Red Roses and the Women's Six Nations: Format Explained
The women's Six Nations, England explained end to end — five rounds, bonus points, the Red Roses record, Twickenham crowds and how to get to a match.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Six Nations & England19 min read
- Teams
- 6
- Rounds
- 5
- Matches per edition
- 15
- Governed by
- Six Nations Rugby
On 29 April 2023, 58,498 people watched England play France at Twickenham. It was, at the time, a world record crowd for a women's rugby union international, and it was set at the closing round of the Women's Six Nations rather than at a World Cup. That single afternoon did more to change assumptions about the size of the audience for the women's Championship than a decade of argument had managed.
This page explains what the Red Roses are competing in: the tournament's route from a Home Nations competition in the mid-1990s to the six-team Championship the Rugby Football Union sends a team to every spring, the points system, the venues used across England, and the professional structure underneath a squad that has spent most of the tournament's modern history winning it.
From four unions to six teams
The women's Championship did not evolve out of the men's tournament. It was built alongside it, later, and by a route of its own.
A Home Nations competition for women — England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland — was running by the mid-1990s. France joined at the end of that decade, producing a five-team event, and the sixth place has a more complicated story than the men's does. Spain competed in the Championship for several seasons in the 2000s before Italy took the place and the tournament settled into the line-up recognised now. The exact seasons Spain played, and the terms on which the place changed hands, are worth checking against Six Nations Rugby's own records if the detail matters to you; contemporary coverage of the women's game in that period was thin and secondary accounts disagree.
What is not in dispute is that the tournament ran for years on a shoestring. Players paid to represent their countries in the early Home Nations era. Fixtures went ahead at club grounds with a few hundred people watching, results were carried in a paragraph if at all, and the Championship existed largely because four unions could be persuaded that it should.
Two structural decisions changed that. The first was the RFU's move to contract players, which is covered further down this page. The second was the decision to stop treating women's fixtures as an appendix to the men's weekend — to give the tournament its own window, its own broadcast slot, its own build-up. Both are recent. Neither is finished.
The competition's name has changed with its sponsors, as the men's has. Six Nations Rugby, the company that runs both tournaments, took over the commercial and organisational side of the women's Championship, which is why the two now share branding, a website and an integrated presentation that they did not have when the women's event was administered separately by the unions.
The format: five rounds, fifteen matches
Six teams, each playing the other five once. England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales. Fifteen matches across five rounds, and no play-off, semi-final or final — the side top of the table after the last round wins the Championship.
- 6Teams
- 5Rounds
- 15Matches per edition
- 4Points for a win
The fixed structure of the competition, not figures from any particular edition.
Home and away alternates by opponent from one year to the next. If England host France in one edition, they travel to France in the next. Because six is an even number and each team plays five matches, every side has three home fixtures in one year and two in the next, and the sequence rotates so that no nation gets an unbroken run of favourable years. The same fixture rota governs the men's Championship, and the mechanics of how it is built are set out in the guide to the Six Nations fixture rota.
There is no relegation. There is no qualifying tournament feeding into it. A nation improving outside the Championship — Spain and the Netherlands have both been competitive in European competition below this level — has no route in, which is one of the arguments made most persistently against the current structure and one the organisers have not resolved.
The table is ordered by points. Where two or more teams finish level, points difference decides it first: points scored minus points conceded across all five matches, then tries scored, then a series of further tie-breaks that have almost never been needed. The same hierarchy applies in the men's Championship, and the Six Nations tie-break rules work through the sequence in full.
Match officials, laws and eligibility all follow World Rugby's regulations, so a Red Roses Test is played under the same laws as a men's Test. Squad sizes, replacement rules and the twenty-three-player matchday squad are identical. The differences between the men's and women's tournaments are in the calendar, the money and the depth of the player pool, not in the game itself.
Bonus points and the Grand Slam premium
Four points for a win. Two for a draw. Nothing for a loss.
Two bonus points sit on top of that. A team scoring four or more tries in a match takes one, whatever the result. A team losing by seven points or fewer takes one, which means a converted try at the death can rescue a point from a game already lost. Both bonuses are available in the same match, so a side that scores four tries and loses by five leaves with two points from a defeat.
The Grand Slam bonus is the interesting one. Three points are added to the total of any side that wins all five matches, and it exists to close a specific loophole: without it, a team could theoretically win every game, take no bonus points, and finish behind a side that lost once but collected bonuses throughout. The rule guarantees that a Grand Slam wins the Championship. That is worth stating plainly, because the arithmetic of the system otherwise leaves room for an outcome that would make the tournament look ridiculous.
Bonus points were not part of the Championship for most of its history. They arrived late, brought in to reward attacking play and to keep dead rubbers alive in the final round, and the effect in the women's tournament has been more pronounced than in the men's. Scorelines in the women's Championship have a wider spread — the gap between the strongest and weakest sides is larger than in the men's competition — so the four-try bonus is claimed far more often, and the losing bonus far less. A fuller account of that system across both tournaments is at Six Nations bonus points.
One consequence deserves attention. Because England and France have generally been able to score four tries against the other four nations, the four-try bonus rarely separates them from each other; it separates both of them from the rest. The Championship is often decided in the fixture where the two meet, and the bonus system does not change that so much as make the rest of the table a more accurate ranking.
Why the tournament moved out of the men's window
For years the women's Championship was played across the same weekends as the men's, sometimes as a double-header at the same ground, more often at a club venue on the Friday night or the Sunday afternoon. The logic was that the men's audience was already assembled and some of it would stay.
It did not work well. Women's matches were scheduled around men's kick-offs, coverage was squeezed into whatever space the men's tournament left over, and the reporting that did exist was written by journalists who had spent their weekend at the other game. A fixture in the shadow of a Twickenham Test gets the attention that is left.
The tournament was moved into a standalone window in the spring, a block running from late March into April, after the men's Championship has finished. The change gave the women's Championship clear air: its own broadcast slots, its own build-up, and a final round with nothing else competing for a rugby audience. Attendance and viewing figures both rose after the move, and the direction of that relationship is not seriously disputed, though separating the effect of the calendar change from the effect of professional contracts arriving in the same period is harder than the headline numbers suggest.
The move had costs. A standalone window means the Championship no longer draws on the men's tournament's promotional weight, and it sits in a crowded part of the domestic season — Premiership Women's Rugby is in its closing rounds at the same time, which pulls internationals out of club sides at the point their seasons are decided. Every fix in a rugby calendar creates a squeeze somewhere else.
England's record and the run behind it
England have dominated the Women's Six Nations to a degree that has no parallel in the men's tournament. They have won it far more often than anyone else, they have assembled the longest sequences of consecutive titles, and for extended stretches the only genuine question in the Championship has been whether France could beat them in the one fixture where the title was live.
Giving a current count here would date the page within a year, so the more useful framing is who else has won it. France are the closest challengers and have taken the title on multiple occasions. Ireland won the Championship twice in the 2010s, with a Grand Slam in 2013 and a further title in 2015 — the second of those clinched away in Scotland, and both achieved by a squad that was almost entirely amateur. Wales took a Grand Slam in 2009. Scotland and Italy have never won it.
That distribution tells you something the table does not. Ireland's 2013 Grand Slam included a win over England, and it came from a system with no professional contracts, one senior domestic competition, and a national squad who took unpaid leave to play. Results like that were possible in the women's game a decade ago in a way they are less possible now, because the resource gap has widened as the leading nations have professionalised at different speeds.
What sits underneath the run
England's dominance has been built on three things that arrived close together: contracts, a competitive domestic league, and continuity in the coaching and support structure. The playing squad turns over, as all Test squads do, but the environment around it has been stable in a way most of the Championship's other nations have not managed.
France run a partially contracted system with a different balance between club and country, and a domestic league that has historically been stronger than England's at club level while producing a less settled national set-up. Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Italy have each moved towards professional contracting on their own timetables and with very different budgets. The Championship's competitive balance over the next decade depends far more on those four than on anything England do.
England's title history in the men's game is a different story with different rhythms, and the England Six Nations title history page covers that side of the ledger.
Grand Slams and Triple Crowns in the women's game
A Grand Slam is five wins from five. It carries the three-point bonus described above, and it is the only thing in the Championship that guarantees the title.
The Triple Crown is older and stranger. It goes to whichever of England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales beats the other three in the same edition — a survival from the Home Nations Championship, when those four were the whole competition and France and Italy did not exist as opponents. Only those four can win it. France can win the Championship and the Grand Slam but is structurally ineligible for the Triple Crown, which is exactly the sort of inherited quirk a competition designed from scratch would never include and that nobody wants to abolish.
In the women's tournament both trophies mean what they mean in the men's, and the Grand Slam and Triple Crown pages set out those histories in full. The difference is frequency. Grand Slams are more common in the women's Championship, because a dominant side faces a wider spread of opposition strength across five matches. In the men's tournament a Grand Slam usually requires beating three or four sides capable of winning on the day. In the women's tournament it has more often required winning one match — the France fixture — and then not slipping.
That is not a criticism of the winning teams. It is a description of a competition where the resource gap between the top two and the bottom two has been wide, and of the reason closing that gap matters more to the tournament's long-term health than any individual result does.
Where the Red Roses play
There is no permanent home. The RFU allocates Red Roses fixtures venue by venue, and the pattern has become reasonably settled: the biggest match of the campaign goes to Twickenham, and the rest go to Premiership club grounds around the country.
| Venue type | Typical use | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Twickenham | The marquee fixture, usually France | Capacity for a record crowd, full stadium operation |
| Premiership club grounds | Most home fixtures | Closer sightlines, sold-out atmosphere, easier to reach |
| Regional grounds | Selected fixtures and warm-ups | Takes the team to areas without a Premiership club |
Kingsholm in Gloucester, Franklin's Gardens in Northampton, Ashton Gate in Bristol and Sandy Park in Exeter have all hosted England women, and each does something Twickenham cannot. A crowd of fifteen thousand in a tight club ground makes more noise, and looks better on television, than the same crowd distributed around an 82,000-seat bowl. The RFU has been explicit that filling a smaller ground is preferable to half-filling a large one, and the policy of moving the team about has taken Test rugby to parts of England that rarely see it.
Twickenham is the exception, and a deliberate one. The stadium is used when the fixture can carry it, which in practice means the France match in a year when England host France. The Twickenham stadium guide covers getting there, where to sit and what a matchday in TW2 involves; almost all of it applies identically to a Red Roses fixture, with the significant difference that tickets are far easier to obtain and considerably cheaper.
England hosted the 2025 Rugby World Cup, with the final played at Twickenham, and the tournament left behind a set of venues across the country that had been tested for women's rugby at scale. That infrastructure question — which grounds can handle a crowd of a given size, and which cannot — is now answered in a way it was not before.
The 2019 contracts and what full-time training changed
In January 2019 the RFU awarded full-time professional contracts to twenty-eight England fifteen-a-side players. It was the first time any union anywhere had done it for a women's fifteens squad.
Those were not the first professional arrangements in English women's rugby. Sevens players had been contracted since the middle of the previous decade, in the run-up to rugby sevens entering the Olympic programme, which created the odd situation where a player could be paid to play sevens but not fifteens. Several switched formats within the sport for that reason alone. The 2019 announcement corrected it.
What full-time contracts change is less about salary than about time. A contracted player trains as a professional trains: strength and conditioning under supervision, video analysis, medical care and rehabilitation on demand, and recovery treated as work rather than as something fitted around a job. The gap between an amateur international and a professional one is not primarily skill. It is the number of quality hours available in a week, and the quality of the support wrapped around them.
The effects showed up first in the parts of the game that respond to repetition. Set-piece accuracy improved. Physical conditioning improved, and with it the ability to sustain intensity through eighty minutes rather than fading in the final quarter.
Injury management changed in both directions — better rehabilitation, but also a heavier physical programme applied to bodies that had not previously carried one. A run of anterior cruciate ligament injuries across the elite women's game has prompted specific research into whether training loads and equipment designed around men's physiology transfer well, and the honest position is that the question is open. It is one of the few areas where the women's game cannot simply copy what the men's game already knows.
Contracts are held by a squad, not by every eligible player. A player outside the contracted group is an amateur or semi-professional who plays for a Premiership Women's Rugby club and works or studies alongside it, and the step from that group into the contracted squad is the sharpest financial transition anywhere in English rugby. The women's rugby pathway in England page follows that route upwards from the community game.
PWR and how a Red Roses squad is assembled
Premiership Women's Rugby is the top domestic league in England, and it is the pool the national squad is drawn from almost exclusively.
The competition launched in 2017 as a restructured top division, replacing an older Women's Premiership, and it was rebranded to Premiership Women's Rugby ahead of the 2023-24 season. Its defining feature is the licence: clubs hold a place in the league for a fixed term against published standards covering finance, facilities, medical provision, academy structures and player welfare, rather than earning it by finishing high enough in a division below. There is no promotion into PWR during a licence period.
That model is contested. It gives clubs the certainty to invest in facilities and staff without the threat of relegation wiping out the investment, which is the argument for it. It also closes the league to any club outside it, however good, until the next licensing round — which is the argument against, and the same argument that runs through English club rugby generally. The RFU Championship page covers how that question plays out in the men's game.
- Club or school rugbyPlaying in the community game, at a club, school or university side affiliated to the RFU.
- PWR academy or senior squadRecruited by a Premiership Women's Rugby club, through its academy or straight into the senior squad.
- Age-grade and development squadsSelection into England age-grade sides and development squads, where national coaching staff assess players directly.
- Senior training squadNamed in the wider England training squad, training with the national set-up without necessarily being capped.
- Contracted squadAwarded an RFU professional contract, which moves the player from part-time to full-time.
- Matchday twenty-threeSelected in the twenty-three for a Championship fixture, announced round by round rather than for the campaign.
The route as the RFU and PWR describe it. Individual players skip steps, and several internationals have come into the game late from other sports.
Selection for a Championship campaign works on a rolling squad rather than a fixed one. A wider training squad is named before the tournament, matchday twenty-threes are announced fixture by fixture, and the head coach rotates through the campaign — an approach the depth of the English pool allows and that most of the other nations cannot risk. The principles governing the men's team are described at how the England rugby squad is picked.
Cross-code and cross-sport arrivals matter more in the women's game than in the men's. Players have come into elite rugby union from sevens, from rugby league, and from outside rugby entirely, at ages at which a men's professional pathway would already have closed. That is a function of the sport's recent growth, and it will narrow as the age-grade pathway fills out beneath it.
The crowds and what produced them
58,498 at Twickenham in April 2023 was the number that changed the conversation. Before it, the working assumption inside the sport was that women's rugby could reliably fill a mid-sized club ground and would struggle beyond it.
What produced the figure was not one thing. Tickets were priced far below a men's international, and family and junior pricing in particular put a Twickenham day within reach of people who would never pay for a men's Six Nations Saturday. The fixture was the title decider, against France, in a standalone window with no competing rugby. And the RFU marketed it as a stadium event rather than as a rugby match, a distinction that sounds cynical and turned out to be correct.
The follow-through has been the harder part. A record crowd for one fixture is an event; a sustainable average across a season is a business. Attendances at PWR club matches remain a fraction of the international figures, and the gap between what people will turn out for once a year and what they will commit to weekly is the central commercial problem in women's rugby in England.
Growth has been real regardless. Red Roses fixtures at Premiership club grounds sell out routinely, television audiences for the Championship have risen substantially since the standalone window was introduced, and the participation figures the RFU reports for girls' and women's rugby have grown across the same period.
WXV, the World Cup and the shape of the calendar
The Women's Six Nations is one of three things a Red Roses player's year is built around.
The Rugby World Cup is the tournament that matters most, held every four years. England hosted the 2025 edition and the final was played at Twickenham. The Championship sits in the spring; the World Cup, in the years it falls, occupies the late summer and autumn.
WXV is the newer piece. World Rugby launched it in 2023 as an annual competition outside the regional championships, arranged in tiers of six teams with promotion and relegation between them, and played in an autumn window. Its purpose was to guarantee that every leading nation played a set number of competitive Tests each year against sides of comparable standard — the problem it was designed to solve being that outside the Six Nations and the Pacific Four, women's international fixtures were arranged ad hoc and were often badly mismatched.
Whether WXV survives in its original form is genuinely unsettled. World Rugby has already reviewed the competition and adjusted the calendar around it, and the tension it has to resolve is the same one that constrains the men's game: there is not enough room in a year for a regional championship, a global league and a World Cup cycle, plus a club season that pays most of the wages.
| Competition | When | Who runs it |
|---|---|---|
| Women's Six Nations | Spring | Six Nations Rugby |
| WXV | Autumn | World Rugby |
| Rugby World Cup | Every four years | World Rugby |
| Premiership Women's Rugby | Domestic season | PWR and the RFU |
For an England player that means a Championship in the spring, club rugby either side of it, and an autumn block that is either WXV or World Cup preparation. A full professional calendar, arrived at within a decade of most of those players being unpaid.
Going to a Red Roses match
Tickets go on sale through the RFU's own ticketing platform and, for club-ground fixtures, sometimes through the host club as well. Prices are a fraction of a men's international, junior and family tickets are heavily discounted, and general sale is genuinely general — there is no club-allocation system to navigate, no debenture market, and little realistic prospect of a fixture selling out before the public can buy. That may not last, and it is a good reason to go now rather than later.
Twickenham fixtures run on the same operation as a men's Test: same gates, same transport arrangements, same walk from Twickenham station on South Western Railway. Club-ground fixtures are simpler and shorter, with less queuing at both ends, and are usually the better first experience for anyone bringing children.
A practical note on the schedule. The Championship is played in a compressed block and the full round-by-round fixture list is published well in advance, so planning around a date is straightforward. What is not fixed until later is the venue for each home match, which the RFU confirms fixture by fixture. Book the date first and the travel second.
Coverage in the United Kingdom has been on free-to-air television since the standalone window began, which is the single biggest reason the audience has grown, and the arrangement is renegotiated periodically rather than being permanent. The wider picture of English rugby, across both codes and every level, sits in the rugby section of this site, and the England guides hub collects everything written here for a British audience.