Six Nations Bonus Points System Explained for England Fans
Four for a win, one for four tries, one for losing by seven — the six nations bonus points system worked through with the arithmetic behind every rule.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Six Nations & England19 min read
- Win
- 4 points
- Draw
- 2 points
- Try bonus
- 4 or more tries
- Grand Slam bonus
- 3 points
Seventy-eight minutes gone at Twickenham, England eight points clear, and a penalty in front of the posts. The old answer was obvious: run the clock down, take the ball into a maul, go home. The current answer is that the fly-half points at the sticks, because a lead of eight is a lead that hands the opposition a bonus point at seven, and three more takes it out of reach. That single decision, repeated across a Championship, is what the 2017 rule change bought.
The Six Nations is run by Six Nations Rugby on behalf of the RFU and the five other unions, and its scoring regulations sit alongside — not inside — World Rugby's laws of the game. The laws say what a try is worth on the scoreboard. The tournament regulations say what a match is worth in the table. Confusing the two is the source of about half the arguments in a British pub on a Championship Saturday.
Four for a win, two for a draw, nothing for a defeat
The base of the table has not changed since 2017 and is the least interesting part of it. Win a match and you take four competition points. Draw and you take two. Lose and you take none.
A drawn Six Nations match stays drawn. There is no extra time, no golden point, no shoot-out; the regulations simply record two points each and the table absorbs it. Draws are rare — the Championship goes years without one — but they are entirely possible, and a draw in round five has decided more than one title race in the tournament's history.
- 4Points for a win
- 2Points for a draw
- 4Tries needed for the try bonus
- 3Extra points for a Grand Slam
The constants of the Six Nations scoring regulations. The Grand Slam award is made once at the end of the tournament, not in any individual match.
On top of the base sit two bonus points, each available in a single match, and one award that exists only at the end of the tournament. The maximum from any one game is five: a win, plus the try bonus. The maximum a side can theoretically reach across the Championship is twenty-eight, which requires five wins with four tries in every one of them and the Grand Slam award on top.
If you want the underlying values — five for a try, two for a conversion, three for a penalty or a drop goal — they are set out on the page about the rugby scoring system. Everything below assumes them.
The try bonus: four tries, and what actually counts as one
Score four or more tries in a match and you take a bonus point. That is the whole rule, and its scope is wider than most supporters assume.
It applies regardless of the result. A side that wins with four tries takes five points. A side that loses with four tries takes one, even if it loses by fifty. Both sides in the same match can take it, which happens more often than you would think in a Rome fixture where the defending is generous at both ends. And there is no requirement that the tries be converted: four unconverted tries earn the bonus exactly as four converted ones do.
Penalty tries count. So do tries awarded on review by the television match official after the scoring player has already left the field of play. What counts is that the referee awarded a try, and that is a binary question with no discretion attached to it.
The threshold is four, not a proportion
Some competitions have experimented with a try bonus set at three more tries than the opposition, on the reasoning that a fourth try in a 60-0 win says less about the quality of the rugby than a fourth in a 26-25 win. The Six Nations has not gone that way. Its threshold is a flat four, which means that in practice the try bonus rewards attacking sides and punishes sides who close matches out conservatively, and it does so in the same measure whether the match was competitive or not.
Whether that is right is arguable. What it definitely does is create an eightieth-minute incentive that did not previously exist, and the sight of a side three scores ahead turning down a kickable penalty to go to the corner is now completely routine. Twenty years ago it would have been read as arrogance.
The losing bonus, and why the number is exactly seven
Lose by seven points or fewer and you take a bonus point. Lose by eight and you take nothing.
The number is not arbitrary and it is not a compromise. A converted try is worth seven. Set the threshold at seven and the losing bonus captures every defeat where one more score would have levelled or won the match — which is exactly the population of matches the rule is trying to reward. Six would have excluded the seven-point defeat, which is the archetypal case. Eight would have started including defeats that were genuinely out of reach.
The margin is measured on the final score and nothing else. Being level with two minutes to go earns you nothing. Losing 24-17 earns you a point; losing 25-17 does not, and the difference between those two scorelines is one penalty in the seventy-ninth minute.
The margin is settled at the whistle, and the TMO can move it
Because the threshold is a hard boundary rather than a sliding scale, a great deal now hangs on decisions taken in the last few minutes by officials rather than players. A try awarded on review takes a losing side from eight down to three down and hands them a point. A try disallowed for an obstruction three phases earlier takes it away again.
That is not a criticism of the officials, who are applying the same standard they always did. It is an observation about what the rule did to the stakes attached to their decisions. Before 2017, a marginal try call in the eightieth minute of a match already lost changed a scoreline and nothing else; a supporter grumbled and went home. Now it changes the table, and in a five-round tournament the table is the tournament.
The same applies to the conversion after a late try. A side eight points down that scores in the corner needs the conversion for the losing bonus, and a touchline kick in the last seconds of a lost match at Murrayfield in February is a genuinely difficult thing to ask of a nineteen-year-old. Under the old regulations nobody would have bothered lining it up properly.
- Step 1Take the result. A win is four points, a draw two, a defeat none. Nothing else in the regulations changes this figure.
- Step 2Count each side's tries, including any penalty tries. Four or more adds one bonus point to that side's total, whatever the result was.
- Step 3If the match was lost, take the final margin. Seven points or fewer adds one further bonus point to the losing side.
- Step 4Add the two together. Five is the most any side can take from one match; two is the most a losing side can take.
- Step 5Carry the total into the table, where it counts as match points for the first tie-break separator.
The order in which the regulations apply to a single fixture. The Grand Slam award sits outside this sequence and is applied once at the end of the tournament.
A defeated side can therefore leave with two points: four tries and a margin inside seven. That is a substantial haul for losing, and it is the part of the system critics dislike most, because two points for a defeat is half what a hard-fought 12-9 win is worth. The counter-argument is that a side which scored four tries and lost by five in Paris has demonstrably done something a side which lost 9-6 has not.
The Grand Slam award and the arithmetic of the safeguard
The third element is not a match bonus at all. A side that wins all five of its matches receives three additional points at the end of the Championship.
Work out why and the whole system makes sense. Under a four-point win with two bonuses available, the best total a side that has lost a match can reach is twenty-two: four wins at four points each, a try bonus in all five matches, and a losing bonus in the one they lost. A side that wins all five without ever scoring four tries reaches twenty. Twenty-two beats twenty. Without a correction, a Grand Slam winner could finish second to a side they had beaten.
Three points is the smallest whole number that closes the gap. Twenty plus three is twenty-three, which is one more than twenty-two, and so a Grand Slam is mathematically guaranteed the title. Not two points, which would have left a tie at twenty-two and thrown the outcome to points difference. Not five, which would have been more than the problem required. Three, precisely.
That is a rare thing in sports administration: a rule with a single correct value that can be derived rather than negotiated. The full account of what a Grand Slam involves and how England's have been put together is on the page about the Grand Slam.
Working a round through, step by step
Take a hypothetical round, constructed to show the mechanism rather than to reproduce any real weekend.
England beat Italy 45-14 with seven tries. That is a win plus a try bonus: five points. Italy scored two tries and lost by thirty-one, so they take nothing.
France beat Scotland 22-16 with two tries. France take four points; no try bonus, because two is not four. Scotland lost by six, inside the seven-point threshold, so they take one point despite scoring only one try themselves.
Ireland beat Wales 31-28 with four tries. Ireland take five. Wales scored four tries of their own and lost by three, so Wales take two — a try bonus and a losing bonus.
| Side | Result | Tries | Margin | Match pts | Bonus | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| England | Won 45-14 | 7 | +31 | 4 | 1 try | 5 |
| Italy | Lost 14-45 | 2 | -31 | 0 | none | 0 |
| France | Won 22-16 | 2 | +6 | 4 | none | 4 |
| Scotland | Lost 16-22 | 1 | -6 | 0 | 1 losing | 1 |
| Ireland | Won 31-28 | 4 | +3 | 4 | 1 try | 5 |
| Wales | Lost 28-31 | 4 | -3 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
Read the bottom two rows against the middle two. Wales lost and took two points. France won and took four. The gap between winning and losing in that round was two points, not four — and in a five-round tournament decided on aggregate that is the whole ballgame.
What the round does to the table
Carry those six figures into a table and the ordering that comes out is not the ordering the results suggest. England and Ireland sit level on five, France on four, Wales on two, Scotland on one, Italy on nothing. Wales, beaten, are above Scotland, who were also beaten, by a single point earned for scoring four tries rather than one. And the two sides on five are separated by nothing at all until points difference is applied, at which point England's plus thirty-one puts them clearly ahead of Ireland's plus three.
Now imagine four more rounds of the same. Points difference is doing quiet work in the background from round one onwards, and the try bonus is doing loud work in the foreground. Neither of them changed who won a match. Both of them changed the shape of the table.
The practical upshot for anyone watching the closing weekend is that you cannot read a Championship table by counting wins. You have to read the points column, and behind it the difference column, because the two together are what the regulations actually settle the title on.
How bonus points reorder a title race without changing a single result
Here is the property that makes the system genuinely consequential rather than cosmetic. Two sides can finish the Championship with identical won-lost records and different totals.
Four wins and a defeat is a common finishing record. A side that won all four of its victories by narrow margins with three tries a time, and lost by twenty, collects sixteen points. A side with exactly the same record that scored four tries in each win and lost by six collects twenty-one. Five points of difference, produced entirely by how the matches were played rather than by who won them.
That is a deliberate design choice, and it moved the Championship's centre of gravity. Under the pre-2017 system a title was a matter of results and, in the last resort, points difference. Under the current one, a coach who sets his side up to win 15-12 five times is choosing a strategy that scores twenty points, while a coach who wins 33-24 five times scores twenty-five. Both are unbeaten. Only one of them has a Grand Slam-proof margin.
The obvious objection is that this rewards a side for beating Italy by fifty rather than for beating France by three. It does, a bit. The less obvious response is that the alternative — a system in which only results count — produces the strangling, territory-first rugby that the Championship was widely accused of playing in the 2000s, and that the try bonus is the cheapest available cure for it.
Two identical records, five points apart
| Cautious side | Expansive side | |
|---|---|---|
| Record | Won 4, lost 1 | Won 4, lost 1 |
| Wins with four or more tries | 0 | 4 |
| Try bonus in the defeat | No | Yes |
| Margin of defeat | 20 points | 6 points |
| Match points from wins | 16 | 16 |
| Try bonuses | 0 | 5 |
| Losing bonus | 0 | 1 |
| Championship total | 16 | 22 |
Six points is an enormous gap in a tournament where twenty is a title-winning total in most years. It has been produced without either side winning or losing a different match, and without any judgement being applied by anybody — the figures fall straight out of the regulations.
That table also shows why the twenty-two in the right-hand column is the number the Grand Slam award had to beat. It is the ceiling for a side that has lost once, and it is uncomfortably close to the twenty a five-win side could otherwise finish on.
The system's defenders would say this is the point: a Championship should be won by the side that played the best rugby, not merely by the side that scraped the most results. Its critics would say a table in which a defeat can be worth half a win has stopped measuring the thing it claims to measure. Both positions are coherent, and the six unions came down on the first one.
Why the Championship waited until 2017
Every other competition got there first. The Premiership had bonus points; so did the old Heineken Cup, and the southern hemisphere tournaments had used them since the professional era began. The comparison with the domestic English game is instructive, and the club version of the system, which differs in its details, is set out on the page about Premiership bonus points.
Two things held the Championship back.
The first was the Grand Slam problem, which had no obvious solution until somebody did the arithmetic properly and found that three points fixed it exactly. Until then, any proposal ran into the objection that it could produce an unbeaten side finishing second, which would have been an embarrassment the tournament could not survive.
The second was weight. In a twenty-two-round league, a bonus point is worth roughly a twentieth of a win over a season. In a five-round tournament it is worth a quarter of one, and the six unions were reasonably wary of handing that much influence to a threshold that a single television match official decision can cross. A try disallowed on review in the seventy-ninth minute now moves the table. It did not before.
There is a third reason, less often stated, which is that the previous system worked perfectly well for a long time. Two points for a win, one for a draw, a maximum of ten: it was crude, it was universally understood, and it produced tables that a supporter could read at a glance from the back page of a newspaper. Replacing something that legible with a seven-outcome scale was not an obviously good trade, and several of the unions said so at the time.
A trial was run for the 2017 Championship and the system stayed. There has been no serious campaign to remove it since, which is the usual sign that a rule change worked.
Where the bonus points stop and the tie-breaks begin
Bonus points are match points. They go into the same column as the four for a win, and that combined figure is the first thing the regulations look at when the tournament ends.
If two sides finish level on it, the tournament does not go to head-to-head — which is where most British supporters, schooled on football, get it wrong. It goes to points difference: total points scored across all five rounds minus total points conceded. If that is also level, it goes to tries scored. The sequence, and what happens when even that fails, is set out in full on the page about the Six Nations tie-break rules.
There is a quiet double-count buried in this. A try earns you five points on the scoreboard, which feeds points difference. Four tries earn you a bonus point, which feeds match points. And tries scored is the third separator in its own right. A side that scores tries is therefore rewarded three separate times by three separate mechanisms, which is not an accident and is not usually pointed out.
The misreadings that keep coming back
Four persistent ones, in rough order of how often they surface.
That the try bonus only applies to the winner. It does not. A losing side with four tries takes the point, and both sides can take it in the same match.
That conversions matter to the count. They do not. The regulation counts tries, and a try is a try whether the conversion goes over, hits the post or is not attempted at all. Conversions affect the scoreboard, and therefore points difference and the seven-point margin, but they have no bearing on whether you reach four.
That a penalty try is somehow lesser. It is not. Since World Rugby's 2017 law change a penalty try is an automatic seven points with no conversion attempted, and it counts as a try for the bonus and for the tries-scored tie-break. The change was made partly to remove the absurdity of a side being awarded a try for an offence that prevented a probable score, and then missing the conversion.
That a draw can attract a losing bonus. It cannot. A draw is worth two points, and both sides may add a try bonus if they scored four, but the losing bonus is available only to a side that has actually lost. A 20-20 draw with four tries each is worth three points to both.
Where bonus points have no effect at all
The system governs the Championship table and nothing else. Every other prize inside the tournament is decided on results alone, and it is worth being clear about which is which.
The Calcutta Cup goes to whichever of England and Scotland wins their fixture, and a four-try haul in defeat does not soften that in any way; the history of the trophy is on the page about the Calcutta Cup. The Triple Crown requires one home union to beat the other three, full stop — bonus points do not enter into it. The Millennium Trophy, the Centenary Quaich and the rest of the bilateral silverware work the same way.
The Wooden Spoon is the interesting exception, because it goes to whoever finishes bottom of the table, and the table is built with bonus points in it. A side that loses all five matches but picks up three bonus points along the way can finish above a side that won once and took nothing else, and has done. That makes the Spoon the only one of the tournament's informal honours that the bonus system can actually move, as the page on the Wooden Spoon sets out.
The same arithmetic in the women's and Under-20s Championships
The Women's Six Nations and the Under-20s Championship run on the same scoring regulations as the men's tournament: four for a win, two for a draw, the four-try bonus, the seven-point losing bonus and the Grand Slam award.
The effect is different, because the competitive spread is different. In an age-grade tournament where scorelines run higher and defences are less organised, four tries is a lower bar and try bonuses are correspondingly commoner, which compresses the value of a win and pushes more of the table's separation onto points difference. Something similar has historically been true of the women's tournament, though the gap between the strongest and weakest sides there has narrowed considerably.
England's women compete as the Red Roses, and their Championship is covered on its own page about the Women's Six Nations. The age-grade version, played on Friday nights at club grounds, is covered on the page about the England Under-20s Six Nations.
What it changes in the last ten minutes
The tactical consequences are specific, and they are the reason the rule earns its place.
A side leading by seven with two minutes left will kick a penalty rather than run the clock down, because eight points removes the opposition's losing bonus. A side leading by eight has no such incentive and will happily kill the game. The difference between those two situations is one point on the scoreboard and one point in the table, and coaches now brief for it.
A side trailing by eight in the eightieth will take three from a kickable penalty rather than go to the corner for a converted try that would draw the match, because five points down secures the bonus point and a failed lineout drive secures nothing. That is a genuinely awkward incentive — it asks a team to accept defeat in exchange for a point — and the fact that it happens is the strongest argument the system's critics have.
And a side three scores clear with four minutes gone in the second half will go to the corner rather than the posts if it has three tries, because the fourth is worth more than the three points. Which is precisely the behaviour the rule was written to produce, and the reason the last quarter of a Championship match looks different now from how it looked before 2017.
The full structure the table sits inside — the five rounds, the alternating rota, the tournament's other prizes — is set out on the page explaining the Six Nations format, and the final-day sequencing that turns all this arithmetic into live drama is covered under Super Saturday. More of the site's rugby writing is indexed under rugby.