Six Nations Tie-Break Rules: How a Tied Table Is Settled
Match points first, then points difference, then tries scored — the six nations tie break rules in order, and the 2015 finish that showed why they matter.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Six Nations & England19 min read
- First separator
- Match points
- Second separator
- Points difference
- Third separator
- Tries scored
- If all three fail
- Title shared
On the last Saturday of the 2015 Championship, England needed to beat France by twenty-six points at Twickenham to take the title. They won 55-35. Seven tries, an extraordinary eighty minutes, and it was not enough by six points of difference, because Ireland had beaten Scotland at Murrayfield earlier in the afternoon and Wales had put sixty-one on Italy in Rome before that. Three countries finished level on eight match points. Ireland were champions.
Nothing about that afternoon involved a decision by anybody. It was arithmetic, applied by the Six Nations regulations in a fixed order, and every one of the three sides knew the number they needed before kick-off. Understanding the six nations tie break rules is really just understanding that order, and understanding why the tournament chose the separators it did rather than the ones a British supporter would expect from following football.
The competition is governed by Six Nations Rugby on behalf of the RFU and the five other unions. The relevant provisions are in the tournament's own regulations, not in World Rugby's laws, which is why they can differ from the tie-break wording used in the Premiership, in a World Cup pool or in an age-grade competition.
The order of separators, and where each one bites
Three separators, applied in sequence, and only if the one above has failed.
- Step 1Match points. The total from the table, including bonus points and the Grand Slam award. Almost every Championship is settled here and goes no further.
- Step 2Points difference. Total points scored across all five rounds minus total points conceded. This is the separator that has actually decided titles.
- Step 3Tries scored. Total tries across all five rounds, penalty tries included. It has never been needed to settle the men's title.
- Step 4Nothing further. If sides remain level after all three, the regulations declare them joint champions. There is no fourth separator and no play-off.
The order of separators under the Six Nations tournament regulations. It is applied only between the sides that are actually level, not to the table as a whole.
Two things about that sequence are worth noticing straight away. It is short — three steps and then a shared title, where a football competition might have six or seven separators including head-to-head, away goals and a drawing of lots. And head-to-head does not appear anywhere in it.
The separators are applied only among the sides that are level. If England and France both finish on twenty and Ireland are on nineteen, points difference is used to order England and France; Ireland's figures are irrelevant to that comparison and Ireland finish third regardless of how attractive their difference looks.
Points difference: the whole tournament, not the shared fixtures
The definition is unfussy. Add up every point a side scored across its five matches. Add up every point it conceded. Subtract the second from the first. A side that scored 150 and conceded 90 has a points difference of plus sixty.
Everything that appears on a scoreboard feeds into it at face value — tries at five, conversions at two, penalties and drop goals at three, penalty tries at seven. There is no weighting for the quality of the opposition and no discount for running up a score against a side that has lost a player to a red card.
That last point is the substantive criticism of the separator, and it is a fair one. A forty-point win over Italy in Rome in round one counts identically to a forty-point win over France in Paris in round five, and the two are plainly not equivalent achievements. Every alternative anyone has proposed — weighting by opponent, capping the margin, counting only matches between the tied sides — introduces a complication that has to be explained on television in fifteen seconds on the last Saturday of the tournament, and the organisers have consistently preferred a crude rule that everybody can follow to a sophisticated one that nobody can.
Ten points of difference separated the champions from the third-placed side that year. England's 55-35 win over France was the highest-scoring match of the three and still left them short, because their earlier defeat in Dublin had cost them more in margin than it had cost them in match points.
What a difference-based separator does to how sides play
A tie-break rule is not supposed to change behaviour. This one does, and it does so from the first weekend rather than the last.
Because every point scored in round one counts identically to every point scored in round five, a side that treats a comfortable win as complete once the result is safe is quietly spending something it may need in March. That is the calculation behind the decisions supporters see and sometimes resent: a side twenty-five points clear with ten minutes left, still using its bench aggressively, still kicking to the corner, still attacking a beaten opponent. It reads as unsporting to people who grew up with a competition where the win was the win. It is simply a team looking after its difference column.
The effect runs the other way too, and this is the part that is genuinely uncomfortable. A side losing heavily has an interest in the scoreboard that has nothing to do with the match in front of it. Conceding forty rather than sixty in Dublin in round two can be worth more in April than anything else that happens in the eighty minutes, and a coach who empties his bench to shore up a defence in a lost cause is making a rational tournament decision that looks like surrender.
Neither behaviour existed in the era before points difference. Both are now normal, and neither is anybody's fault.
Why head-to-head is not the first separator
Ask a British supporter how a tie at the top of a league is settled and most will say goal difference, because that is how the Premier League works. Ask them what a rugby tie-break should be and a good number will say the result between the two sides, because that is how the Champions League group stage and several domestic football competitions handle it. The Six Nations does neither of those second things, and the reason is structural rather than philosophical.
In a five-round tournament every side plays every other exactly once. A head-to-head separator between two tied teams therefore rests entirely on one match — often one played six weeks before the tie arose, sometimes decided by a late penalty, and in a tournament where a single fixture already carries a fifth of the season's weight. Making that one match count twice, once for its four points and again as the decider, gives it a weight the format was never designed to carry.
There is a practical objection too. Head-to-head breaks down completely with three sides level, which is exactly the situation that arose in 2015 and again on other final days. England had beaten Wales; Ireland had beaten England; Wales had beaten Ireland, in a three-way circle with no top and no bottom. A separator that fails in the case it is most likely to be needed is not a useful separator, and the tournament's drafters worked that out a long time ago.
Points difference has no such failure mode. It produces a single ordered list of six numbers every time, and ties within it are vanishingly rare.
When every separator fails, the title is shared
If sides are level on match points, level on points difference and level on tries scored, the regulations do not reach for a fourth measure. They record joint champions.
That is an unusual position for a modern competition to take and it is deliberate. There is no drawing of lots, no comparison of disciplinary records, no coefficient. The tournament's view, as far as it can be read from the regulations, is that if two sides have been that precisely equal across five rounds then the honest answer is that neither of them won it outright.
The practical consequences are odd and quite charming. Two captains lift the trophy, usually at different grounds, on the same afternoon. Both sets of medals are struck. The record books list both, and the tournament's honours board carries two names against the year.
It has not happened in the six-team era
Since the Championship took its current form the tie-break has always found an answer at step one or step two. Match points settle it most years. Points difference has settled it several times, most conspicuously in 2015 and previously in 2007, when France finished ahead of Ireland on the same measure after a final-day sequence that ran almost as close.
Tries scored, the third separator, has never been reached for the men's title. It is there because a regulation with a gap in it is worse than a regulation with a step nobody uses, and because a tournament that has already produced a five-way tie once has good reason not to assume it cannot happen again.
Why tries, and not something else
The choice of tries for the third step is not obvious and it says something about what the tournament thinks it is for.
The alternatives were available and were not taken. Fewest points conceded would have rewarded defence, which is a perfectly respectable way to win a rugby match and would have suited several of the six unions' traditions rather better. Wins alone would have separated a side with four victories from one with three victories and two draws. Disciplinary record, used in some football competitions, would have brought yellow and red cards into the reckoning for a Championship.
Tries scored was chosen instead, and it points in exactly the same direction as the four-try bonus point that was added to the table in 2017: towards attacking rugby, deliberately and consistently. The two mechanisms reinforce each other, which means a try in the Six Nations is now rewarded in three separate places — five points on the scoreboard feeding points difference, a contribution towards the four-try bonus, and a unit in the third separator.
Whether the third step will ever be used is doubtful. Points difference produces a tie so rarely that the step is closer to a statement of values than a working rule, and there is no harm in that.
1973, and the shared championships English fans still argue about
- 5Countries competing
- 4Matches played by each
- 2Wins for each country
- 5Countries declared champions
The final table of the 1973 Five Nations, in which every country won both home matches and lost both away matches.
Every side won at home. Every side lost away. All five finished on four points, and because the Five Nations regulations of the day had no separator at all, all five were declared champions. It is the only five-way tie in the tournament's history and it remains the strongest single argument for having a points-difference rule, because the 1973 table is a perfectly symmetrical object that tells you nothing whatsoever about who played the best rugby.
Shared titles were not unusual before that. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century the Championship was routinely divided between two countries, and the honours record is dotted with them. England supporters of a certain generation grew up with the idea that a shared title was a normal outcome rather than a failure of the rules.
The mechanism that produced them was simply the absence of any separator. Two points for a win, one for a draw, four matches, and if two countries arrived at the same total then both were champions and nobody thought to ask which had scored more. Newspapers of the period reported it without comment. The idea that a competition owes its audience a single winner is a much more recent expectation than it feels, and it arrived alongside television money rather than ahead of it.
Points difference was adopted as a separator in the mid-1990s, and the change did what it was intended to do. Shared titles stopped almost immediately. Whether the tournament gained or lost by that is one of the better arguments in British rugby: a shared championship is a genuinely rare thing that no other major competition produces, and the sport traded it away for the certainty that television wanted. England's own record across both eras, including the shared titles, is set out on the page about England's Six Nations title history, and the longer story of how the tournament grew out of the Home Nations Championship is on the page covering the Six Nations from the Home Nations.
Staggered kick-offs, and what they do to the maths
Until the middle of the 2010s the final round was played like any other, with matches spread across a weekend and sometimes running concurrently. Since 2015 the last round has been staged as three kick-offs on a single Saturday, each starting after the previous has finished.
The change was made for broadcast reasons and it transformed the tie-break from an accounting exercise into the tournament's main dramatic device. Because the matches run in sequence, every side knows precisely what it needs before it kicks off. The team playing last does not have to guess at a target; it has been handed one. In 2015 England took the field knowing the exact margin required, which is why they played the way they did, and why the game finished 55-35 rather than 30-20.
The sequencing is not neutral. Playing last looks like an advantage, because you have complete information. It is also a burden, because complete information can mean knowing that you need to win by twenty-six against a side with nothing to lose, and because the target can only get harder as the afternoon goes on. Which of those effects dominates is genuinely unclear and probably varies by year. The full mechanics of the final-day format, and the finishes it has produced, are on the page about Super Saturday.
One consequence is rarely mentioned. Staggering the kick-offs means the trophy has to be moved, or duplicated, or held back — because the champion can change during the final match and the presentation has to happen somewhere within a few minutes of the final whistle. That logistical problem is a direct cost of the format, and the organisers absorb it every year.
Building a scenario: what England actually need
The calculation supporters do on the last Saturday is less complicated than it looks, and it comes in three parts.
First, establish the match points. Work out what every contender can reach, including bonus points. A side on sixteen going into the final round can reach twenty-one with a win and a try bonus, or seventeen with a losing bonus. Fix the range for each of them.
Second, if the leaders are already beyond England's reach on match points, no margin helps and the exercise stops there. That is the commonest outcome by a distance.
Third, if England can draw level on match points, the target becomes a margin. Take the leader's current points difference, add whatever their final match is likely to move it by, and the difference between that figure and England's own is the margin England must beat — by one, since a level difference goes to tries scored.
| Element | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|
| Match points available | Four for a win, one for four tries, one for a defeat inside seven |
| Rival's likely final difference | Their current difference plus the expected margin of their last match |
| England's required margin | Rival's projected difference minus England's current difference, plus one |
| Fallback if the margin is met exactly | Total tries scored across all five rounds |
The awkward part is the second row, because it depends on a match England are not playing and cannot influence. A target set at fifteen at three o'clock can be twenty-eight by half past four. That is why the number quoted before the last kick-off is always provisional, and why the graphic on the television screen keeps moving. The base points that feed all of this — the four for a win and the two bonuses — are set out on the page about the Six Nations bonus points system.
A constructed example
Suppose England go into the final round on sixteen points with a difference of plus forty, and the leaders are on seventeen with a difference of plus fifty-five. England play last.
England's win takes them to twenty, or twenty-one with a fourth try. The leaders, playing earlier, can reach twenty-one with a win and a try bonus, twenty-two if they were on eighteen rather than seventeen, or stay on eighteen with a losing bonus. Until their match finishes, England's requirement is a range rather than a number.
Say the leaders lose narrowly and finish on eighteen. England now win the Championship with any victory at all, because twenty beats eighteen and the separators never come into play. Margin becomes irrelevant, which is why a side can look strangely uninterested in the last quarter of a match that decided a title.
Say instead the leaders win by twenty with four tries, finishing on twenty-two with a difference of plus seventy-five. England cannot reach twenty-two; twenty-one is their maximum. The tie-break is never reached, the title is gone before England kick off, and the last match of the Championship becomes a dead rubber played in front of eighty-two thousand people who already know.
Say the leaders win narrowly without a bonus, finishing on twenty-one with plus sixty. England need twenty-one and then a difference above plus sixty, which means a win by four tries and by a margin of at least twenty-one. That is the scenario the television graphics live for, and it is roughly the shape of what happened in 2015.
These are illustrations rather than results, but the structure is exactly how the real calculation is done.
How a Grand Slam pre-empts the whole process
There is one route to the title that no tie-break can touch.
A side that wins all five matches receives three additional match points at the end of the Championship. Five wins is twenty; the award makes twenty-three the minimum a Grand Slam can be worth. The highest total available to any side that has lost a match is twenty-two — four wins at four points each, a try bonus in all five games, and a losing bonus in the defeat. Twenty-three beats twenty-two, and there is no arrangement of results that changes it.
So a Grand Slam winner is champion outright, immediately, without points difference being consulted, without tries scored mattering, and without any possibility of a share. That was the entire purpose of the three-point award, and it is a rare example of a sporting regulation whose value was determined by arithmetic rather than by committee: two would have left a tie at twenty-two, four would have been more than the problem needed.
The corollary is that the tie-break rules only ever operate in a Championship without a Grand Slam, which is most of them. What a Grand Slam requires, and how England's have been assembled, is on the page about the Grand Slam.
The prizes the tie-break cannot reach
Several of the Championship's honours are settled entirely by results and never appear in the table's arithmetic.
The Calcutta Cup goes to whichever of England and Scotland wins their annual fixture, and if that match is drawn the holder keeps it — a genuine quirk that has decided the destination of the trophy more than once. Points difference has no bearing on it whatsoever. The trophy's history, from the melted silver rupees of 1878 onwards, is on the page about the Calcutta Cup.
The Triple Crown requires one of England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales to beat the other three. It is a pure results test with no table involved, no bonus points and no separator, and a side can win it while finishing third in the Championship. That page is the Triple Crown.
The same applies to the Millennium Trophy between England and Ireland, the Centenary Quaich, the Auld Alliance Trophy, the Giuseppe Garibaldi Trophy and the rest of the bilateral silverware. Every one of them turns on a single result.
The Wooden Spoon is the exception in the other direction. It goes to whoever finishes bottom, so it is determined by the table and therefore by the same separators — and a side that loses all five matches but collects bonus points along the way can escape it at the expense of a side that won once. That is the only place where the tie-break machinery touches an informal honour.
Men's, women's and Under-20s: same principles, separate documents
Each of the three Championships is run under its own set of published regulations. The principles are the same across all of them — match points, then points difference, then tries scored, then a shared title — but the documents are separate, they have been amended at different times, and it would be wrong to assume the wording is identical in every particular.
That matters more than it sounds. Age-grade and women's competitions have historically been where governing bodies trial changes before applying them to the senior men's tournament, and a difference in a clause about, say, how a forfeited or abandoned match is treated can sit unnoticed in a regulation for years. Anyone who needs the exact position for a specific competition should read that competition's own rules rather than reason across from the men's.
What is consistent is the absence of a head-to-head separator and the willingness to declare joint champions. Neither of those has been quietly dropped from the women's or age-grade versions. The Women's Six Nations, which England contest as the Red Roses, is covered on its own page about the Women's Six Nations, and the Friday-night age-grade tournament on the page about the England Under-20s Six Nations.
Why there is no decider, and what one would actually look like
Every few years, usually after a Championship settled by a handful of points of difference, somebody proposes a play-off. The argument is straightforward: a title decided by a subtraction sum is unsatisfying, and a final between the top two would be worth an enormous amount of money.
Consider what it would require. A sixth match, in a calendar where the release windows are already fixed and player welfare is the loudest argument in the professional game. A venue, which means either a neutral ground that generates no home revenue for any of the six unions, or a home ground that hands one finalist a substantial advantage. A qualification rule for the two finalists — which would need a tie-break of its own, so the problem is relocated rather than solved. And a mechanism for a scenario in which one side has already won all five matches, since asking a Grand Slam winner to play a sixth game they could lose is close to absurd.
The organisers have looked at all of that and declined, repeatedly. The compromise, and it is a good one, is the staggered final Saturday: it produces the tension of a final without adding a fixture, and it does so by making the tie-break rules themselves the drama rather than an accounting footnote applied afterwards.
My view is that the current arrangement is better than any of the proposed replacements, and that the willingness to accept a shared title in the last resort is a feature of the tournament rather than a defect in it. A competition confident enough to say that two sides were equal is doing something no knockout format can. The wider structure this all sits inside is set out on the page explaining the Six Nations format; the rest of the section's guides are indexed on the England hub, and more of the site's rugby coverage sits under rugby.