Rugby Scoring Explained: Tries, Conversions and Penalties

Five points, and the ball has to be under control. That is the whole of a try, and it is where most of the arguments at Twickenham begin — not over whether the attacker reached the line, but over whether the ball was ever properly pressed onto the grass beneath him.

The values themselves come from Law 8 of World Rugby's laws, which the Rugby Football Union applies without alteration from a Premiership Saturday down to a third-team fixture on a council pitch in Wakefield. Four scoring acts, four numbers, and no discretion for the referee about what any of them is worth. What the referee does have discretion over is whether the act happened at all, and that is a far larger territory than the arithmetic suggests.

This page covers the values, the conditions attached to each one, the history that produced them, and the places where England's two rugby codes diverge. It does not cover the bonus-point systems that convert those scores into league table positions, which work differently in each competition.

What each score is worth

Four ways to put points on the board in rugby union, and the numbers have been stable since the early 1990s.

• 5Try
• 2Conversion
• 3Penalty goal
• 3Drop goal

The values set by World Rugby's Law 8. They apply at every level of the game in England, from Test rugby to age-grade fifteens.

A try is the grounding of the ball in the opposition's in-goal area. A conversion is the kick that follows it, and only follows it — you cannot attempt a conversion without having scored first. A penalty goal is a place kick or drop kick at the posts taken from a penalty awarded against the opposition. A drop goal is struck from open play, with the ball bouncing off the turf before the boot makes contact.

There is a fifth number that matters, and it is not a separate act: seven. A converted try. Seven is the unit that decides how a coach thinks about the last ten minutes, because it is the only score that puts a side more than a penalty ahead in a single visit to the 22.

The maximum available from one attacking sequence is therefore seven points, and the minimum from a scoring one is three. Nothing else is possible. A conversion missed leaves five, a penalty try gives seven with no kick required, and there is no partial credit for a ball carried over the line and held up.

Grounding the ball, and the arguments it starts

Law 8 gives two ways to ground the ball, and they are not the same thing.

The first is holding the ball in hand or arms and touching it to the ground in in-goal. Downward pressure is irrelevant here — contact is enough, and it is enough if the ball touches the ground for a fraction of a second while the player is sliding, falling or being driven backwards. The second is pressing down on a ball already lying on the ground, using a hand, an arm, or the front of the body between the waist and the neck. That second method is what produces the pile of bodies in the corner and the referee crouching to look through it.

Both routes have edge cases that keep television match officials busy. A player who is tackled short may immediately reach out and ground the ball, and that is legal. What is not legal is going to ground, being held, stopping, and then making a second effort to stretch over — the so-called double movement. The distinction is between one continuous action and two separate ones, and it is genuinely a judgement call rather than a bright line. Referees at Kingsholm and referees at a county cup semi-final will draw it slightly differently, and no amount of slow motion removes that entirely.

The goal line itself belongs to in-goal, so a ball grounded on the whitewash is a try. So is a ball grounded at the base of the padded post protector, because the posts stand on the goal line and their base is part of it. A ball grounded a centimetre in front of the line is nothing at all.

Touch is the other boundary. An attacker who is in touch-in-goal, or who touches the touchline before grounding, has not scored. A change to the laws in the late 2000s removed the corner flag from the definition of touch-in-goal, which means a ball that clips the corner post on its way to being grounded is no longer automatically dead — a detail that has rescued more than one try older supporters instinctively call back.

Held up is the last case. If a defender gets a hand or a body underneath the ball and stops it reaching the ground, no try is awarded and play restarts with a five-metre scrum to the attacking side. Which is a genuine turnover of momentum rather than possession, and one of the few moments in rugby where a defence celebrates conceding a scrum on its own line.

Where a decision is close, the referee can refer it upstairs. The scope of that referral, and how far back into the build-up the officials may look, is set by protocol rather than by Law 8 — our guide to how the TMO process works in English rugby goes through it.

The conversion: the line, the angle and the 90 seconds

Score in the corner and you have made your own next job harder.

The conversion is taken from a point on an imaginary line running back from where the ball was grounded, parallel to the touchlines. The kicker may retreat as far as he likes along that line, all the way to halfway if it helps, but he cannot step sideways to improve the angle. Distance is negotiable; angle is not. A try grounded two metres in from the touchline leaves a kick that stays acute at every distance, and the only remedy is retreating far enough that the angular gap between the posts narrows less sharply than the distance grows.

This is why you see wingers with the line at their mercy angling infield rather than diving at the flag. Ten metres of lateral movement before grounding can be worth the two points, and a good winger knows it.

The kick may be a place kick or a drop kick. Nobody at senior level drop-kicks a conversion in fifteen-a-side rugby, but the law allows it, and sevens requires it.

Time is limited. Law 8 gives the kicker 90 seconds of playing time from the moment the try is awarded to the moment the kick is taken. If the ball falls off the tee before the run-up begins it may be replaced without penalty; if it falls after the kicker has started to approach, he must kick it as it lies or where it rolls. Exceed the time and the kick is disallowed. Referees at Test level are strict about it, and the stadium clock at Twickenham counts down where it is displayed.

The opposition is not entirely passive. Defenders must stand behind the goal line and may charge once the kicker begins his approach, which is why you occasionally see a line of players sprinting out from under the posts. In practice a charged-down conversion at senior level is vanishingly rare — the kicker's routine is long enough that the charge almost never gets there in time. It happens more often in age-grade and community rugby, where the tee routine is shorter and the sprint is more optimistic.

Kicking the three, or kicking the corner

A penalty is awarded and the captain has a decision. Three points from the tee, or five metres from touch and a lineout, or a scrum. The choice is one of the most revealing things about a side's coaching.

The arithmetic is not complicated but it is not obvious either. A kickable penalty is close to a certainty for a good goal kicker inside the 22 and in front. A lineout drive from five metres out converts at a rate that varies enormously by side — a pack with a strong maul might expect to score more often than not, a lighter pack considerably less. Multiply and compare: three guaranteed points against seven points at some probability, and the break-even sits somewhere around a two-in-five conversion rate for the maul. Most Premiership packs believe they are above that line. Some are wrong.

Score state changes the calculation completely. Trailing by four with three minutes left, three points are worthless and the corner is the only option. Trailing by five, three points are also worthless, because a penalty leaves you two behind and still needing to score. Leading by two with the clock red, the kick at goal ends the match. The situations where the decision is genuinely balanced are narrower than the amount of argument they generate.

1. 1Referee awards the tryWhistle, arm raised vertically above the head, and the score is signalled to the timekeeper.
2. 2Point of grounding is markedThe assistant referee marks the spot from which the conversion line runs back.
3. 3Kicker chooses a distanceAnywhere on that line, parallel to the touchlines. No sideways movement is permitted.
4. 4The 90 seconds runPlaying time from the award of the try to the kick being taken. Overrun and the kick is disallowed.
5. 5Defenders may chargeThey stand behind the goal line and may advance once the kicker begins his approach.
6. 6Restart from halfwayThe side that conceded restarts with a kick-off from the centre, whether or not the conversion was successful.

The sequence set out in Law 8. The 90-second limit is playing time and is displayed on the clock at grounds that have one.

One further wrinkle. A penalty kick at goal must be taken within 60 seconds of the kicker indicating his intention to have a shot, which is a shorter window than the conversion allows. Indicate, then dawdle, and the referee will disallow it and award a scrum to the opposition.

The drop goal and the situations that produce one

The kick has to bounce. That single requirement is what separates a drop goal from a place kick and what makes it hard: the ball must be dropped from the hand and struck on the half-volley as it rises off the turf, and a ball scooped off the ground or volleyed before it lands scores nothing.

Three points, from anywhere, at any time in open play. There is no restriction on where the kick is taken from and no requirement that a phase of play has ended.

The classic use is the drawn-out attacking sequence where a side has field position but the defence is not breaking. Ten or twelve phases inside the opposition 22, a forward pod carrying to hold defenders in, the fly-half dropping into the pocket with the scrum-half feeding him. English sides have historically been good at this, and the 2003 World Cup final is the reason every schoolchild in the country knows what a pocket is — the story of how England won that final is told in full elsewhere on the site.

The second use is the desperate one. Two points down, injury time, a lineout on halfway. The drop goal is the only score available that does not require crossing the line.

There is one restriction that catches people out. A team awarded a free kick cannot score a drop goal directly from it, and cannot do so until the ball has next been made dead or an opponent has played it or tackled the ball carrier. Take a quick free kick, tap, and hoof a drop goal over from thirty metres and it counts for nothing. The same restriction does not apply to a penalty, from which a drop goal may be attempted directly, though almost nobody does it because a place kick is easier.

Fly-halves practise the drop goal far less than the goal kick, and it shows in the strike rate. It is a low-percentage shot from anywhere outside about thirty metres, and a coach who calls for one at forty out is usually admitting the attack has failed.

The penalty try, and why it stopped needing a conversion

Seven points, no kick, and a card.

The test the referee applies is whether a try probably would have been scored, or probably would have been scored in a more advantageous position, but for foul play by the defending side. Probably is the operative word — the standard is a balance of probabilities rather than a certainty, and it does not require the attacker to have been within touching distance of the line. A collapsed maul rolling towards the posts, a deliberate knock-on that kills a three-on-one, a defender taking out the chaser of a kick into space: all of these can produce a penalty try.

Awarding one is never the referee's only act. Law requires that the offending player is at minimum cautioned and temporarily suspended, which means a yellow card as a floor and a red where the foul play warrants it. A side conceding a penalty try therefore concedes seven points and plays the next ten minutes a player short. That combination is the most punishing single outcome in the sport, and the ten minutes usually cost more than the seven points do.

The seven-point value came in with a law change adopted in 2017. Before that a penalty try was worth five, with the conversion taken from directly in front of the posts — a kick that goes over almost every time, but not quite. The change removed a meaningless piece of theatre and, in doing so, removed the possibility of a side profiting from a missed gimme. It also saved roughly ninety seconds of playing time on each occurrence, which the game's administrators cared about more than they said out loud.

The scrum penalty try is a category of its own and the hardest to referee. A dominant attacking scrum five metres out, the defending scrum collapsing repeatedly, and the official has to decide whether the collapse is deliberate obstruction of a certain score or the honest failure of an outmatched front row. Repeat offences and a warning usually precede the award. The mechanics of that judgement sit inside the scrum laws themselves.

How the numbers got to five, two and three

Rugby began without points at all.

A match was decided on goals — kicks over the bar — and the act of touching the ball down in the opponents' in-goal earned nothing except the right to have a try at goal. That is where the word comes from. If the sides were level on goals, the count of tries was used to separate them, which made the try a tie-break rather than a score.

The Rugby Football Union moved to a points system in the 1880s, and the values shuffled repeatedly over the following decade as the RFU and the newly formed international board argued about the relative worth of running and kicking. The exact season each early change took effect varies between sources, so treat those dates with some caution. What is not in doubt is the direction of travel across the twentieth century.

Until 19713points

1971 to 19924points

1992 onwards5points

The two well-documented modern increases and the value they replaced. The shifting values of the 1890s are recorded inconsistently across sources and are not charted here.

Show the numbers

The value of a try in rugby union over time

Item	Value
Until 1971	3points
1971 to 1992	4points
1992 onwards	5points

Three landmark changes shape the modern game. The try went from three points to four in 1971. It went from four to five in 1992. And the drop goal, which had been worth four points, was cut to three in 1948 — a reduction that says a great deal about how the sport viewed a kick that could be attempted at any moment from anywhere.

One score has disappeared entirely. The goal from a mark, in which a player who made a fair catch could take a drop kick at goal from the mark, was abolished in 1977. It had been worth three points and was a relic of a version of the game where the kick was the point of everything.

The penalty goal has sat at three points throughout the modern era, which is why the try-to-penalty ratio has changed so much. When a try was worth three, scoring one was worth exactly the same as a defender putting his hands in a ruck. That is a strange sentence to write about a sport that sells itself on the try line, and it explains almost everything about why the law changed.

Why the modern values push teams towards the try line

The 1992 increase was not a tidying-up exercise. It was a deliberate intervention.

By the late 1980s the international game had drifted towards a pattern administrators found unwatchable: territorial kicking, pressure applied to force penalties, and matches decided by goal kickers. A converted try was worth six, a penalty three. Two penalties beat a converted try. A side with a reliable kicker and a sound defensive structure could win without ever seriously attempting to score, and several did.

Raising the try to five made a converted try worth seven, which is more than two penalties. That single point changed the incentive structure of the sport more than any other law amendment of the era, and it is the reason the modern game looks the way it does.

Whether it went far enough is arguable. A penalty at three points is still an efficient return for a defence that concedes cheap infringements in its own half, and there is a decent case that the modern breakdown penalty count keeps the goal kicker more central than the 1992 reformers intended. Competitions have layered their own incentives on top rather than touching the values again — the four-try bonus point used across English club rugby is exactly that, an attempt to reward try-scoring without reopening Law 8. How it works in practice is covered in the Premiership's bonus point system.

Union and league: the same words, different arithmetic

Two codes, two governing bodies, two sets of laws that have been separate since 1895. The scoring values diverged early and have never converged.

Scoring act	Rugby union	Rugby league
Try	5	4
Conversion	2	2
Penalty goal	3	2
Drop goal / field goal	3	1
Maximum from one visit to the line	7	6

The differences are not cosmetic. A league try plus conversion is worth six, and a penalty goal only two, so kicking for goal in league is a far worse deal than in union — three penalties are needed to match a converted try. That single ratio is why league sides so rarely take a shot at the posts and why the sport's attacking rhythm is what it is.

The one-point field goal is the sharper divergence. In union a drop goal matches a penalty; in league it is worth a sixth of a converted try, so it is almost exclusively a late-match tie-breaking device. The Rugby Football League's use of golden-point extra time in Super League makes it decisive rather than marginal: a single kick from thirty metres ends a match that eighty minutes of rugby could not.

League's try has moved too. It was worth three points until 1983, when the RFL raised it to four for reasons that mirror union's own reasoning almost exactly — the try was not worth enough relative to the kick. The two codes reached the same conclusion nine years apart, without agreeing on the number.

One caution. The National Rugby League in Australia introduced a two-point field goal from beyond forty metres, and competitions have not all adopted it. Do not assume the value of a long-range field goal in any given English competition without checking that competition's operational rules, because this is one of the few places where the answer genuinely varies by season and by league. The broader picture of how the codes differ is set out in our comparison of the two sets of rules as played in England.

Sevens: the same values, different kicks

Seven-a-side rugby uses Law 8 untouched. A try is five, a conversion two, a penalty goal three, a drop goal three. What changes is how the kicks are taken and how quickly.

Every conversion in sevens must be a drop kick, and it must be taken within 30 seconds of the try being awarded rather than the 90 seconds allowed in fifteens. No tee, no sand, no walk back to the halfway line to settle. The kicker picks the ball up, moves back, and strikes it on the bounce while the defenders are still walking to their line.

Penalties and free kicks are also taken by drop kick in sevens, which effectively removes the shot at goal from the game — nobody chooses a drop kick from forty metres when a tap and a two-on-one is available. Sevens scores are therefore almost entirely tries and conversions, which is one reason the format is easier to follow for a newcomer than fifteens.

The other structural difference is the restart. In fifteens the side that conceded kicks off. In sevens the side that scored restarts, which compounds the advantage of scoring and is the single biggest reason sevens matches run away from teams so quickly. Concede, and you are chasing the kick-off as well as the deficit.

The abbreviated format shows up in the arithmetic of a tournament. Matches run seven minutes each way, ten in a final, and a side that takes an early two-score lead has genuinely won most of the time available for a response. Our page on how sevens is organised in England sets out the competition structure and the pathway.

Reading the scoreboard and the referee's signals

Watch the referee's arm before you watch the screen.

A try is signalled with a whistle and one arm raised vertically above the head. A penalty is an arm extended at roughly forty-five degrees, pointing towards the non-offending side's attacking direction. A free kick is different again — the arm bent at the elbow with the hand at shoulder height — and the distinction matters because of the drop goal restriction described above. Advantage is a horizontal arm held out towards the side benefiting. None of these are decorative. The signal is the formal award, and the scoreboard follows it.

English grounds display the running score in the conventional home-then-away order, and the larger stadia show a breakdown of tries and goals separately. Twickenham's screens run a countdown for the conversion window, which is a genuinely useful thing to watch if you want to understand why a kicker suddenly hurries a routine he has taken his time over all afternoon.

Match officials record the scorer of each try and the taker of each goal, and those records feed the statistical archives the RFU and the competitions maintain. A penalty try is recorded as a try with no scorer attached to it, which is why players' career try tallies occasionally fail to reconcile with a team's total.

At a community ground the score is often kept on a manual board by a volunteer, and the honest answer is that the running total on the touchline at a Level 7 fixture is not always right. The referee's own record is the one that counts, and the match card submitted afterwards is what enters the league table. If the board and the referee disagree, the referee wins.

Where the scoring values sit inside the wider game

Points do two jobs in English rugby. They settle the match, and they feed the table.

Every league from the Premiership down through the RFU's community pyramid uses a points-for and points-against differential as a tie-break, which means the margin of a win has value beyond the win itself. A side chasing promotion late in a season has a real incentive to keep scoring at 40-0, and supporters who find that ungracious are, technically, wrong. The structure of that pyramid and how the tables are settled is laid out in our guide to the RFU's community league structure.

The bonus point layer sits on top. Four tries in a match earns an extra league point in most English competitions regardless of the result, and a defeat inside seven points earns another. That seven-point margin is not arbitrary — it is exactly one converted try, the maximum a side can score in a single visit, which defines a losing bonus point as a match you were one score away from saving.

Which brings the arithmetic back where it started. Five for the try, two for the kick, and the whole competitive structure of English club rugby built on the assumption that seven is the number that matters. Understanding what each number is worth is the first step to reading a match properly; the second is knowing who is meant to be doing what when the ball arrives, which is where our guide to the fifteen positions and their jobs picks up. More on the sport across the country sits in the rugby section and on the England guides hub.