RFU League Structure Explained: England's Rugby Pyramid
The RFU league structure explained level by level, from the Premiership down to Counties rugby, with how promotion works and why the leagues were redrawn.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Laws & Pathway19 min read
- Level 1
- Premiership
- Level 2
- The Championship
- Divisions at Level 4
- 3
- Governed by
- Rugby Football Union
A club in west Cornwall and a club in Northumberland can both be at Level 6 of English rugby and never once share a fixture list, a travel budget or anything a spectator would recognise as the same competition. That is not a flaw in the pyramid. It is the point of it.
English club rugby is organised as a single ladder of levels, numbered from 1 at the top, with a fully connected route from the Premiership down to a village side playing on a Saturday afternoon in front of thirty people. What changes as you descend is not just the standard but the shape: one national division at the top, then two, then three, then a spreading fan of geographically drawn leagues that gets wider every level until it reaches the ground.
The Rugby Football Union owns that structure and rewrote a large part of it for the 2022-23 season. This page sets out what each level is called, who runs it, how a club moves between them, and the several ways in which promotion in the community game is not the simple thing it looks like from the Premiership.
Level 1 to Level 12: how the ladder is actually built
- Level 1The Premiership. Fully professional, a closed number of clubs, and its own commercial and salary arrangements.
- Level 2The Championship. One national division, professional and semi-professional, the tier that has spent years arguing about its own funding.
- Level 3National League 1. A single national division, semi-professional, and the highest level a club can reach on merit from the community game.
- Level 4National League 2, split three ways by geography — North, East and West.
- Levels 5 and 6Regional 1 and Regional 2, drawn to cover large parts of England rather than the whole of it.
- Level 7 downwardsCounties 1, Counties 2, Counties 3 and below, organised by the county unions the RFU calls Constituent Bodies.
The names of the tiers as they stand after the 2022 redraw. The number of parallel divisions at each level below the national tiers varies with the number of clubs in each area.
Read the name and you know the level. That is the most useful thing about the current naming and the main practical gain from the redraw: a club that plays in Regional 2 is at Level 6, a club in Counties 1 is at Level 7, and nobody has to remember that "London and South East Premier" was a level above "Midlands 1 East".
The number of levels is not fixed nationally. Areas with a dense club population carry the ladder further down than areas without one, so the bottom of the pyramid is a different number in Yorkshire from what it is in Cumbria. That is a genuine feature of a structure built to place every club that wants a league, rather than a tidy grid imposed from Twickenham.
Above Level 4 the geography disappears entirely. National League 1 and the Championship are single national divisions, which is why a Level 3 club's away fixtures can be four hours in either direction and why the step from Level 4 to Level 3 costs a club more in travel than in playing budget.
National League One and Two: the semi-professional middle
The two National League tiers are the hinge of English club rugby, and the least understood part of it.
A Level 3 club is not an amateur club with ambition. It typically pays a proportion of its squad, employs at least a director of rugby and often a full-time strength and conditioning coach, trains two or three evenings a week to a professional standard, and runs a fixture list that requires overnight stays. What it does not have is the central funding that flows to the professional game, which means the entire operation is carried by gate receipts, sponsorship, a benefactor, or all three at once.
Level 4 was split into three divisions in the redraw, North, East and West, in place of the two that preceded it. The reasoning was the same as everywhere else in the restructure: three regional divisions cut the average journey substantially compared with two.
Where the money at Level 3 and Level 4 comes from
There is no broadcast income at this level and no meaningful central distribution, so a National League budget is assembled locally from a small number of sources. Gate money on a Saturday, matchday bar and food takings, shirt and pitchside sponsorship sold to businesses within about twenty miles, a supporters' club, hospitality in whatever room the clubhouse can dress up, and in a good many cases a single wealthy supporter covering the gap.
That last item is the structural weakness of the tier and everybody in it knows it. A club whose budget depends on one person is a club one change of circumstance away from a crisis, and English rugby has repeated examples of sides that rose two or three levels quickly and then fell further and faster when the funding stopped. The RFU's facility and financial criteria are partly a response to exactly that pattern.
The clubs that survive at Level 3 for a long period tend to share unglamorous characteristics: they own their ground, they run a large junior section that feeds the seniors, and they have a clubhouse that makes money on days when there is no rugby. None of that appears in a league table.
Promotion out of Level 3 into the Championship is the point at which the ladder stops behaving like a ladder. The relationship between the Championship and the Premiership above it has been suspended, restored and made conditional on minimum operating standards more than once since 2020, and there is no honest way to describe it as a settled arrangement. The detail sits in the guides to the Championship and to promotion and relegation in the Premiership, because it is a professional-game argument rather than a community-game one.
Regional 1 and Regional 2, and the geography that decides them
Levels 5 and 6 carry the largest clubs that are still recognisably amateur. A Regional 1 side will train twice a week, run three or four senior teams, have a colts section, employ nobody full-time, and travel further on a Saturday than most of its players would choose.
The divisions at these levels are drawn to cover regions of England — north west, north east, midlands, south central, south east, south west and so on — with the exact boundaries redrawn periodically as clubs are promoted, relegated, merged or fold. A club near a boundary can find itself moved between parallel divisions from one season to the next without its league position changing at all.
That is the part that catches people out, and it is worth stating clearly because it looks like an error when it happens. A club that finishes fourth in Regional 2 South East may start the following season in Regional 2 South Central. Nothing has gone wrong. The organising committee has rebalanced the divisions.
Why the redraw put "Regional" in the name
The old names were historical and had stopped describing anything. A league called "South West 1 East" was several levels deep and geographically ambiguous, and it took a chart to work out whether a club had gone up or sideways. Naming Levels 5 and 6 as Regional made two things explicit at once: the level, and the fact that these are the tiers where travel is regional rather than national and clubs should not expect either.
Counties leagues and how far the pyramid actually goes down
From Level 7 the leagues are Counties 1, Counties 2, Counties 3 and downwards, and the organisation moves from national committees to the Constituent Bodies — the county unions that have run the amateur game in England since long before the leagues existed.
| Level | League name | Geographic scope | Typically organised by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Premiership | National | Premiership Rugby |
| 2 | Championship | National | RFU |
| 3 | National League 1 | National | RFU |
| 4 | National League 2 North, East, West | Third of England each | RFU |
| 5 | Regional 1 | Region | RFU regional committees |
| 6 | Regional 2 | Region | RFU regional committees |
| 7 and below | Counties 1, 2, 3 and lower | County or group of counties | Constituent Bodies |
A Counties league fixture is a genuinely local affair, sometimes a fifteen-minute drive, and that is the whole design intent. Clubs at this level are volunteer-run from top to bottom, from the fixture secretary to the person who paints the lines, and a fifty-mile away trip is not an inconvenience but a threat to whether the side gets fielded at all.
The bottom of the ladder is not the bottom of adult rugby. Below the lowest county league sit clubs playing merit tables and friendlies, second and third XVs playing in their own structures, and social sides that have never entered a league and do not intend to.
Promotion, relegation and the sideways moves nobody expects
- The titleA club finishes top of its division and is provisionally promoted.
- Facility checkThe RFU assesses the ground against the criteria for the level above — pitch barriers, floodlights where required, changing and officials' facilities.
- The club's decisionPromotion can be declined. Clubs turn it down for cost, travel or squad depth, and this happens more often than the tables suggest.
- AllocationBecause parallel divisions are geographic, the club is placed in whichever division at the new level fits its location, not an obvious successor league.
- Knock-onOther clubs may be moved sideways between parallel divisions to keep division sizes even.
- Fixture listThe new league's fixtures are drawn up once the final composition is settled, which is why community fixture lists appear late in the summer.
The sequence in the community game. Ground and facility criteria are set by the RFU and get stricter as the level rises.
The mechanism above is the single biggest difference between community promotion and the version watched on television. Finishing top is necessary and it is not sufficient.
Facility criteria are the most common obstacle. Floodlights are required for league rugby at the higher community levels, and a club with a pitch on a public park cannot install them. Barriers, segregated changing, a room for match officials and adequate parking all appear in the criteria as the level rises. A club that has just won its league in April and cannot fund floodlights by August does not go up.
Declining promotion carries no shame in the community game and there is no penalty for it. A club with one strong side and no second team can look at a division requiring double the travel and reasonably conclude that a good season at the current level is better than a bad one above it.
Relegation works the same way in reverse and is usually less contested, though it produces the same geographic reshuffle. A club dropping from Regional 2 into Counties 1 goes into its own county's Counties 1, which may contain clubs it has not played in fifteen years.
The 2022 redraw and the travel problem it was built to solve
The RFU consulted its clubs on adult competition and the answer that came back was not about standards or league sizes. It was about distance.
Clubs at Levels 5 and 6 in particular had accumulated fixture lists that required three-hour coach journeys for a league game between two amateur sides. The costs of that fall entirely on the club: coach hire, food, a full Saturday from every player and volunteer, and a real recruitment problem when a prospective player learns what half the away fixtures involve.
The redraw from the 2022-23 season regrouped clubs by geography, renamed the tiers so the level was legible from the name, and adjusted division sizes so that the league programme fitted a shorter block of the season. Fewer long journeys, more derbies, and a season that did not run every available Saturday from September to May.
It has not been universally popular, and the objections are worth recording rather than glossing. Clubs whose historic rivalries crossed the new boundaries lost fixtures they had played for a century. Clubs at the strong end of a weak region found the standard dropped. And any structure that ties leagues to geography guarantees that some clubs will be moved sideways for reasons that have nothing to do with how they played.
The season shape: league block, cup rounds and the community calendar
A community season starts in early September and the league programme runs through the autumn and winter, interrupted by cup rounds and by the weekends the Six Nations takes out of the calendar for volunteers and spectators alike.
The knockout competitions run alongside. The RFU's community cups are banded by level, so clubs meet opposition of roughly comparable standard rather than being drawn against a side four tiers above them: a Senior Cup, an Intermediate Cup, a Senior Vase and a Junior Vase, with finals traditionally played at Twickenham on a community finals day. Winning one is the achievement most Level 8 clubs put on the clubhouse wall.
Weather is the other structural feature of an English season, and it is not a footnote. Frost and waterlogging remove fixtures through January and February, and the postponed matches have to be replayed inside the same block, which is one of the arguments for a shorter league programme with slack at the end of it. Clubs with a 3G pitch lose almost nothing; clubs with one grass pitch and no drainage lose whole months.
Who decides when a postponed match is played
The league organiser, and their powers are wider than most players realise. A community league runs on a set of competition regulations that give the organising committee authority to order a fixture to be played on a specified date, to award the points to one side where a club fails to fulfil a fixture without adequate reason, and to fine a club for a late cancellation.
Clubs treat those regulations casually until the first time they are applied to them. The rule that bites hardest is the one on fielding a side: an inability to raise fifteen players is not usually an acceptable reason to postpone, because if it were, half the league programme in February would evaporate. A club that repeatedly cannot field a first XV will be removed from the league and its results expunged, which is a brutal outcome for the clubs that beat them and part of why organisers are reluctant to do it before the season's end.
There is also a deadline problem at the tail of the season. A club with four outstanding fixtures in April and one pitch cannot play them all on Saturdays, so midweek games appear, and midweek games at an amateur club with players who work are precisely the fixtures that do not get fulfilled. The redraw's shorter league block was intended to leave room for that pile-up rather than let it run into the summer.
What each level asks of a player in training and travel
Ambition is easy to declare in August and expensive to sustain in February, so it helps to know what you are signing up to.
At Level 3 the commitment is close to professional in everything except pay. Two or three squad evenings, individual gym work, video, and a Saturday that can be an entire day. Players hold full-time jobs and it shows in their week.
At Levels 5 and 6 the picture is two training evenings, a Saturday fixture that may involve a coach, and a genuine expectation of availability. Miss training routinely and you will not be picked, because there are three sides beneath the first team and someone in the second is training.
One requirement applies at every level and catches clubs out at all of them: front-row cover. The laws require suitably trained and experienced front-row replacements to be available, and a side that cannot provide them plays uncontested scrums. In the community game that is not a theoretical problem. A club with two props and no third is one hamstring away from a match in which the scrum contest disappears entirely, and the fixture secretary's hardest job in October is finding a tighthead.
Below that the arrangement becomes negotiable, and this is the part rarely said out loud. Counties rugby accommodates shift workers, new parents, players who can train once a fortnight and players who cannot train at all. That flexibility is exactly why so many people play at that level rather than one above it, and it is the reason a club's third XV is often the hardest team in the club to get into on a good Saturday.
Anybody weighing that decision from outside the game will find the entry routes set out in the guide to starting to play rugby in England, and the non-contact alternatives — which have their own leagues and no travel to speak of — in the guide to touch and walking rugby.
Registration, transfers and being cup-tied in the community game
Every adult player in an RFU-affiliated club is registered to that club through the union's Game Management System, and that registration is what makes them eligible to play league rugby.
You cannot play league rugby for two clubs in the same season on a whim. The registration regulations govern how a player moves, they require the move to be processed rather than assumed, and they close off certain moves late in the season so that a title race cannot be decided by a squad assembled in March. Cup rules add another layer: a player who has played for one club in a competition is generally tied to it for that competition.
Dual registration exists for specific circumstances, most obviously for young players moving between a club and a higher-level side, and for students who play at university during term and for a home club in the vacation.
The practical warning is simple. A club that fields an unregistered or ineligible player loses the match by default and is usually docked points as well, and it happens every season somewhere, almost always by administrative accident rather than design. If you are new to a club, ask the fixture secretary whether you are registered before you play, not after.
Merit tables, friendlies and life outside the leagues
Not every English club plays league rugby, and not every team within a league club does either.
Merit tables are the older structure that leagues did not replace. A group of clubs, usually organised by a Constituent Body, agree to record the results of whatever fixtures they arrange with each other over a season, and a table is produced from them. There is no fixed fixture list, no promotion, no relegation and no obligation to play anybody in particular. Second and third XVs run in merit tables across most of England, because they cannot guarantee to field a side on a given Saturday and a league would punish them for it.
Pure friendly rugby survives too, and it survives for good reasons: touring sides, clubs with one team and no appetite for a league, sides whose player pool fluctuates too much to commit.
The trade-off is real. League rugby gives a club a guaranteed fixture list, a reason for players to turn up in November, and a table that tells everyone how the season went. Merit rugby gives flexibility and asks nothing. Plenty of clubs run both at once, with a first team in a league and everything below it in merit tables.
There is a strong argument, made regularly by people who have run clubs for thirty years, that leagues have cost the community game something it has not got back. Before 1987 an English club arranged its own fixture list and chose its opponents, which produced traditional fixtures, long tours and Easter festivals. Leagues replaced that with a compulsory list, results that matter, and a competitive pressure that reaches down to Level 10. Participation and standards both rose. Friendlies, touring sides and the habit of playing a club because you liked playing them mostly did not survive.
Whether that was worth it is a judgement rather than a fact, and it is one worth making: the leagues gave the amateur game a structure that keeps players turning up in February, which the old fixture list did not, and the cost was a set of traditions that were pleasant rather than load-bearing.
County rugby, the Bill Beaumont Cup and representative fixtures
Alongside the club leagues, the Constituent Bodies run their own representative competition. The County Championship is competed for the Bill Beaumont Cup at its top level, with Shield and Plate competitions beneath, and it is played as a short block of fixtures in the late spring after the club season has finished.
It is the oldest layer of English rugby's competitive structure and it sits awkwardly with the modern game, which is worth acknowledging rather than dressing up. Players from Level 3 and Level 4 clubs make up much of the standard, the professional game does not release players for it, and the fixtures come at the end of a long season. What it does provide is a genuine step above club rugby for players who will never be professional, a route for coaches building experience towards the higher RFU coaching awards, and a fixture with a hundred and more years of history behind it.
Constituent Bodies also run the age-grade representative programmes that feed into the national pathway, which operate under the RFU's separate age-grade regulations.
The Constituent Bodies do a great deal more than pick a county side, and it is the least visible work in English rugby. They organise the lower league divisions and hear the disciplinary cases arising from them, appoint and develop match officials through their referee societies, deliver coaching and first aid courses locally, and administer the age-grade competitions that clubs' junior sections play in on Sundays. A club at Level 9 deals with its Constituent Body constantly and with the RFU at Twickenham almost never.
Their boundaries are historic rather than administrative, which produces some oddities. Several counties in the rugby sense do not match the counties on a road map, a few Constituent Bodies cover areas that were redrawn by local government decades ago, and one or two exist because a group of clubs has always organised itself that way. None of it is a problem in practice, and all of it explains why the pyramid below Level 6 looks untidy on paper and works perfectly well on a Saturday.
Choosing the right level of club for the time you actually have
Start with the Saturday rather than the standard. A club is a level you can play at multiplied by a commitment you can sustain, and the second number is the one people get wrong.
Ask three things when you first walk into a club. How many senior sides does it run, because a club with four teams will find you a game every week and a club with one will not. Where are the away fixtures, because the answer is a genuine time commitment and the club will tell you honestly if you ask. And what happens if you can only train once a week, because at some levels that is fine and at others it means you will not be selected.
The level itself matters less than most new players assume. A good Counties 2 side with three teams, a full clubhouse and a coach who can teach is a better place to spend five years than a Regional 1 club where you are the sixteenth-choice forward. The English pyramid is deep enough that there is a level that fits almost anybody, which is its real achievement, and more of the broader English game is covered across the rugby section.