Premiership Rugby Bonus Points Explained: League Table Rules

Seven points. That is the whole idea. A converted try is worth seven, so a team beaten by seven or fewer finished the afternoon within one score of its opponent, and English club rugby decided a long time ago that being that close deserved something. One league point, taken out of a defeat.

The Premiership's table is governed by that principle and one other: that scoring tries should be rewarded whether you win or not. Together they make a league table in which the club with the most wins does not always finish highest, which is unusual in British sport and occasionally infuriating. The RFU sits above the English club game as its governing body, Premiership Rugby runs the competition, and the scoring system they use has been the northern hemisphere standard for two decades.

This page sets out how each point is earned, what happens when clubs finish level, how deductions appear, and why a director of rugby forty points behind with ten minutes left still wants a fourth try.

Four for a win, two for a draw, none for a defeat

Start with the base, which has not changed in a very long time.

A win in the Premiership is worth four league points. A draw is worth two. A defeat is worth nothing at all before any bonus is added.

The four-two-nil structure is worth pausing on, because it is not the only option and rugby chose it deliberately. Football's three-one-nil system was designed to make winning worth substantially more than two draws. Rugby union's four-two-nil keeps a win worth exactly two draws, which is a more neutral arrangement, and then hangs the bonus system off it to create the incentives the sport actually wants — attacking play, and effort maintained in matches that are already lost.

Draws are rare in rugby union and rarer than most people assume. With three scoring methods and no penalty shoot-out at the end of a league fixture, sides that are level in the final minute usually find a way to end it, and a drawn Premiership match is a genuinely notable result rather than a routine one. The consequence is that most of the table's shape comes from wins and bonus points, with draws as an occasional disturbance.

• 4A win
• 2A draw
• 1Four or more tries
• 1Losing by seven or fewer

The values fixed in the competition's scoring system. These are the components, not a total from any season.

The try bonus, and why the threshold is four

Score four tries in a match and you take a bonus point. It does not matter whether you win, lose or draw; it does not matter whether the fourth try comes in the second minute or the eightieth; it does not matter how many the opposition scored.

Four is an arbitrary number in the sense that any threshold would be, and a considered one in the sense that it was chosen to sit slightly above what a good side does routinely. Set it at two and every club takes it every week, which rewards nothing. Set it at six and only a thrashing qualifies, which rewards a mismatch rather than an intention. Four is roughly the point at which a team has had to commit to attacking rugby for eighty minutes rather than kicking for the corner twice and defending a lead.

The system came north from the southern hemisphere, where try bonuses had been used in provincial and club competitions before they reached Europe, and it was adopted for Rugby World Cup pool stages from 2003 onwards. English club rugby brought it in during the early professional years and has kept the four-try threshold ever since.

Variants exist. Some competitions have experimented with a differential version, awarding the bonus for scoring three more tries than the opponent rather than four in absolute terms, on the argument that a 6-5 try match is a better spectacle than a 4-0 one and should not be the version that goes unrewarded. Super Rugby ran that model for a period. The Premiership has stayed with the flat four, and the case for it is simplicity: every player, coach and supporter in the ground knows the count without doing arithmetic involving the other team.

One detail that catches people out. A penalty try counts as a try for bonus-point purposes. So does a try scored after the hooter, in the phase that continues past eighty minutes until the ball goes dead. Sides trailing by thirty with the clock red have won bonus points from the last play of the match, which is precisely the behaviour the rule was written to produce.

The seven-point rule and the converted-try margin

Lose by seven or fewer and you take a point.

The number is not arbitrary at all. A converted try is five plus two, and seven is therefore the largest margin that a single score can erase. A side beaten 24-17 was one converted try from a draw. A side beaten 25-17 was not, and gets nothing.

That cliff edge is the source of the rule's drama and its unfairness in roughly equal measure. Eight points is one point more than seven and an entirely different league outcome, and matches have turned on a conversion attempt from the touchline in the last minute of a game already lost. Kickers have been sent out to attempt conversions that changed nothing on the scoreboard except a club's position in April.

Nobody in rugby seriously proposes changing it, and the reason is that the alternative is worse. A margin of ten would reward being nearly close. A margin of five would exclude the exact scenario the rule exists for. Seven maps precisely onto the sport's own scoring arithmetic, which is the strongest possible justification for a threshold.

The losing bonus goes only to the losing side. A drawn match awards nobody a losing bonus, because nobody lost — both sides take two points and whatever try bonus they earned. That sounds obvious and it produces a genuine oddity: a club can be better off losing 22-20 with four tries than drawing 20-20 with two. Two points either way, and the loser has more tries in the difference column.

The most a club can take from one afternoon

Five. A win, plus four tries.

Setting out the full ladder makes the incentives visible in a way the prose does not.

Win with four tries5pts

Win4pts

Draw with four tries3pts

Narrow loss with four tries2pts

Narrow loss1pts

Derived directly from the scoring system. The maximum from one fixture is five, from a win with four or more tries.

Show the numbers

League points available from a single Premiership match

Item	Value
Win with four tries	5pts
Win	4pts
Draw with four tries	3pts
Narrow loss with four tries	2pts
Narrow loss	1pts

The gap that matters is the one at the bottom. A heavy defeat and a narrow, try-scoring defeat are two points apart, which across a season is the difference between a play-off place and a mid-table finish. A club that loses eight matches and takes a bonus point from six of them has effectively won an extra match and a half compared with a club that lost the same eight by forty.

That is the whole design. Rugby's scoring system is built to keep every fixture live for both sides deep into the final quarter, and it works. The number of Premiership matches in which a losing team is chasing something in the seventy-fifth minute is far higher than it would be under a system that gave defeats nothing.

How bonus points decide who makes the play-offs

The Premiership does not crown its champion by finishing top. The regular season produces a table, the top clubs from that table go into knockout rugby, and the play-off structure settles the title with semi-finals and a final at Twickenham. The number of play-off places has been revisited whenever the league's size has changed, so it is worth checking the current shape against the season's own regulations, but the principle has held: a small number of qualifiers, seeded by league position, with home advantage running to the higher finisher.

Which makes the table a qualifying mechanism rather than a championship, and it makes bonus points decisive in a specific way. The margin between fourth and fifth in a tight season has repeatedly been smaller than the number of bonus points a club collected across the campaign. Finish one point outside and your season ends in May with nothing, having won the same number of matches as the club playing a semi-final.

Home advantage compounds it. A semi-final at Welford Road or Sandy Park in front of a full house is a materially different proposition from the same fixture away, and that advantage is allocated by table position, which is allocated partly by bonus points. A single try in a February fixture that finished 31-24 can end up deciding where a May semi-final is played. Our guide to the Premiership's season format sets out how the regular season builds towards that.

Splitting clubs that finish level

It happens more often than the maths suggests, because bonus points bunch clubs together rather than spreading them out.

The Premiership regulations set out a sequence of criteria, applied in order until the tie breaks. The factors used are the ones you would expect: the number of matches won, points difference across the season, tries scored, and the results between the clubs that are level. If everything is identical, the regulations provide a final resort, which in the most extreme case can be a play-off match.

I would rather be honest than confident here. The precise ordering of those criteria sits in the competition regulations and has been amended over the years, and a page that states a fixed sequence risks being wrong for the season you are reading it in. The safe summary is that wins are looked at before points difference, and that head-to-head is used but is not the first thing consulted, which is the opposite of the football convention many English supporters assume.

1. 1Matches wonThe club with more wins across the season is placed higher, regardless of how the points were accumulated.
2. 2Points differenceTotal match points scored minus total conceded across every fixture.
3. 3Tries scoredThe number of tries scored across the season, which rewards the same attacking intent as the try bonus.
4. 4Head to headThe results and points in the matches played between the clubs that remain level.
5. 5Final resortWhere every criterion is exhausted, the regulations provide a decider rather than leaving the placing to chance.

The criteria the regulations use. The exact order has been amended over time and should be checked against the current season's competition regulations.

Rugby league does it differently again, which is one of several reasons the two sports' tables are not comparable — Super League's format uses points difference far earlier in the sequence, and has no bonus points bunching clubs together in the first place.

Deductions, and how a sanction shows up in the table

A points deduction is not a bonus point in reverse, but it lands in the same column and it has decided seasons.

The league can dock league points for breaches of its regulations. The mechanism is disciplinary rather than sporting: a club is found to have broken a rule, a sanction is imposed, and the deduction is applied to the table, usually shown as a negative figure in a notes column alongside the club's total.

The Saracens case is the reference point and remains the most severe sanction in the competition's history. In November 2019 the club was docked 35 league points and fined more than £5m for breaching the salary cap across three seasons. In January 2020, after declining to submit to a mid-season audit, Saracens accepted relegation, with a further deduction applied that put the outcome beyond any mathematical doubt. A club that had won European titles finished bottom by regulation rather than by results. The salary cap regulations that produced that outcome are worth reading in full, because the case turned on arrangements the club argued were outside the cap and the league found were within it.

Deductions are not only a salary cap tool. League regulations cover fielding ineligible players, financial and administrative failures, and breaches of competition rules, and sanctions can include fines, suspended deductions and immediate ones.

The competitive effect is blunt and deliberate. A ten-point deduction is two and a half wins, which no club recovers from in a short season without an exceptional run. That severity is the point: a sanction that could be absorbed would not deter anything.

When a match is not played

The scoring system assumes eighty minutes were completed. Sometimes they were not.

Postponements are normally straightforward — a frozen pitch in January, and the fixture is rescheduled to a free midweek or a blank weekend, played in full, and scored normally. The league's calendar has limited slack, which is why fixture congestion becomes a story every hard winter.

The harder cases are matches that cannot be played at all, and the Premiership has had to resolve them. The competition's board has power under the regulations to determine the outcome where a fixture is not fulfilled, and in the disrupted seasons around the pandemic it used that power repeatedly, deeming results rather than replaying matches there was no room for. Where a club could not field a side for reasons within its control, the fixture was awarded against it.

An abandonment part-way through is different again, and the regulations distinguish between a match abandoned late, where the score at the point of abandonment may stand, and one abandoned early enough that no meaningful result exists. The judgement about where that line falls sits with the competition rather than the referee.

None of this is satisfying, and administrators know it. Awarding a result is always second best to playing the match, and bonus points make the problem worse rather than better, because a deemed result has to decide not only who won but whether anyone scored four tries. The regulations answer that question. They cannot make the answer feel fair.

Chasing a fourth try with the game already gone

Twenty minutes left, twenty-five points down, and a side takes a scrum in front of the posts instead of the three points on offer. To anyone watching football that decision is incomprehensible. In the Premiership it is arithmetic.

Three points off a penalty are worth nothing to a team that will lose by twenty-two either way. A fourth try is worth a league point that sits in the table until May. So the ball goes to the corner, the scrum is taken, the maul is set up, and a match that looked dead has ten minutes of genuine intensity in it.

The same logic runs the other way, and this is the part supporters find harder to accept. A side thirty points ahead with four tries banked has nothing further to gain from the scoreboard and everything to gain from keeping its internationals uninjured. Substitutions arrive, intensity drops, and the last quarter of a Premiership blowout is often the least interesting rugby of the weekend. That is the bonus system working exactly as designed, and it looks like the opposite.

There is a third situation, less discussed and more revealing. A club leading by six with five minutes left, on three tries, deciding whether to run a penalty rather than kick it. Kick and you are nine ahead, safe, four points. Run it, score, and you have five points instead of four — but if you turn the ball over you may finish with none. Directors of rugby make that call on the basis of where they sit in the table and what they think fourth place will require, and reasonable people make it differently.

What bonus points do to April

Late in a season the table stops being a record and becomes a calculation.

By the final month, every club chasing a play-off place knows what it needs, and the needs are expressed in bonus points rather than results. Four points behind with three to play is not the same problem as four points behind with a better tries-scored column and two of your remaining fixtures at home against sides with nothing left to play for. Coaching staff model it, and the modelling changes team selection.

The behaviours it produces are specific. Sides that need bonus points pick a bench weighted towards attack rather than towards closing a game out. Kicking strategy changes: fewer shots at goal from kickable positions, more kicks to the corner. Sides safe in a play-off place but competing for a home semi-final start managing minutes for Test players while still needing results, which is a genuinely awkward brief for a coach.

And the losing bonus point changes what a defeat means at the wrong end of the table too. A club trying to avoid the bottom places treats a narrow away loss at a leading side as a productive afternoon, because it is one point that the club below did not get.

The criticism of all this is that it makes the table harder to read, and the criticism is fair. A supporter looking at the standings cannot tell at a glance who has won more matches. The defence is that the alternative produces dead rubbers in March, and English club rugby has too few matches in a season to spend any of them on fixtures nobody is trying to win.

The same thresholds, a very different championship

The Six Nations uses four points for a win, two for a draw, a bonus for four tries and a bonus for losing by seven or fewer. Identical thresholds. Yet the system behaves nothing like the Premiership's, for two reasons.

The first is length. A Six Nations campaign is five matches. A bonus point in a five-round championship carries roughly four times the weight it carries across a full club season, which means a single try in Rome can settle a championship. Coaches know it, and the last twenty minutes of a Six Nations match with the result decided are played with an intensity that has no equivalent in a mid-table club fixture in November.

The second is the Grand Slam bonus. When the championship adopted bonus points in 2017 it added three points for a side that wins all five matches, specifically to close a loophole: without it, a team could win every match narrowly and be overtaken in the table by a side that lost once but collected try bonuses throughout. A Grand Slam is the championship's defining achievement and the organisers were not prepared to let arithmetic take it away. The Premiership has no equivalent, because winning every league match guarantees you nothing beyond a home semi-final anyway.

The two systems are set out side by side below. Our guides to the Six Nations bonus point system and its tie-break rules go through the championship's version in detail.

	Premiership	Six Nations
Win	4	4
Draw	2	2
Try bonus	4 or more tries	4 or more tries
Losing bonus	Beaten by 7 or fewer	Beaten by 7 or fewer
Extra award	None	3 points for a Grand Slam
Matches	A full home-and-away league season	5
Table decides	Play-off qualification and seeding	The championship outright

Rugby league counts differently, and always has

Super League is a rugby league competition, run under the Rugby Football League and played to a different set of laws with thirteen players a side. Its points system is separate from anything above and should not be read across.

The scoring is two points for a win, one for a draw, none for a defeat. No try bonus. No losing bonus. A win is worth double a draw and a defeat is worth nothing, which is closer to the older football convention than to rugby union's arrangement.

Super League also introduced golden point extra time, so drawn matches in the regular season are comparatively rare — sides level after eighty minutes play on until somebody scores, within a limited extra period, and only a scoreless extra time leaves the draw standing. That reduces the number of one-point results still further and makes the table a much more direct record of wins and losses than a union table is.

Why has rugby league never adopted bonus points? Partly because it does not need to. Rugby league produces high try counts as a matter of course, so a four-try bonus would be earned in most matches and would incentivise nothing. Partly because the sport's competitive structure already loads late-season jeopardy into a play-off system, and partly because the League Leaders' Shield exists to reward the best regular-season record while the Grand Final at Old Trafford decides the champion — two separate honours, cleanly divided.

Points deductions exist in rugby league as well, applied by the RFL for salary cap and financial breaches, and clubs have been relegated on the back of them. The mechanism is comparable. The scoring system it is applied to is not, and treating the two sports' tables as versions of each other is the single most common mistake made by people who follow one and not the other.

A worked example — climbing into the top four

Numbers are the clearest way to show what bonus points do. Everything in the table below is invented for illustration; it is not a record of any season.

Take four clubs at the end of an eighteen-match campaign, competing for the last play-off place.

Club	P	W	D	L	Try BP	Losing BP	Pts
A	18	11	0	7	8	3	55
B	18	12	0	6	5	1	54
C	18	12	1	5	3	1	54
D	18	13	0	5	1	0	53

Work through it.

Club D won thirteen matches, more than anyone else, and finishes bottom of the four. Its rugby was efficient and narrow — the sort of side that wins 19-13 with two tries and a full complement of penalties — and it collected a single bonus point all season. Thirteen wins is 52 points, plus one, and that is the lot.

Club A won eleven, two fewer than D, and finishes above it. Eight try bonuses says it scored four or more tries in nearly half its fixtures. Three losing bonuses says that when it lost, it usually lost close. Forty-four points from wins, eleven from bonuses, and a play-off place from a record that on wins alone would have finished fourth of the four.

That is a two-win swing, overturned entirely by bonus points, and it is the clearest possible statement of what the system values.

Clubs B and C are level on 54, which sends the regulations to work. Both won twelve; the first criterion does not separate them. So it moves to points difference across the season, and whichever club has the better margin takes the higher place — a season decided by aggregate scores in matches played eight months apart.

Two things fall out of this that are worth carrying away. A club that plays attacking rugby and loses narrowly is systematically rewarded over one that grinds out close wins, which is a value judgement the sport has made openly. And the last bonus point of a season is worth as much as the first, which is why nobody in an English rugby ground leaves at the eightieth minute. For the wider structure this table sits inside, see our England sport guides and the rugby section.