Women's Football Pyramid in England: Every Tier Explained
The womens football pyramid in England tier by tier, from the WSL and WSL2 through the FA Women's National League to the regional and county leagues.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's Football24 min read
- Top tier
- Women's Super League
- National League clubs
- 72 in six divisions
- Regional leagues
- 8
- First national league season
- 1991-92
Count down from the top and English women's football runs like this. The Women's Super League is tier one. WSL2, the division known as the Championship until the summer of 2025, is tier two. The FA Women's National League fills tiers three and four with seventy-two clubs in six divisions. Eight regional leagues cover tiers five and six, each with a Premier Division above its Division Ones. County leagues begin at tier seven and carry on downwards for as many divisions as the county has teams to fill.
So the pyramid has six tiers with a fixed national shape and a seventh, plus whatever lies beneath it, that changes from county to county. Clubs move between every pair of levels by promotion and relegation, with one large qualification: for the top two tiers a league position is not enough, because both professional divisions also demand a licence. The Football Association regulates the whole structure, runs the National League itself and sanctions everything below through its County FAs. The top two divisions have belonged since 2024 to a company owned by their own clubs.
The whole women's football pyramid in England, tier by tier
Seven rows cover it. The table gives each level, the competition played there, how it is divided and who is responsible for running it.
| Tier | Competition | Divisions | Run by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Women's Super League | One national division of 14 clubs from 2026-27 | WSL Football |
| 2 | WSL2 | One national division of 12 clubs | WSL Football |
| 3 | FA Women's National League Premier Division | Two: Northern and Southern, 12 clubs each | The FA |
| 4 | FA Women's National League Division One | Four: North, Midlands, South East, South West, 12 clubs each | The FA |
| 5 | Regional league Premier Divisions | Eight, one for each region | Regional league committees, FA sanctioned |
| 6 | Regional league Division Ones | One or more beneath each Premier Division | Regional league committees, FA sanctioned |
| 7 and below | County leagues | Different in every county | County leagues, sanctioned by County FAs |
Two things in that table deserve a second look. The first is how early geography takes over. Only two divisions in the whole system are national, and by tier three the country has already been cut in half. The second is that the structure narrows before it widens. With the top flight at fourteen clubs and the division beneath it at twelve, the second tier is smaller than the first, which is an odd shape for something called a pyramid. Below that the numbers double at each step: twenty-four clubs at tier three, forty-eight at tier four.
One practical consequence follows from the narrow top. There are only twenty-six places in professional football for women's clubs in England, and the queue of clubs with the money and the ambition to fill them is longer than that. Most of the arguments about the pyramid in the past decade have been arguments about who is allowed through that neck and on what terms.
Tiers one and two: the professional leagues and the licence that guards them
The Women's Super League kicked off in April 2011 with eight clubs, as a summer competition. It moved to a winter calendar in 2017-18, required full-time professional squads from 2018-19 and settled at twelve clubs from 2019-20. In June 2025 its clubs voted to expand it to fourteen from the 2026-27 season. How the division itself operates, from its fixture pattern to its title race, is set out in our guide to the Women's Super League.
WSL2 was created in 2014 as the second division of the Super League, with ten clubs. It was renamed the FA Women's Championship in 2018 and went back to the WSL2 name in 2025. It had twelve clubs in 2025-26 and stayed at twelve when the division above grew to fourteen.
Neither league is run by the FA any longer. In August 2024 the governing body handed both to a new company in which every club in the two divisions holds a share. It was incorporated as Women's Professional Leagues Limited and has traded as WSL Football since May 2025. The handover is the women's game's equivalent of the 1992 breakaway that produced the Premier League, with the difference that it was negotiated with the FA and not against it.
Why a league position is only half the entry requirement
Membership of either division is conditional on a licence. The criteria cover the ground, the training base, medical and performance staffing, the qualifications of the coaching team, the academy and the terms on which players are employed. When the licences were introduced in 2018 the tier-one version required at least sixteen contact hours a week between club and players and the tier-two version eight; those numbers are the clearest shorthand for the difference between the levels, though the criteria have been revised since.
A club that wins promotion on the pitch still has to satisfy the licence for the division it is entering, and a club already in the division can lose its place by failing to. Two recent cases show the second route. Reading, a WSL club until 2023, withdrew from the second tier in the summer of 2024 on financial grounds and restarted at tier five. Blackburn Rovers gave up their second-tier place in 2025, saying they could not meet the costs of the requirements. Neither club was relegated by results.
Movement between the two divisions has been rewritten for the expansion. For years one club went up and one came down. In the transitional 2025-26 season two clubs were promoted automatically and a third met the WSL's bottom club in a play-off. Under the arrangements for 2026-27 onwards the second-tier champions go up, the fourteenth-placed WSL club goes down, and the thirteenth-placed club has to win a play-off against a WSL2 side to stay. As announced in 2025 that opponent was to be the WSL2 runners-up; the version confirmed with the 2026-27 fixtures adds a preliminary match between the second and third-placed WSL2 clubs, whose winners take on the WSL side. At the bottom of WSL2 the eleventh and twelfth-placed clubs are relegated. The mechanics, and the licence a promoted club must hold, are covered in how promotion to the WSL is won.
Tiers three and four: the six National League divisions
Below the professional game sits the FA Women's National League, seventy-two clubs arranged as six divisions of twelve. Each club plays twenty-two league matches, home and away against the other eleven.
Tier three is the Northern Premier Division and the Southern Premier Division. Tier four is Division One, played in four sections: North, Midlands, South East and South West. A Division One champion moves up into whichever Premier Division suits its location, which for a Midlands club can be either, and the dividing line between north and south is redrawn each summer once the membership is known.
This is where semi-professional football begins, and the phrase covers a wide range. At the top of tier three there are clubs backed by Premier League and EFL owners that pay part-time wages and train in the evenings at the men's academy. Newcastle United went further in 2023 and put their squad on full-time contracts while still a third-tier side. At the bottom of tier four there are clubs where players pay subscriptions and wash their own kit. The league's rules permit both, and the same division can contain each.
The two Premier Division champions are promoted to WSL2. Until 2023 only one of them normally went up, decided by a single play-off between the northern and southern winners, with 2018-19 the exception when the tier above was being enlarged. Since 2023-24 both have been promoted, provided each holds the licence. The full detail of the six divisions, their cup and their criteria is in our guide to the FA Women's National League.
A note on the name, because it causes confusion. In men's football "the National League" is one national division at tier five. In women's football it is six regional divisions at tiers three and four. The shared name tells you nothing about the relative level.
Tiers five and six: the eight regional leagues and the counties they cover
England is divided into eight regional leagues, and every one of them is built the same way: a Premier Division at tier five, and beneath it Division One at tier six. Every region is too large for a single Division One and runs two or three, split by geography, and the number has changed as clubs have come and gone.
| Regional league | Broad area covered | Usual Division One above it |
|---|---|---|
| North East Regional Women's Football League | Northumberland, County Durham and Yorkshire | Division One North |
| North West Women's Regional Football League | Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire | Division One North |
| West Midlands Regional Women's Football League | Birmingham, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire | Division One Midlands |
| East Midlands Regional Women's Football League | Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire | Division One Midlands |
| Eastern Region Women's Football League | Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire | Division One South East |
| London and South East Women's Regional Football League | London, Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Sussex | Division One South East |
| Southern Region Women's Football League | Hampshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire | Division One South West |
| South West Regional Women's Football League | Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire | Division One South West |
Treat the middle column as a sketch. The regions follow County FA boundaries, which are not the same as modern council boundaries, and a club near an edge can be placed in the neighbouring league if the travel makes more sense. The right-hand column is a habit and not a rule either: the National League decides each summer which Division One a promoted club joins, and a champion from the southern end of the East Midlands has no guarantee of staying with its neighbours.
Tier five is the level at which a club stops being purely local. A Premier Division fixture list in the South West can mean a trip from Cornwall to Gloucestershire and back on a Sunday, paid for by a committee whose income is subscriptions, a bar and a sponsor's name on the shirts. It is also the highest level at which a professional club's second team is normally found, a point covered further down.
Each regional league is run by its own management committee of volunteers, sanctioned by the FA, with its own rulebook, its own league cup and its own annual meeting at which clubs vote on constitutional changes. They are older than most of the structure above them. Several grew out of leagues that were operating before the first national competition was formed in 1991.
Tier seven and below: county leagues and why no two counties look alike
From tier seven the pyramid stops being designed and starts being whatever local numbers allow.
A county league's top division is tier seven. What sits under it depends on how many teams have entered that season. A large league such as the Greater London Women's Football League runs a Premier Division with several divisions stacked beneath it, some of them split geographically. A league in a sparsely populated county may have one division, in which case tier seven is both the top and the bottom. Some leagues cover more than one county because no single county could sustain a competition alone: the Thames Valley Counties Women's Football League and the South East Counties Women's Football League both take their names from that arrangement.
The leagues are run by volunteers and sanctioned by the local County FA, which also registers the clubs, appoints the referees and hears the disciplinary cases. What a County FA does, and how it relates to the national body, is explained in our guide to the County FAs.
Rules at this level bend to keep teams playing. Divisions can change size between May and August. Lower divisions in some counties run smaller-sided or flexible formats for new teams that cannot yet raise sixteen players every week. Kick-off is Sunday afternoon almost everywhere, on a hired council pitch or a ground borrowed from a men's Saturday side.
So the question of how many tiers English women's football has does not have one answer below the regional leagues. In one county the bottom rung is tier seven. In another it is tier ten.
Getting out of county football is the hardest administrative step in the whole climb, harder in some ways than anything above it. A county champion applying to a regional league needs a ground of a higher specification than most county pitches, a committee capable of running longer away trips, and enough players to cope with a Sunday that starts at eight in the morning. Clubs that manage it tend to be the ones attached to an established men's non-league club with a clubhouse and a secretary already in place.
How promotion and relegation join each step
The principle is the same throughout: finish top and go up, finish bottom and go down. The numbers and the small print differ at every join.
- County league to regional Division OneCounty champions are promoted to tier six if their ground and administration meet the regional league's requirements and a place is available.
- Division One to regional PremierEach Division One champion moves up to tier five, replacing clubs relegated from the Premier Division.
- Regional Premier to National LeagueThe eight Premier Division champions are promoted to tier four, two into each Division One section.
- Division One to Premier DivisionThe four Division One champions go up to tier three. The bottom two in each Premier Division come down.
- National League to WSL2The Northern and Southern Premier champions are promoted to tier two if each holds the professional licence.
- WSL2 to the WSLThe champions are promoted. The WSL's thirteenth-placed club then faces a play-off against the winners of a match between the second and third-placed WSL2 clubs.
The standard routes between levels under the structure in force from 2026-27. Numbers promoted have been varied in individual seasons, and every step is subject to the entry criteria of the league above.
From tier four downwards the arithmetic is tidy. Each of the four Division One sections relegates its bottom two clubs, which makes eight, and the eight regional champions replace them. Between tiers three and four, four clubs come down from the two Premier Divisions and four Division One champions go up.
Play-offs are rare. The women's pyramid has never had the four-club end-of-season play-off that the EFL uses. Where a play-off exists it is a single match created to settle one place: the old meeting of the northern and southern champions for one promotion spot, the runners-up play-offs staged in 2025-26 to fill the extra places the WSL's expansion opened, and the new fixture between the WSL's thirteenth-placed club and a challenger from WSL2. Those 2025-26 matches were all played at Burton Albion's Pirelli Stadium over one weekend in May 2026: Wolverhampton Wanderers beat Plymouth Argyle 1-0 for the third place in WSL2, and Boldmere St. Michaels and Norwich City won the two ties for places at tier three.
Between county and regional football the process is looser. A regional league has a fixed number of places in its Division Ones and may have more county champions wanting them than it can admit, so promotion from tier seven is usually by application as well as by league position. A champion with no interest in regional travel can simply decline, and plenty do.
Vacancies complicate every one of these joins. A club that folds or resigns in June leaves a hole, and the league concerned fills it by reprieving a side that had finished in a relegation place or by admitting an extra club from below. One resignation near the top can therefore ripple down three or four tiers, sparing a club at each. Leagues also move clubs sideways between parallel divisions when geography demands it, so a team can change division over the summer having been neither promoted nor relegated.
When a champion does not go up
Sunderland won the FA Women's Premier League National Division three seasons running, in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and were not promoted once. The league they were winning had been the top flight until the WSL was placed above it, and entry to the WSL in those years was by licence application alone. No promotion place existed. Sunderland got in only when a second division was added in 2014, won that at the first attempt and reached the top flight for 2015.
That is the most famous case, and it belongs to a period when the top of the pyramid was closed by design. Since then the route has been open, but three things can still stop a champion.
The first is the professional licence, as described above. A club that wins a Premier Division title but cannot evidence the staffing, the facilities and the funding required for WSL2 can be refused, and the rules provide for what happens to the place.
The second is the ground. Each league from the regional level upwards publishes minimum standards for the venue, and a club promoted on the pitch has to show it has a ground that meets the standard above, or a formal agreement to share one that does. Clubs at tiers five to seven often play on pitches they do not control, which makes this the commonest obstacle of the three.
The third is a season that never finishes. The 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons below the top two tiers were curtailed during the pandemic and their results set aside. Nobody was promoted as a champion. In 2021 the FA instead invited applications for what it called upward club movement and placed clubs on a combination of recent results and off-field criteria, which is how Sunderland and Watford reached the second tier that summer.
Reserve, development and under-21 sides, and the ceiling above them
Second teams are part of the pyramid but only up to a point. A reserve or development side can enter a county league, win promotion and climb through the regional divisions like any other team. Tier five is as high as it goes, because the National League admits first teams only, and a reserve side that wins a regional Premier Division is passed over in favour of the best-placed eligible club. Regional rules also stop a second team occupying the same division as its own first team. The detail sits in each league's rulebook and is worth checking there, since the wording has been adjusted more than once.
The under-21 squads of the professional clubs mostly sit outside the pyramid altogether. They play in an academy league organised for the licensed clubs, the Professional Game Academy programme, against one another and without promotion or relegation. From 2025-26 a number of those academy sides were also entered into the National League's cup competition, which gave them competitive matches against senior third and fourth-tier teams without giving them a league place.
Whether professional clubs' second teams should be allowed into the national tiers is an argument that returns every few years. Supporters of the idea point to the gap between academy football and a senior squad. Opponents, who include a good many National League clubs, point to what happens to a competition's integrity when a third of a division cannot be promoted. The current rulebook is the place to see where that argument stands. How girls reach those academies in the first place is covered in the girls' academy pathway.
How a new women's team gets in
Nobody starts at tier three. The ordinary route for a new club has three steps and takes a few weeks of paperwork in the spring.
The club affiliates to its County FA, which requires a named secretary and welfare officer, a constitution, insurance and a ground. It applies to its county league before that league's deadline. It is placed in the bottom division, or the only division, and starts in September. From there every promotion has to be won.
A side attached to a professional men's club usually avoids most of that climb, and it does so in one of two ways. The more common is adoption: the men's club takes over or merges with an existing independent women's club and inherits its league position. A large share of the familiar badges at tiers two to four arrived like this, which is why so many of those clubs have an earlier life under a different name. The rarer route is direct entry by licence. Manchester United formed a women's team in 2018 and were admitted straight to the second tier through that year's licensing round, having never played a match. London City Lionesses came into existence in 2019 when the licensed Millwall Lionesses side separated from its parent club and took the second-tier place with it.
Both short cuts are within the rules. They are also the reason the upper tiers contain so few clubs that began in a county league under their present name and reached the national divisions by results alone. For an individual looking for a team, as opposed to a committee founding one, the starting point is our guide to joining a grassroots club.
Which tier enters which cup
Each level of the pyramid has cup football attached to it, and the entry rules mirror the league structure closely.
| Competition | Who enters | Run by |
|---|---|---|
| Women's FA Cup | Clubs from tier one to tier seven | The FA |
| League cup for the professional clubs, renamed the Players Cup in 2026 | Tiers one and two | WSL Football |
| National League Cup and National League Plate | Tiers three and four | The FA |
| Regional league cups | Member clubs of each regional league, tiers five and six | The regional leagues |
| County cups | Clubs affiliated to that County FA, at whatever tier | County FAs |
The Women's FA Cup is the only competition in which a county league side can, in theory, meet a WSL club. Entry is staggered so that the higher a club's tier, the later it joins. In 2025-26 tier-seven clubs began in a preliminary round, tier six came in at the first qualifying round, tier five at the second and tier four at the third. Tier-three clubs entered at the first round proper, WSL2 clubs at the third round and the WSL at the fourth. The rounds, the draw and the Wembley final are described in our Women's FA Cup guide.
That chart is the nearest thing to a census of the pyramid's width that exists in one place. It undercounts the base, because entry is voluntary and many county sides do not apply.
The cup for the top two tiers is covered in our guide to the Women's League Cup, including the change of format and name it underwent in 2026. County cups are the oldest competitions most clubs play in, and at the lower tiers they are frequently the fixture of the season: a county final is often staged at the County FA's own headquarters ground or at a local EFL stadium.
The middle of the pyramid has the most distinctive arrangement. The National League's knockout competition takes all seventy-two of its clubs and sorts them, after an opening stage, into a Cup and a Plate, so that sides knocked out early still have a trophy to play for. Regional leagues run their own cups on similar lines. A fifth-tier club can thus be in four knockout competitions in one season: the FA Cup, its regional league cup, its county cup and sometimes a second county or invitation trophy besides.
How the women's pyramid differs from the men's
A supporter who knows the men's system will find the women's one familiar in outline and different in almost every proportion.
| Feature | Women's pyramid | Men's pyramid |
|---|---|---|
| National divisions | Two, at tiers one and two | Five, at tiers one to five |
| First regional split | Tier three | Tier six |
| Professional cut-off | After tier two | Full-time throughout the top four tiers and most of the fifth |
| Entry by licence | Tiers one and two | Not used; ground grading and financial rules apply |
| Default matchday | Sunday afternoon | Saturday at three o'clock |
| County football begins | Tier seven | Tier eleven and below |
The depth is the plainest difference. Between the top of the men's game and the first county league there are ten tiers; in the women's game there are six. A women's side that won promotion every season from its county league would reach the WSL in six years, which no club has done, though a few have covered half the distance in a hurry.
Regional football arrives three tiers earlier, and that is a function of money. National travel costs what it costs regardless of a club's income, and the women's pyramid stops asking clubs to pay for it at the point where full-time wages stop too. The men's structure beneath the EFL, with its numbered steps, is described in the non-league steps guide, and both systems appear side by side in the English football pyramid explained level by level.
Sunday is the other tell. Women's football in England grew up on Sunday afternoons because pitches were occupied on Saturdays, and the habit has survived professionalism everywhere except where television has moved a fixture. Below the WSL the standard kick-off is still two o'clock on a Sunday.
The licence has no real counterpart either. A men's club winning the National League is promoted to the EFL if its ground and finances pass inspection, but nobody asks how many hours a week its players are contracted for. In the women's game that question is the gate.
One last difference is easy to overlook. In the men's pyramid a club is almost always its own legal entity with its own ground. In the women's pyramid a large proportion of the teams from tier four upwards are departments of a men's club, playing at a ground chosen for them and funded from a budget set elsewhere. That changes what promotion means. For an independent men's club it is an achievement the club itself decided to pursue. For many women's teams it is something the parent company has to approve first.
The restructures behind today's shape
The present structure is recent. None of its top four tiers existed in its current form before 2014, and each layer was added on top of the last.
1991: a national league at last
The Women's Football Association launched a Women's National League for the 1991-92 season with twenty-four clubs: a National Division of eight and a Northern and Southern Division beneath it. Doncaster Belles won the first title. The FA took the competition over in 1994 and renamed it the FA Women's Premier League. This came barely two decades after the governing body had lifted the prohibition described in why women's football was banned.
2011 and 2014: a new roof, then a second floor
The WSL was placed on top in 2011 as a closed, licensed league of eight, and the Premier League's National Division became tier two overnight. Three years later the Super League added its own second division. The National Division was abolished, the old Northern and Southern Divisions dropped to tier three, and the four regional Combination Leagues beneath them were absorbed as Division One. That is the moment the modern six-division National League took shape.
2018 and 2025: licences and names
In 2018 every club in the top two tiers had to reapply. The top division became full-time, the second tier was renamed the Championship, and the leagues at tiers three and four took the National League name. Places were awarded on applications as well as results, which moved several clubs up or down by more than one tier in a single summer. The story of that shift is told in when the women's game turned professional.
The 2025 changes were mostly cosmetic by comparison: a new operating brand, the Championship becoming WSL2 and a vote to add two clubs to the top flight. The names have now changed often enough that anyone reading an old league table needs to check which tier it described at the time.
Up fast and down hard: clubs that show how the pyramid works
Southampton FC Women are the best recent advertisement for the open route. In 2018-19 they won the Southern Region Premier Division at tier five. They were moved up to tier three in 2021 through the upward movement process after two curtailed seasons, won the Southern Premier at the first attempt and beat Wolverhampton Wanderers 1-0 in the play-off at Edgeley Park in May 2022. Tier five to tier two in four years, two of which had no completed league season.
Newcastle United did the upper half of that climb faster. Champions of Division One North in 2022-23, champions of the Northern Premier in 2023-24, second-tier football in 2024-25. Back-to-back titles on a budget the rest of the third tier could not approach.
The traffic the other way is just as instructive. Doncaster Rovers Belles, twice national champions in the early 1990s and founder members of the WSL, won the second tier in 2017-18, could not fund the licence that followed and were playing at tier four by 2019. Yeovil Town were a WSL club in 2018-19, went into financial difficulty, were refused a second-tier licence and dropped straight to the National League. Millwall Lionesses, FA Cup winners in the 1990s, restarted in the Eastern Region league after the 2019 separation. Reading's fall from the top flight to tier five took a little over a year.
Read together, those cases say something uncomfortable. On the way up, the pyramid rewards results and money about equally. On the way down, money decides almost everything, and it works faster than any run of defeats. A club's tier in the women's game is still a statement about its funding as much as its football, and the licensing system, for all the stability it has brought to the top, is the mechanism that makes that true.
More English football guides are gathered on the England hub, with the rest of the site's coverage in the football section.