Non League Football Steps Explained From Step One Down
The English pyramid below the EFL, with non league football steps explained from Step 1 to Step 6 — ground grading, promotion, money and volunteers.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grassroots & Women's19 min read
- Governed by
- The Football Association
- Top step
- Step 1
- Promoted to the EFL
- 2 clubs
- Grading deadline
- 31 March
A club can win its league by twelve points, score a hundred goals, and stay exactly where it is. It happens most seasons somewhere in England, and the reason is almost never football. It is that the ground has 84 seats and the step above needs more, or the floodlights failed a lux reading in November, or the club missed the March deadline for the inspection and there is no appeal for that.
The FA's National League System is the ordered set of leagues sitting below the English Football League, and "step" is the word it uses for its own tiers. Step numbers count downwards from the top of non league football, which is the single most confusing thing about the whole vocabulary — Step 1 is the highest non league level, not the lowest, and it sits at the fifth level of English football overall. A supporter who talks about "Step 5" is describing a club four rungs further down, somewhere around the ninth level of the game. The system covers several thousand clubs, from full-time professional squads with four-figure crowds to village sides whose secretary launders the kit.
What a step is, and where the numbering begins
Step 1 is the National League, the division immediately below EFL League Two. Everything below it, down to Step 6, is administered by the FA under the Regulations for the Operation of the National League System, a document that governs which leagues exist, how many clubs each holds, who goes up, who comes down and — crucially — who gets moved sideways.
Below Step 6 the picture changes. Leagues at that level and beneath are run by County FAs and local competitions, and the question of whether they form part of the national system has been answered differently across successive restructures. Clubs and supporters at that level often use "Step 7" for the tier immediately below, and the FA's grading documentation carries letters extending that far. It is a genuine ambiguity rather than something anyone is getting wrong, and the honest way to state it is that the nationally administered system definitely covers Steps 1 to 6 and the boundary underneath that has moved.
The whole structure connects upwards through promotion and relegation into the EFL, which makes the English game unusual in scale rather than in principle: a club in a park in Cumbria is, in constitutional terms, connected to the Premier League by an unbroken chain of promotions. The full ladder from the top down is set out in the guide to the English football pyramid.
Two clubs move between the National League and League Two each season in each direction. That link — one automatic promotion place and one won through play-offs — has been the mechanism since the early 2000s, and it is the point at which the amateur constitution of the pyramid meets the legal and financial machinery of the professional leagues.
The divisions at each step and how the regionalisation works
Going down the system, each step splits into more divisions, and the reason is travel. A national single division is affordable when clubs have coaches and paid squads. It is not affordable when eighteen players are meeting at a pub car park at nine on a Saturday morning.
Step 1 is a single national division. Step 2 splits north and south. Step 3 has four divisions, drawn from the three long-established feeder leagues — the Northern Premier League, the Southern League and the Isthmian League — with the Southern League's premier tier split into central and southern halves. Step 4 doubles that to eight, and this is where the geography gets fine-grained: the divisions are drawn as bands and blocks rather than as clean halves, because the density of clubs is not evenly spread across England.
At Step 5 and below the pattern continues, with county-scale and sub-regional leagues doing the work. The Combined Counties, the Wessex, the Northern League, the Hellenic, the Eastern Counties and their many equivalents each cover a defined patch. A restructure in recent years increased the number of divisions in the lower half of the system specifically to shorten journeys, after clubs made the case that a Tuesday night fixture two hours away was costing them players and money in equal measure.
The consequence is that "Step 5" describes a level of competition rather than a named league. Two clubs at the same step, one in Devon and one in Northumberland, may never meet in league football in their entire histories.
There is a second consequence that matters for judging quality. Because the divisions at a given step are not equal in strength — one Step 4 division may be full of recently relegated Step 3 sides while another is not — a club promoted out of a weak division and a club promoted out of a strong one arrive at the same level with very different prospects. The FA does not attempt to correct for that, and it would be difficult to see how it could. Supporters comparing clubs across the width of a step are comparing a position in a table, not a standard.
Names change too, and change often. The feeder leagues carry sponsors' names, divisions are retitled after restructures, and a league's premier division at one point in its history may sit a step higher or lower than the identically named division does now. Historical comparisons across the non league game need the step, the season and the league, and even then they need care.
Ground grading: the survey that decides whether promotion is allowed
The FA's National Ground Grading scheme runs on letters, with Grade A applying at the top of the system and the alphabet descending as you go down. A club must hold the grade appropriate to its current step to stay there, and must hold the grade for the step above to be promoted into it.
| Grade | Step it corresponds to | Character of the requirement |
|---|---|---|
| A | Step 1 | Substantial seated and covered accommodation, full floodlighting, segregated facilities, media and officials' provision |
| B | Step 2 | Reduced seating and cover against Grade A, floodlights required, full boundary and hard standing |
| C | Step 3 | Seating and covered standing to a set minimum, floodlights, dressing rooms to specified dimensions |
| D | Step 4 | The threshold at which floodlighting and permanent spectator accommodation become firm requirements |
| E | Step 5 | Enclosed ground, pitch barrier, hard standing, changing provision; floodlight requirements vary by league |
| F | Step 6 | The entry standard for the national system: secure boundary, pitch barrier, basic covered accommodation |
Deliberately, that table describes categories of requirement rather than quoting seat counts and lux levels. The precise figures live in the FA's grading documentation, they differ between grades in ways no summary captures, and they have been revised. Anyone building a promotion plan around them needs the current document, not an article.
What is fixed is the timetable, and it is unforgiving. The deadline for holding the higher grade is 31 March. A club that completes a stand in April has completed it for next season. Inspections are carried out by County FA and league grading officers, deficiencies are notified, and the club has to close them out before the date.
- Summer beforeClub decides it wants the grade for the step above and identifies the gap against the published requirements.
- AutumnInitial inspection or pre-inspection advice, listing what has to be built, replaced or certified.
- WinterConstruction and certification work: stands, barriers, floodlight testing, dressing room alterations.
- By 31 MarchFinal inspection must confirm the higher grade. Nothing completed after this date counts for the coming season.
- April to MayLeague standings resolve. Promotion is offered only to clubs that have both the playing position and the grade.
- Late springThe FA's leagues committee allocates promoted clubs to a division at the step above.
The sequence of steps a club works through under the FA's grading regulations. Inspection dates and notification windows are set by the relevant league and County FA.
Grading also works downwards, and that half of the rule gets less attention. A club whose ground falls below the standard for its current step can be relegated for it, or refused entry to the division it would otherwise be in, regardless of results. Grounds decay. A stand condemned by a structural survey, a floodlight pylon that fails inspection, a boundary fence that no longer encloses the ground after a boundary sale — all of these have moved clubs down the system without a ball being kicked.
The other complication is tenancy. A large number of non league clubs do not own their ground, and a landlord — often a local authority, sometimes a school or a sports club — has to agree to the works, the lease has to run long enough for a grant funder to lend against it, and the club has to be able to show security of tenure for the required period. Clubs have been blocked from promotion by a lease with too few years left on it, which is an entirely non-footballing reason to stay where you are and one that no amount of fundraising fixes quickly.
Grading is the single most common reason a strong non league side stalls. Floodlights, a covered terrace and a compliant dressing block are capital projects for a club whose annual turnover might be measured in tens of thousands of pounds, and the funding usually comes from the Football Foundation, local authority grants, fundraising, or a benefactor. Which is why so many non league promotions are really construction stories with a football season attached.
Promotion and relegation between steps
Champions go up. Beyond that, almost everything varies by league and has been changed.
Most divisions from Step 2 downwards operate play-offs among the clubs finishing immediately behind the champions, and the number of clubs involved has moved between four and larger fields at various points, particularly at Step 1 where the National League play-off has been expanded and reconfigured more than once. Anyone who wants the detail of that specific contest should read the guide to National League promotion to the EFL, which covers the play-off format and the separate hurdle of EFL membership criteria.
Relegation numbers are set by the FA each season to balance the divisions, and this is where the system stops resembling a normal league. Because the FA allocates clubs between parallel divisions, the number relegated from a given division is not a fixed constitutional number — it is a variable the FA adjusts so that every division starts the next season with the right number of clubs. A division can send down three clubs one season and four the next without any rule having changed.
Promotion can also be refused. A champion without the grade stays put. A champion whose finances fail the league's scrutiny can be held. A club can decline promotion, and clubs do decline it, usually because the travel and grading costs at the step above would break them.
The bit that surprises people
Relegation is not always applied downwards into the club's own region. Because the FA rebalances the system every summer, a relegated club is placed into whichever division at the lower step makes the geography work, which may not be the one it came from.
Full-time, part-time and amateur across the steps
There is no clean line where professional football stops. It fades.
Step 1 contains full-time squads, hybrid squads training three or four days a week, and part-time clubs competing against both. Several National League clubs are former EFL members with the infrastructure and the wage bill to match, and some carry the parachute money from a recent relegation out of League Two, which distorts the competitive balance of the division in the same way it does higher up the pyramid.
Step 2 is predominantly part-time. Training two evenings a week, players holding down jobs, a small paid coaching staff. Some clubs at this level have full-time managers and everything else part-time. Step 3 and Step 4 are part-time almost without exception, with training on Tuesdays and Thursdays and squads assembled from within a commutable radius.
By Step 5 the model changes character again. Wages are small, the manager may be unpaid or on expenses, and the club's viability depends on volunteers rather than on revenue. Step 6 is functionally amateur in everything but the paperwork, though "amateur" is a poor word for it, because money still moves — it is simply small enough that no one is making a living.
The FA abolished the formal distinction between amateur and professional status in English football in 1974, which is why nothing in the modern system turns on that word. What matters instead is the registration a player signs.
What non league players are actually paid
Two registration types run through the whole system: contract and non-contract. A contract player has a written agreement with the club, registered with the FA, with fixed terms and a fixed end date, and cannot simply walk. A non-contract player can leave on short notice — a matter of days — and sign elsewhere, which is why non-contract registration dominates the lower half of the system where clubs cannot commit to paying someone through an injury.
Payment structures run roughly like this. At Step 1, weekly wages under written contracts, with the range across a division enormous. At Steps 2 to 4, weekly wages that are real but supplementary, often with appearance money and win bonuses layered on top, and the sum only makes sense as a second income. At Steps 5 and 6, match fees, expenses, or nothing.
Cash payments were once endemic at the bottom of the system and have been squeezed by HMRC scrutiny and by the FA's own reporting requirements. Clubs at Step 4 and above face financial reporting obligations to their leagues, and salary cost controls tied to turnover have been operated at various points in the upper steps, with the details revised and contested. A club that pays more than it earns has one obvious future, and English clubs going into administration is a longer story than the non league game likes to admit.
Transfers work differently too. Below the professional game, a move between non league clubs frequently involves no fee at all, because a non-contract player is free to go. Where a fee is paid it is negotiated club to club, often in instalments, sometimes with a percentage of any future sale attached. Those sell-on percentages are the closest thing the lower steps have to an asset, and a club that has developed a player worth selling upwards will fight hard for one.
The awkward truth is that wages at Steps 2 to 4 are set by a market with almost no information in it. There is no published salary data, no agent standard, and a manager assembling a squad in June is guessing at what the club down the road is offering. Wage inflation in a division tends to arrive when one ambitious owner decides to buy a promotion, and it does not go away when that owner does.
The volunteers behind a Saturday afternoon
Count the jobs. Somebody unlocked the ground at eight. Somebody marked the pitch on Friday. Somebody is on the turnstile, somebody is on the gate for the car park, two people are in the tea bar, one is selling programmes, one is running the raffle, the physio is a club member with a qualification and no wages, the secretary has spent the week on registrations and referee appointments, and the treasurer will spend Sunday reconciling the takings.
At Step 5 that is the entire operation. At Step 3 there may be a paid commercial manager and a paid groundsman, and everything else is still volunteers.
The FA's registration and compliance requirements land on those people. Player registrations have to be lodged before a player is eligible; playing an ineligible player brings a points deduction and a fine, and it happens every season somewhere because a volunteer secretary missed a deadline. Safeguarding obligations, first aid provision, ground safety certificates, referee payments, league fines for late team sheets — all of it is administered by people doing it after work.
The club secretary is the load-bearing role in non league football, and it is the hardest one to fill. When a long-serving secretary steps down, clubs at the lower steps genuinely fold, not for want of players but for want of anybody who will do the paperwork. Coaching staff face a parallel problem: the qualification requirements are real, and the route through them is set out in the guide to the FA coaching badges pathway.
Attendances and where the matchday money comes from
Crowd sizes across the system vary by more than an order of magnitude, and the honest way to describe them is by shape rather than by figure. At Step 1, the biggest clubs — former Football League members with a city behind them — draw four-figure crowds and occasionally very large ones for a promotion decider. At Step 3 and 4, a few hundred is a normal afternoon. At Step 6, a crowd is measured in dozens, and the gate is not the point.
What matters more is the mix of income. Admission money is significant at Steps 1 to 3 and largely irrelevant at Steps 5 and 6. The clubhouse bar is the single most important revenue line for a very large number of non league clubs — it trades seven days a week, it hosts functions, and it subsidises the football. Pitch hire to junior sides and local leagues does the same job. Sponsorship is local and small: a shirt sponsor is a builder or a car dealership, not a betting company.
Costs run the other way with the same regional logic. A Step 2 club travelling from the north-east to the south coast is paying for a coach, a meal stop and sometimes an overnight stay, and doing it half a dozen times a season. Referee and assistant fees are set by the league and paid on the day. Pitch maintenance, floodlight electricity on winter Tuesdays, insurance, affiliation fees to the County FA and league entry fees all fall due whether anyone turns up or not. A club at Step 4 has a fixed cost base it cannot reduce and a revenue line that depends entirely on the weather and the fixture.
Then there are the one-off events that reshape a season. A good FA Cup run brings prize money and a share of gate receipts through the rounds, and a televised tie brings a broadcast fee that can exceed a whole season's normal income. Selling a player to an EFL club brings a fee, and sell-on clauses negotiated by canny non league secretaries have funded stands. Neither is something a club can budget for.
The cup competitions available at each step
Three national knockouts run beneath the professional game, and each is pitched at a band of the system.
| Competition | Who enters | Where it finishes |
|---|---|---|
| FA Cup | Clubs from Step 6 upwards, subject to grading and prior participation | Wembley Stadium |
| FA Trophy | Clubs at Steps 1 to 4 | Wembley Stadium |
| FA Vase | Clubs at Steps 5 and 6 | Wembley Stadium |
| County Cups | Clubs affiliated to the relevant County FA, across all steps | County FA ground or a member club |
The FA Cup is the one everybody knows, and its qualifying structure is the part most people never see. Six rounds run before the first round proper — an extra preliminary round, a preliminary round, and four qualifying rounds — which is how a Step 6 club can theoretically reach an EFL side with five wins in the bag. The full sequence is broken down in the guide to the FA Cup qualifying rounds.
The Trophy and the Vase were separated by step in a restructure that moved the boundary, with the Trophy covering Steps 1 to 4 and the Vase Steps 5 and 6. Both finish at Wembley, and for a Step 6 club a Vase final is a bigger day than anything a league campaign can produce.
County Cups sit alongside all of it, running from the County FA and drawing clubs from wildly different steps into the same draw. They are treated with varying seriousness — a Step 2 club may field a reserve side, a Step 6 club will treat the tie as the match of its season — which is a recurring source of friction.
Entry to the FA Cup is not automatic on the strength of a club's step alone. The rules require a club to have played in a qualifying competition in the preceding season and to hold the ground grade the competition specifies, and clubs are excluded each year for one or the other. A newly formed club, or one that has just climbed into Step 6, generally waits a season before it is eligible, which is why a phoenix club rebuilt after a collapse cannot simply enter the competition its predecessor was in.
Fixture congestion is the price of a good run. A Step 4 club that reaches the fourth qualifying round has played four or five extra matches by November, most of them midweek, with a squad of part-timers who work the following morning. Managers at that level make a genuine trade between cup revenue and league position, and some of them quietly prefer an early exit.
Lateral movement: how the FA shifts clubs sideways
This is the mechanism that has no equivalent in most national football systems, and it is the one that most confuses supporters arriving from the professional game.
Because the divisions at each step are regional, the FA has to decide every summer which division each club plays in. That decision is made by the FA's leagues committee, taking into account geography, the balance of numbers in each division after promotion and relegation, and the effect on travel. A club can therefore be moved from one Step 4 division to another without having been promoted, relegated or consulted in any meaningful way.
For clubs on a boundary — the Midlands, the fringes of the Home Counties, the Welsh border — this can happen repeatedly. A club may play in the Southern League one season and the Northern Premier League the next, with a wholly different set of opponents and a materially different travel budget, purely because the FA needed a number to balance.
Clubs can appeal placement decisions and sometimes win, usually on the basis of demonstrable travel cost. But the committee's job is to make the whole system fit together, and an individual club's preference loses to that arithmetic more often than not.
Following non league football as a supporter
Kick-off is normally three o'clock on a Saturday, and midweek fixtures are Tuesday evenings under lights. Admission is paid at a turnstile, frequently in cash, and it is cheaper by a large multiple than a Premier League ticket. There is no segregation at most grounds below Step 2, no allocated seating, and no restriction on moving ends at half time — which is, for a lot of people, the entire appeal.
Programmes are still printed and still collected. The tea bar sells chips. You can stand behind the goal your team is attacking, walk round at the interval, and hear the manager shouting from the technical area because you are eight yards from it. The players' names are on a whiteboard by the turnstile, handwritten, because the teamsheet was finalised forty minutes ago.
Ground-hopping has grown into a substantial subculture around exactly this, with supporters working through grounds at every step, and the practicalities of doing it — fixtures, floodlit midweeks, the etiquette — are covered in the guide to ground-hopping in England. Broader coverage of the English game sits across the football section and the England hub.
Check before you travel. Non league fixtures move for cup ties, for waterlogged pitches, for floodlight failures and for a dozen other reasons, and clubs at the lower steps announce it on social media an hour beforehand and nowhere else.