1m
- Most a price can move in a Gameweek
- £0.3m
- Share of a rise kept on sale
- Half, rounded down
- Budget every team starts with
- £100m
A forward scores three at the weekend and by Monday morning he costs £0.1 million more in Fantasy Premier League. The hat-trick did not do that. Several hundred thousand managers across England and everywhere else the game is played read about the hat-trick, opened the transfers page and bought him, and the buying is what moved the price.
That is the whole rule, as the Premier League publishes it. A player's price goes up or down in single steps of £0.1 million according to how popular he is in the game's transfer market: how many managers are bringing him in against how many are shipping him out. Goals, assists, clean sheets and form have no direct effect. They matter only because they change what managers do. A manager who sells receives the purchase price plus half of any rise, rounded down, so the price on the list and the money in the hand are rarely the same figure.
FPL price changes explained by one rule: popularity, not points
The distinction between performance and popularity sounds like pedantry until the two come apart, which they do every week.
A defender at an unfashionable club keeps four clean sheets in a row. His points total climbs, but few managers buy him, because few are watching. His price stays where it was. Meanwhile a midfielder at one of the big clubs returns from injury, plays twenty minutes without touching the ball in the penalty area, and rises overnight, because half the game had been waiting for him.
Neither outcome is a malfunction. Prices in this game are a record of demand. They measure what managers believe will happen, expressed through transfers, and belief runs ahead of evidence in both directions.
- 0.1mOne price step
- 0.3mMost movement in one Gameweek
- 100mBudget at the start of a season
From the Premier League's Fantasy rules and its 2026-27 explainer on price changes. All are settings the game can revise before a new season.
Three consequences follow from the rule, and they shape everything else on this page.
Prices are slow. One step a night, and no more than three in a Gameweek in either direction, means a player cannot double in value however well he plays. A season's movement for even the most heavily bought player is measured in a million or two on the list, not in tens of millions.
Prices are herd behaviour made visible. A rise is information about what other managers are doing, which is useful in a mini-league and worth nothing as a forecast of points.
And prices have no bearing on scoring. A £4.5 million defender's clean sheet is worth exactly what a £6.5 million defender's is. How those points are awarded is set out in our guide to how every position scores in FPL, and nothing in it refers to cost.
What the official rules say about price changes, and what they leave out
The published rules on this subject are short enough to summarise in four statements.
| Subject | What the rules state |
|---|---|
| Cause of movement | Prices change during the season dependent on the popularity of the player in the transfer market |
| Pre-season | Prices do not change until the season starts |
| Selling after a rise | The manager keeps half of the increase, rounded down to the nearest £0.1m |
| Worked example | A player bought at £7.5m who has risen to £7.8m has a selling price of £7.6m |
| The formula itself | Not published |
That last row is the one to dwell on. The game has never published the calculation. It does not say how many transfers produce a rise, whether the number is the same for every player, whether all transfers count equally, or how ownership enters into it.
Everything managers think they know beyond the four statements above has been worked out from the outside. For well over a decade, hobbyists and the sites they built have recorded transfer counts, watched which players moved each night, and fitted models to the pattern. Some of those models became very good. None of them was ever the rule.
This page keeps the two apart. Where a statement comes from the Premier League's rules or its own explainers, it is given as fact. Where it comes from the modelling community, it is described as a working assumption, an observation or a belief, and should be read with that weight.
There is an argument that the secrecy is deliberate and sensible. A published threshold would be gamed on the first night. Leaving it opaque keeps price movement as something a manager anticipates and cannot engineer. The cost is a rule that players of the game have to take partly on trust, which sits awkwardly in a competition with prizes.
What changed in 2026-27
For the 2026-27 season the Premier League moved a little towards openness without publishing the formula. It added a Price Change Predictor to the game, described in a section further down this page. The accompanying explainer confirmed in the game's own words that a player can rise or fall by up to £0.3 million in a Gameweek, a limit the community had long inferred from watching.
When FPL prices change: once a night, UK time
Prices do not drift during the day. They are recalculated once in every twenty-four hours, overnight in the United Kingdom, and all of that night's rises and falls are applied together. A manager who checks the list at teatime and again at bedtime will see identical figures.
The hour has not always been the same.
For many seasons the update ran in the small hours: about half past one in the morning during the winter months on Greenwich Mean Time, and about half past two during British Summer Time. Those are the same moment on the universal clock, which suggests the job was simply scheduled without regard to the clocks going forward. To a manager in England it looked as though the changes moved by an hour twice a year.
For 2026-27 the Premier League announced that price changes would take place at 00:00 UK time each day. Midnight, in other words, on whichever clock Britain happens to be using. That is the stated time for that season and should not be assumed for any other.
Why the hour matters
The price that counts for a transfer is the price at the instant the transfer is confirmed. A manager who buys a player at ten at night pays that evening's figure. The same purchase made the next morning, after a rise, costs £0.1 million more, and that can be the difference between a move that fits the budget and one that does not.
So the nightly update works as a second, softer deadline inside the Gameweek. It pulls transfers earlier in the week, against the pull of late team news that makes waiting attractive. The tension between the two is discussed on our page about free transfers, banking and points hits, which also explains why an early move cannot be reversed if the news turns out badly.
Moving the update from the small hours to midnight changed that calculation slightly for British managers. A decision that once had to be made before going to bed, or left to chance, now falls at an hour when a fair number of people are still awake.
Nothing moves before the first deadline
The rules say flatly that prices do not change until the season starts. Between the game's launch in the summer and the opening Gameweek, every figure is frozen.
The reason is structural. Before a team's first deadline, changes are unlimited and are not transfers in the game's sense at all. Managers build and tear up draft squads daily through July and early August. If that churn fed the price mechanism, the most talked-about players would climb before a ball was kicked and late entrants would be penalised for nothing more than signing up in the second week of August.
Three prices for one player: purchase, current and selling
Most confusion about money in this game comes from treating a player as having one price. He has three, and they answer different questions.
| Price | Where it is seen | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase price | Recorded against the player in one manager's squad | What that manager paid on the day of the transfer |
| Current price | The player list and the player's profile | What anyone would pay to buy him now |
| Selling price | The transfers page, against players already owned | What that manager would receive for him now |
| Starting price | The player's history | What he cost when the season opened; of no effect on any transaction |
The current price is the only one that is the same for everybody. The purchase price is private to each team: two managers who own the same forward may have paid different amounts, depending on when they bought. Their selling prices then differ as well.
The place to see the difference is the transfers page. The figure shown there against a player already owned is his selling price, and it may be less than the current price on the player list. Many a planned transfer has collapsed at that page, because the sums were done from the list.
- BoughtThe manager pays the current price. That figure is stored as the purchase price for this team only.
- Demand buildsOther managers buy the player. After a nightly update his current price steps up by £0.1m.
- Selling price follows at half speedThe team's selling price becomes the purchase price plus half the rise, rounded down to the nearest £0.1m.
- Demand reversesManagers sell. The current price steps down, and the selling price is recalculated from the same purchase price.
- SoldThe manager receives the selling price. The purchase price is discarded and plays no further part.
- Bought againIf he returns to the squad later, the price paid that day becomes a new purchase price.
A description of the mechanism in the Fantasy rules. No figures are involved until a manager buys, and each manager's purchase price is his own.
Two smaller points belong here. The starting price is a historical note and nothing more; no calculation refers to it once the season is running. And the money a manager has not spent, shown as the bank, is a fourth figure that sits beside these and is added to a selling price to give the budget for a replacement.
The sell-on fee worked through with an invented player
Call him Danny Marsh, a midfielder who does not exist, at a club that does not exist either. A manager buys him at £6.0 million. Marsh starts scoring, managers pile in, and his current price climbs a step at a time.
The rule is that the manager keeps half of the increase, rounded down to the nearest £0.1 million. The rounding is where the pain is.
| Marsh's current price | Rise since purchase | Half of the rise | Selling price | Profit actually banked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £6.0m | None | None | £6.0m | None |
| £6.1m | £0.1m | £0.05m | £6.0m | None |
| £6.2m | £0.2m | £0.1m | £6.1m | £0.1m |
| £6.3m | £0.3m | £0.15m | £6.1m | £0.1m |
| £6.4m | £0.4m | £0.2m | £6.2m | £0.2m |
| £6.5m | £0.5m | £0.25m | £6.2m | £0.2m |
| £6.6m | £0.6m | £0.3m | £6.3m | £0.3m |
Read the second row again. Marsh has risen once, the list says £6.1 million, and his owner can sell him for precisely what he paid. Half of £0.1 million is five hundredths of a million, the game deals only in tenths, and it rounds down. A single rise adds nothing whatever to a selling price.
The same happens at every odd-numbered step. The third rise is worth nothing more than the second, the fifth nothing more than the fourth. Selling price moves only on the even rises.
What the fee does to behaviour
It makes chasing a single rise pointless as a way of building funds, and managers who buy early "to beat the rise" are often protecting against something else: being priced out. A player who goes up before he is bought costs the full £0.1 million more. A player who goes up after he is bought earns his owner nothing for the first step. The asymmetry runs against the buyer every time.
It also makes holding worth more than trading. A player kept through six rises has banked £0.3 million. Six different players each sold after one rise have banked nothing between them.
The fee has a defensible purpose. Without it, the game would reward managers who treated it as a market, flipping popular players for profit and fielding whatever that left them. With it, value accrues slowly to those who pick well and stay put. One oddity remains: the game displays a headline value that includes profit a manager can never fully realise, which is the subject of a later section.
Price falls, and why buying a player back costs money
Rises are shared with the house. Falls are not.
Suppose a manager buys Marsh at £6.0 million and he is promptly dropped by his club. Managers sell, and the list price slips to £5.9 million and then £5.8 million. The selling price is £5.8 million. Every step below the purchase price is passed on in full, with no rounding in the owner's favour and no fee to cushion it.
A fall from above the purchase price behaves differently, and more kindly than it first appears. Say Marsh had risen to £6.4 million, giving a selling price of £6.2 million, before the fall began.
| Marsh's current price | Position against the £6.0m purchase price | Selling price |
|---|---|---|
| £6.4m | Up £0.4m | £6.2m |
| £6.3m | Up £0.3m | £6.1m |
| £6.2m | Up £0.2m | £6.1m |
| £6.1m | Up £0.1m | £6.0m |
| £6.0m | Level | £6.0m |
| £5.9m | Down £0.1m | £5.9m |
Above the purchase price, a fall on the list costs the owner only half as much, for the same reason that a rise earned him only half. Some steps cost nothing. The list price drops from £6.3 million to £6.2 million and the selling price stays at £6.1 million. Once the price passes below what was paid, each step costs the full tenth.
The buy-back trap
A manager owns Marsh, bought at £6.0 million and now listed at £6.4 million. Marsh is suspended for one match. The manager sells him for £6.2 million, intending to bring him back a week later.
A week later Marsh is still listed at £6.4 million. Buying him costs £6.4 million. The round trip has cost £0.2 million in cash, on top of two transfers, and something less visible has gone too: the purchase price is now £6.4 million. The cushion of earlier rises has been wiped. If Marsh goes up again, the first step earns nothing, and if he falls, every step from here is passed on in full.
This is the strongest practical argument for patience with a valuable player who is briefly unavailable. The cost of a short absence has to be weighed against a permanent loss of banked value. The game's flags, and the bans that sit behind a red one, are covered in our guide to how yellow and red card suspensions work in the Premier League.
Team value against selling value, and money in the bank
Managers boast about team value. It is the nearest thing the game has to a second scoreboard, and the figure quoted is usually the wrong one.
There are two ways to add up a squad. Sum the fifteen current prices and the result is what it would cost to buy that squad from scratch today. Sum the fifteen selling prices and the result is what the manager could actually raise by selling everybody. The second is always the lower of the two for any squad containing a player who has risen since purchase. Add the bank to either and there is a total.
Take an invented squad late in a season.
- Selling prices of the fifteen players101.6m
- Gap between list and selling prices1.4m
- Money in the bank0.9m
An illustration, not a real team. The squad's current prices total £103.0m, its selling prices £101.6m, and £0.9m is unspent. Figures in millions of pounds.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Selling prices of the fifteen players | 101.6m |
| Gap between list and selling prices | 1.4m |
| Money in the bank | 0.9m |
On the generous count this manager has £103.9 million. On the honest count he has £102.5 million, because £1.4 million of the headline exists only on the player list. It is the unbanked half of his rises, plus whatever the rounding swallowed.
Which of the two the game itself shows has not been consistent. The official site and the app have displayed value figures in a team's Gameweek history and beside the squad, and community sites present both under labels such as team value and sell value. Because the basis of a given official screen has varied, the safe course is to ignore every summary figure when planning a transfer and to use the selling prices on the transfers page, which are the ones the game will apply.
Does value matter?
Less than its reputation suggests. A squad worth £2 million more than a rival's can afford, roughly, one better player in one position. That is a real edge and a modest one. A manager who took hits or made poor picks in pursuit of rises has usually given away more points than the extra money will buy back.
It matters most at a Wildcard, when the entire squad is rebuilt at once against a budget counted in selling prices. And it matters to nobody after May.
What price trackers measure, and the game's own predictor
Since the formula is unpublished, a small industry grew up to guess at it. Price trackers are the result, and for years they were the only way to know whether a player was close to moving.
Their method, in outline, is this. The game's public data shows how many managers have transferred each player in and out during the current Gameweek. Subtract one from the other and the result is net transfers. Trackers then compare that number with a threshold of their own estimation, which is generally believed to grow with the number of managers who already own the player. A heavily owned midfielder needs far more net buyers to rise than a little-owned full-back does.
The output was a progress figure for each player, often shown as a percentage towards a rise or a fall, together with a prediction for that night.
These were estimates. Good ones, at their best, and wrong often enough that seasoned managers treated a predicted rise as likely and never as certain. The thresholds had to be inferred. The weighting of different transfers had to be inferred. And more than once the game's behaviour appeared to shift mid-season, leaving every tracker miscalibrated for a week or two until the modellers caught up.
The official predictor
For 2026-27 the Premier League put a predictor of its own inside the game. According to its announcement, the tool uses official data to track transfer activity for every player and shows each one's progress towards a rise or a fall as a percentage. It refreshes every fifteen minutes. Anything above 100 per cent indicates a change is expected at the next update.
The announcement was careful about its limits. The data, it said, would always be a guide and would not guarantee a price change. The example given was a player showing just over the line who is sold heavily in the final quarter of an hour and falls back under it.
Two observations. An official percentage is better than an inferred one, since the game knows its own thresholds. But the predictor publishes a reading and still not the formula, so the question of which transfers count remains exactly where it was.
There is a behavioural effect to consider as well. When every manager can see that a player stands at 95 per cent, some will buy him for that reason alone, and the prediction helps bring about the rise it describes.
Transfers generally believed not to count towards price changes
Everything in this section is community inference. None of it appears in the published rules, and it is set out here because managers will meet these claims stated as fact elsewhere.
Wildcard and Free Hit transfers. Modellers have long worked on the assumption that moves made while one of these chips is active are excluded from the price calculation, or heavily discounted. The reasoning is partly observational: on nights after a popular Wildcard week, prices have not moved in the way raw transfer counts would predict. It is also intuitive. A Free Hit squad is discarded after one Gameweek, and letting a temporary purchase push a price up would be strange. What these chips do is described in our guide to the Wildcard, Free Hit and the other FPL chips.
Repeated moves by one team. A manager who sells a player and buys him back, or cycles through the same pair several times, is believed to register once at most. If it were otherwise, a handful of determined managers with hits to burn could move a lightly owned player on their own.
Teams that are no longer being managed. Trackers commonly assume that the ownership base used for the threshold is not the raw count of every team ever entered, since millions are abandoned by the autumn.
How confident should a reader be in these? Reasonably, on the first two, in the sense that models built on them predicted well for years. Not at all, in the sense of being able to point to a rule. The arrival of an official predictor makes the question less pressing for anyone who only wants to know whether a player is about to move. It does nothing for anyone who wants to know why.
Flagged players: how an injury or suspension flag slows a price
When a player is injured or banned, the game marks him with a coloured flag and managers sell. Often in enormous numbers, within hours. On the raw arithmetic of net transfers such a player ought to fall on the first night and keep falling to the weekly limit.
Frequently he does not. The long-standing observation among modellers is that a flag changes how a player's price behaves: falls come more slowly than the volume of sales would suggest, and in some cases the price appears to be held altogether for a period after the flag goes on or comes off. Trackers have handled this in different ways, typically by showing a flagged player's progress as locked or by applying a different threshold to him.
Again, this is inference from behaviour. The rules do not mention it.
If the observation is right, the logic is easy to see. A long-term injury to a heavily owned player would otherwise knock £0.3 million off him every Gameweek for as long as owners kept selling, and a manager who was away for a fortnight would return to a loss he could do nothing about.
Why it matters to a manager waiting to sell
Suppose a manager owns an injured player listed above his purchase price and has no free transfer to spare this week. The question is whether waiting will cost money.
If flagged prices fall slowly, the answer is often no, or not much, and the manager can deal with something more urgent first. The half-speed rule on falls above the purchase price helps too. A drop from £6.4 million to £6.3 million on the list costs a seller who paid £6.0 million a tenth; the next one costs him nothing.
But "often" is the operative word. The behaviour is unpublished and has not been perfectly consistent. A manager who cannot afford to lose £0.1 million on a sale, because the replacement costs exactly what the sale would raise, should not rely on a flag to hold the price. He should check the predictor and assume the worse case.
Prices and chips: what a Free Hit and a Wildcard do to purchase prices
Chips change which transfers are free. They do not suspend the price rules, and each interacts with them differently.
Free Hit
A Free Hit lets a manager field a different squad for one Gameweek, after which the original fifteen are handed back. They come back with their original purchase prices intact. Nothing about the manager's history with those players is disturbed by a week away.
Their current prices, however, have carried on moving in the meantime. If one of the original squad rose twice during the Free Hit week, the manager returns to find his selling price up by a tenth, exactly as if he had never been away. If one fell below what was paid, the loss is waiting.
The temporary players leave no trace. Any rises they enjoyed during the week belong to nobody, because they are never sold: the squad is simply swapped back. A Free Hit cannot be used to harvest price rises, which closes off what would otherwise be an obvious trick.
Wildcard
A Wildcard makes every transfer in the Gameweek free, and managers treat it as a blank sheet. Financially it is nothing of the kind.
The budget for a Wildcard squad is the sum of the existing squad's selling prices plus the bank. That is the lower, honest figure from the team value section. A manager whose squad is listed at £103.0 million with £0.9 million unspent does not have £103.9 million to play with. He has £102.5 million.
Every player sold on a Wildcard is sold under the ordinary rules, fee included, and every player bought sets a new purchase price at the current figure. The buy-back trap applies in full: a player confirmed out and later brought back within the same Wildcard returns at today's price with his cushion gone.
There is one helpful piece of observed behaviour. A player removed on the transfers page and put back before the transfers are confirmed has generally been restored as though he had never left, at his old purchase price, because nothing was actually transacted. The danger lies in confirming a draft, then changing it. Managers who save Wildcard drafts in stages during the week should know which of those two things they are doing.
Because prices move nightly, the timing of a Wildcard inside the week matters more than for an ordinary transfer. Playing it early locks in fifteen purchase prices before the rises. Playing it late gives better information and worse prices. A week containing two rounds of matches sharpens that further, and our guide to why blank and double Gameweeks happen explains where those come from.
Starting prices and the summer reset
Every season of the game begins with a clean ledger.
Some weeks before the opening fixtures, the Premier League relaunches the game with a new player list. Each footballer is given a position and a starting price, chosen by the people who run the game. Those prices are editorial decisions. They reflect what a player did the season before, the role he is expected to have, the club he plays for and how tempting the administrators want him to be at that figure. A defender who scored heavily last year will open dearer. A promoted club's players will mostly open cheap.
Every manager, new or returning, then receives £100 million and an empty squad of fifteen places.
Nothing carries over. A team that finished the previous May with a squad worth £106 million and a team that was abandoned in September start level. Banked value, money left unspent and purchase prices are all discarded. Mini-leagues can be renewed with the same members, as described in our guide to classic leagues, head-to-head leagues and cups, but they are the only thing that survives the summer.
That reset is why starting prices attract such attention in July. For a few weeks they are the only prices there are, fixed by the rule that nothing moves until the season starts, and every manager is solving the same puzzle with the same £100 million.
The one format with no prices at all
The Premier League also runs a Draft version of the game, in which each footballer belongs to one manager in a league and squads are filled by taking turns to pick. There is no budget and there are no prices, so nothing on this page applies to it. Our guide to the FPL Draft format covers how that works.
A caution about every figure on this page
The step of £0.1 million, the limit of £0.3 million in a Gameweek, the half-share on a sale and the £100 million budget are taken from the rules and announcements for the seasons named. The update times are those reported for the seasons named. The thresholds were never published. All of them are settings, and the Premier League reviews its settings each summer.
No price quoted here belongs to a real player, and no time or percentage should be read as current. The game's own rules page, republished before each season, is the authority. More of our football explainers written for readers in this country are gathered on the England sports hub and in the main football section.