How Many Games in an NFL Season? Why It Is 17, Not 16

On March 30, 2021, the 32 owners of the National Football League voted to add a game to the regular season for the first time since 1978. Every NFL team now plays 17 regular-season games, spread over 18 weeks that begin just after Labor Day and end in early January. Each team gets one week off. Across the league that comes to 272 games.

The number is 17 and not 16 because the collective bargaining agreement the league signed with the NFL Players Association in March 2020 gave owners the option of one more game, and only one. The same agreement capped the preseason and the regular season at 20 games combined, so the fourth preseason game disappeared on the day the seventeenth regular-season game arrived. Put three preseason games in front and as many as four playoff games behind, and a team that wins the Super Bowl takes the field 23 or 24 times between August and February. Twenty or 21 of those count.

How many games in an NFL season: 17 for each team, 272 in all

The arithmetic is short. Thirty-two teams playing 17 games each makes 544 team appearances, and every game uses two of them, so the regular season holds 272 games. A full weekend with nobody resting has 16. Eighteen full weekends would hold 288, and the 32 byes, each one half of a game that does not happen, remove 16 of those.

• 17Regular-season games per team
• 18Weeks in the regular season
• 272Regular-season games league-wide
• 285Games that count, playoffs included

The format in use since the 2021 season. The 285 figure adds the 13 playoff games, Super Bowl included, to the 272 played in the regular season.

Nobody plays 16 or 18. The league does not drop a game for bad weather the way baseball once shrugged off a rainout between two also-rans in late September; a postponed NFL game is moved by a day or a few days and played. The one exception in the 17-game era came in January 2023 and is described further down.

Who a team plays is settled by formula before the previous season's confetti has been swept up. The dates are not, and the two halves of that process are covered in the site's explainer on how the NFL schedule is made. The opponent list for every team has the same five parts.

Part of the schedule	Games	How the opponents are chosen
Division rivals	6	Home and away against the other three teams in the division
One division in the same conference	4	A full division, rotating on a three-year cycle
One division in the other conference	4	A full division, rotating on a four-year cycle
Same-place finishers in the same conference	2	The teams that finished in the same position in the two remaining divisions
The seventeenth game	1	A team from the other conference, matched on the previous season's division finish

Fourteen of the 17 are fixed years ahead by the rotations. Only three depend on how a team did the season before, which is the whole of what people mean when they call a schedule a "first-place schedule" or a "last-place schedule." It is a smaller tilt than the phrase suggests.

The 18 weeks are not interchangeable. Byes are confined to a stretch in the middle of the calendar, so the opening month and the closing month are played at full strength, and since 2010 the final week has consisted entirely of division games. That last choice was made to keep the final Sunday from filling up with teams resting starters against opponents they had no reason to care about.

Counting the whole year: preseason, playoffs and the 20 or 21 a champion plays

Seventeen is the answer to the question as most people ask it. It is not the number of times a good team actually plays.

Before the regular season, every team plays three preseason games. Two teams play four, because the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, is staged a week before anyone else starts and the labor agreement treats it as an extra. Those games are exhibitions in the strict sense: no standings, no statistics that reach the record book, and starters who are often in sweatpants by the second quarter. The site's guide to what the three preseason games are for goes through how coaches use them.

After the regular season come the playoffs, and since the 2020 season 14 teams qualify, seven from each conference. The bracket is single elimination and has four rounds.

Stage	Games for one team	Games league-wide
Preseason	3, or 4 for the two Hall of Fame Game teams	49
Regular season	17	272
Wild-card round	1, with the top seed in each conference idle	6
Divisional round	1	4
Conference championships	1	2
Super Bowl	1	1

Thirteen playoff games, then. Add them to the 272 and the league plays 285 games that matter in a season, 334 if the preseason is counted.

For a champion the total depends on one thing: whether it earned the bye. The top seed in each conference skips the wild-card round and needs three wins, which makes 20 games. Every other seed needs four, which makes 21. The 2021 Los Angeles Rams, a fourth seed, were the first champions to play 21. Under the 16-game schedule the ceiling had been 20, and a champion with a bye finished at 19. That is also why the 2007 New England Patriots, unbeaten until the last of their 19 games, are remembered as 18-1.

What the count leaves out

The Pro Bowl, in whatever form the league currently stages it, is not a game in any of these totals. Neither are joint practices, which have taken over much of the work the fourth preseason game used to do. And for the individual player the number is usually lower than 17 anyway. Injuries see to that. The roster rules that let a team carry 53 players and dress 48 exist because nobody expects the same 22 starters to survive four and a half months intact.

Why it is 17 and not 16: the 2020 labor agreement and the March 2021 vote

Owners had wanted a longer season for more than a decade before they got one. During the 2011 lockout the league's opening position was an 18-game schedule, and the players' union refused it flatly on injury grounds; the agreement that ended that dispute kept the schedule at 16. When the two sides sat down again at the end of the decade, the league came back with a smaller request and a larger offer.

The result is a short provision in the collective bargaining agreement. It gives the league the discretion to raise the regular season from 16 games per club to 17, and no further, on the condition that preseason and regular-season games together do not exceed 20 per team. The agreement closes the door behind it: no eighteenth regular-season game for the life of the deal.

The 20-game cap mattered as much as the option did. It meant a seventeenth game could not simply be stacked on top of four exhibitions. Something had to give, and the only thing available was the last preseason game, which most starters did not play in and few ticket holders had ever wanted to pay for.

Players ratified that agreement on March 15, 2020, by 1,019 votes to 959. Sixty votes. Several of the league's most prominent veterans had said publicly that they would vote no, and the seventeenth game was the reason most of them gave.

1. 12011The league proposes 18 games during the lockout. The union refuses, and the new agreement keeps the season at 16.
2. 2March 15, 2020Players ratify a new agreement by 1,019 votes to 959. The agreement allows a seventeenth game and bars an eighteenth.
3. 32020 seasonThe league plays 16 games as before. The pandemic cancels the preseason entirely.
4. 4March 2021The league completes new long-term contracts with its broadcast partners, priced with the larger schedule in mind.
5. 5March 30, 2021Owners vote to adopt a 17-game regular season and a three-game preseason, starting that fall.
6. 6January 8 and 9, 2022The first Week 18 is played, closing the first 17-game season.

The sequence from the labor agreement to the first 17-game season. Dates are from the agreement itself and the league's announcements.

The year's delay was not hesitation. The option in the agreement was worth far more to the owners once it could be sold, and the buyers were the television networks. New media contracts were finished in March 2021 and the vote followed within two weeks. The labor agreement had anticipated exactly that order of events: it contains a clause, called the media kicker, that pays players a higher share of revenue in 17-game seasons if those new contracts beat a set threshold.

So the honest answer to "why 17" has little to do with football. Seventeen is an odd, lopsided number that no scheduler would have chosen from a blank page. It is what was left when one side wanted 18 and the other wanted 16.

Where the extra game comes from: a cross-conference opponent

The first sixteen games already used up every team in a club's own conference that the formula could reasonably reach. The seventeenth had to come from the other one.

The rule the owners approved has two parts. First, divisions are paired across conferences on a rotation, and the pairing is always with the division a team met in full two seasons earlier. Second, within that pairing, teams are matched by where they finished in their own division the year before. First place plays first place. Fourth plays fourth.

The inaugural set shows how it works. In 2021 the NFC East was paired with the AFC East, which it had last played as a full division in 2019. Washington had won the NFC East in 2020 and Buffalo the AFC East, so Washington went to Buffalo. The second-place New York Giants went to second-place Miami. Third-place Dallas played at third-place New England, and Philadelphia, last in 2020, played at the New York Jets, who had been last too. None of those four games would have existed under the old formula.

Two things follow from the design.

One is that the long gaps between cross-conference meetings got shorter. Under the 16-game formula a team could go four years without seeing anybody from a given division in the other conference. Now a full four-game slate against that division comes round every four years and a single placement game against one of its members falls halfway between.

The other is competitive, and the league intended it. A division winner now gets three opponents chosen because they also won their divisions, where it used to get two. A last-place team gets three fellow strugglers. Three games in 17 is a little under 18 percent of the schedule, enough to nudge the league toward the parity it sells and not enough to rescue a bad roster.

There is an oddity worth knowing. The match is on division finish, not record, so a 9-8 division winner draws the same seventeenth opponent that a 14-3 division winner would have. The divisions and conferences that produce those finishes are not equally strong in any given year, and the formula makes no attempt to correct for that.

Nine home games one year, eight the next

Seventeen cannot be split evenly. The league's solution was to split it by conference: in any one season, all 16 teams in one conference host the seventeenth game and all 16 in the other travel for it.

Season	Conference with nine home games	Conference with eight
2021	AFC	NFC
2022	NFC	AFC
2023	AFC	NFC
2024	NFC	AFC
2025	AFC	NFC
2026	NFC	AFC

AFC teams host in odd-numbered years and NFC teams in even ones. The reason for doing it by conference and not, say, by drawing lots is that playoff places are awarded within a conference. Every team chasing the same seven berths has the same number of home games. An NFC team with eight home dates is not competing with an AFC team that has nine; it is competing with 15 clubs in exactly its own position.

The imbalance does show up in one place, the Super Bowl matchup itself, where one finalist has played a slightly more home-heavy schedule than the other. Nobody has made a serious argument that it matters.

How the preseason evens out the gate

Owners cared about a different symmetry: tickets. A club with nine regular-season home games hosts one preseason game that summer, and a club with eight hosts two. Either way the building opens ten times. Season-ticket packages therefore cover the same number of dates every year, with the mix changing underneath.

The international wrinkle

When the owners approved the seventeenth game they passed a second resolution alongside it, committing every club to play abroad on a regular cycle, and the home games given up for those trips were to come first from teams in the nine-game conference. That softened the cost of taking a game to London, Germany or beyond: a team surrendering one of nine home dates still keeps eight. The overseas slate has grown since then, so the tidy link between the ninth home game and the trip abroad is looser than it was in 2022.

What the players got for the seventeenth game

A larger share of the money, first. Under the previous agreement players received roughly 47 percent of league revenue. The 2020 deal set a floor of 48 percent from the 2021 season on. In 17-game seasons the media kicker can push the figure higher still, to a maximum of 48.8 percent, depending on how far the new television contracts exceeded a benchmark written into the agreement. A percentage point of NFL revenue is a very large number of dollars, and it flows to players through the salary cap. The mechanics are laid out in our explainer on how the league divides its revenue.

Second, the preseason shrank. The agreement limits the league to three preseason games in any year with 17 regular-season games. Veterans had regarded the fourth exhibition as pure risk for no pay that resembled a game check, and few mourned it.

Then a list of smaller things, some of them not small to the players affected:

• Salaries are paid across 18 weekly checks instead of 17, so a base salary is earned in eighteenths, bye week included.
• Padded practices in training camp were capped at 16, fewer than the old deal allowed, with an acclimation period before pads go on at all.
• Game-day rosters grew from 46 active players to 48, on the condition that a team dresses enough offensive linemen.
• Practice squads were enlarged, and the minimum salaries on every rung of the scale went up.

Whether that was a fair price is a judgment, and the 60-vote margin says the players themselves were split almost down the middle. The case for yes was that minimum-salary players, who are most of the union, gained the most from the raised floors and the bigger practice squads. The case for no was made mainly by established starters, who take the most snaps and would absorb most of the additional collisions. Both groups were reading the deal correctly. It paid the rank and file and it cost the stars, and the rank and file had more votes.

The owners got something else in the same document that is easy to forget: a 14-team playoff field in place of 12, which added two wild-card games a year from 2020.

Why football plays so few games

One a week. That has been the rhythm of professional football since the league's first decade, and everything else about the sport's calendar comes from it.

A football game is a sequence of collisions between very large people, and the week between games is mostly recovery. A typical one runs like this: treatment and film on Monday, a players' day off on Tuesday, the game plan installed across Wednesday and Thursday, a lighter Friday, a walk-through on Saturday. There is no room in it for a second game. The league's one regular experiment with less rest, the Thursday night game, asks a team to play twice in five days and is unpopular with players for precisely that reason, as the guide to how the bye week works describes.

The consequence is a season in which each game carries a weight no other American league can match. One NFL game is one-seventeenth of a season, 5.9 percent. One Major League Baseball game is 0.6 percent. In standings terms a single Sunday is worth about nine and a half baseball games, or nearly five in the NBA. A three-game losing streak, which a baseball club gets through on a bad road trip without anyone noticing, is more than a sixth of an NFL season gone.

That scarcity is the league's product. It is why a Week 3 game in September draws an audience that other sports reserve for their finals, and why owners who would like more inventory have still moved slowly: each added game dilutes the others a little.

It has a cost in fairness, though. Seventeen games is a small sample. An injured quarterback, a tipped pass, a missed kick from 48 yards or an overtime coin toss can move a team two wins in either direction, and the schedule is too short for that luck to even out. Records bunch together as a result, and the league needs a long ladder of tiebreakers to separate teams that 17 games could not. How those appear in the table is the subject of our guide to reading the NFL standings.

What a longer season did to the record book

On January 4, 2026, in the final week of the 2025 regular season, Cleveland's Myles Garrett sacked Cincinnati's quarterback for his 23rd sack of the year. It broke a record of 22.5 that Michael Strahan had set in 2001 and T.J. Watt had tied in 2021.

It also happened in Garrett's seventeenth game. Strahan had 16 to work with.

This was the argument everyone saw coming in March 2021, and the NFL's answer has been consistent: there are no asterisks. The league's record book lists season totals and does not sort them by schedule length. That is the same position it took in 1961, when the season grew from 12 games to 14, and in 1978, when it grew to 16. Baseball went the other way in 1961, when its commissioner suggested that a home run record set in a 162-game season should carry some distinguishing mark beside one set in 154, and the sport spent thirty years regretting it.

The honest way to read a modern total is alongside the games it took.

Single-season record	Holder and total	Season	Team games that year
Rushing yards	Eric Dickerson, 2,105	1984	16
Passing yards	Peyton Manning, 5,477	2013	16
Passing touchdowns	Peyton Manning, 55	2013	16
Receiving yards	Calvin Johnson, 1,964	2012	16
Sacks	Myles Garrett, 23	2025	17

Those are the marks as they stood through the 2025 season, and any of them can fall in any year. What is striking is how many 16-game records survived the first five 17-game seasons. Cooper Kupp finished 2021 with 1,947 receiving yards, 17 short of Johnson, with an extra game in hand. Saquon Barkley reached 2,005 rushing yards through 16 games in 2024, 100 behind Dickerson, and then sat out the final week because Philadelphia had nothing to play for. The extra game is an opportunity. It is also one more week in which a contending team may decide its best player should rest.

Per-game marks tell a different story

O.J. Simpson ran for 2,003 yards in 1973, when the season was 14 games long. That is 143.1 yards a game, and nobody in the half century since, with 16 games or 17, has matched the pace. Dickerson's record season works out to 131.6. Per-game figures are the fairest way to compare across eras of different length.

Team records moved as well, with less noise. A perfect regular season is now 17-0. The 2007 Patriots' 16-0 can be equaled in losses but never again in form, and the 1972 Dolphins went 14-0 before winning three playoff games, a year told in full in our piece on Miami's perfect season. At the other end, 0-16 has been replaced as the worst possible record by 0-17, which no team had managed through the 2025 season.

How 17 compares with college football, the CFL and the other leagues

Football is the outlier among American team sports, and the NFL is not even the shortest season within football.

College football, FBS12games

NFL17games

Canadian Football League18games

Major League Soccer34games

NBA82games

NHL84games

Major League Baseball162games

Scheduled regular-season games for one team, excluding preseason and playoffs. The NHL figure is the 84-game schedule adopted from 2026-27; it had been 82.

Show the numbers

Regular-season games per team in North American leagues

Item	Value
College football, FBS	12games
NFL	17games
Canadian Football League	18games
Major League Soccer	34games
NBA	82games
NHL	84games
Major League Baseball	162games

Teams in the top tier of college football play 12 regular-season games, a number set by NCAA rules, though conference championship games, bowls and the College Football Playoff can now carry the best of them well past that. The full count is in our guide to how many games a college football season has. A national champion that plays through a conference title game and every playoff round can finish with about as many games as an NFL team plays in its regular season, which is one of the pressures on the college calendar.

The Canadian Football League has played 18 regular-season games for decades, on a bigger field with twelve men a side and three downs, and it gives its teams more than one bye to get through them. Supporters of an 18-game NFL season point north whenever the subject comes up. Opponents point out that the CFL season is run with smaller rosters of smaller players and that the comparison flatters nobody.

Then the daily sports. Basketball asks for 82 and has done since the late 1960s, a schedule explained in our page on the NBA's 82-game season. Hockey has just gone from 82 to 84. Baseball plays 162, nearly ten times the NFL count, and treats a three-game series the way football treats a quarter.

Measured in calendar time the gap is narrower than the chart suggests. The NFL regular season occupies 18 weeks, a little over four months. Baseball's 162 games take about six months. Football puts one game into a week in which baseball plays six or seven, and the difference between the sports lies there more than in the length of the season.

What the chart cannot show is that these numbers produce different kinds of sport. A baseball season is a long statistical argument that the best team usually wins. A football season is 17 separate events, and a great deal of what fans feel about the NFL, the dread on a Sunday morning included, comes from knowing how few there are.

The road to 17: twelve games, then fourteen, then sixteen

In the 1920s there was no schedule in the modern sense. Clubs arranged their own games, played different numbers of them, and the title went to whoever had the best winning percentage. A fixed count arrived in the mid-1930s: twelve games at first, eleven from 1937, ten in the war years of 1943 to 1945, and twelve again from 1947.

Twelve lasted through the 1950s, the decade in which television found the sport. Then a rival forced the next step. The American Football League began play in 1960 with a 14-game schedule, and the NFL matched it in 1961. For a single season, 1960, the two leagues played schedules of different lengths, 14 games in the new league and 12 in the old one. Fourteen then held for 17 seasons, across the merger of the two leagues in 1970.

Scheduled games per team in the first season of each format. The strike-shortened seasons of 1982 and 1987 are not plotted.

Show the numbers

Regular-season games per NFL team

Item	Games
1947	12
1961	14
1978	16
2021	17

The move to 16 came in 1978. It was packaged with a second wild-card team in each conference and, critically, with a shorter preseason. Teams in the 14-game years had typically played six exhibitions. From 1978 they played four.

That trade is the pattern worth noticing, because it has been repeated exactly.

• Through 1977: 14 regular-season games and six in the preseason. Twenty in all.
• From 1978: 16 and four. Twenty.
• From 2021: 17 and three. Twenty.

Each expansion of the season has been paid for by converting an exhibition into a game that counts. Owners lose nothing at the gate, since season-ticket holders were already being charged for preseason games, and they gain a real game to sell to television. Players get a paycheck for work they had been doing for a per diem. The 2020 agreement turned the habit into a contractual limit by capping the combined total at 20.

The calendar grew in other ways during the 16-game era. A bye week was added in 1990, stretching 16 games over 17 weeks. In 1993 the league tried two byes per team and an 18-week season, disliked it, and went back to one the following year. So the 18-week regular season of today is not new. What is new is filling it with 17 games.

The seasons that came up short: 1982, 1987 and one canceled game

Twice since the schedule reached 16 games, a labor dispute has cut it down.

The first was 1982. Players struck after the second week of the season, on September 21, and stayed out for 57 days. When they came back in mid-November there was time for seven more games, so every team finished with nine. Division standings were meaningless with so few games, and the league threw them out, seeding the top eight teams in each conference into a 16-team tournament. Two clubs got in at 4-5, the first losing teams ever to make the playoffs, a story picked up in our guide to the worst records to reach the postseason. Washington won the Super Bowl at the end of it.

The second was 1987, and it was stranger. Players struck again after Week 2. This time the owners canceled only one week of games and then resumed the schedule with replacement players: men who had been cut in training camp that summer, veterans of leagues that had folded, players several years out of the game, and a few regulars who crossed the picket line. Three weeks of those games were played and, unlike anything in 1982, they counted in the standings. The strike collapsed after 24 days. Every team finished with 15 games, three of them played largely by people who were not on the roster in Week 2 or in Week 7. Washington won the title again, having gone 3-0 with its replacements.

The league has otherwise been stubborn about playing every game. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the second week of the season was postponed and moved to the end of the calendar, which pushed the Super Bowl into February for the first time. In 2020 the pandemic erased the preseason and scattered games across unfamiliar days of the week, and all 256 were still played.

One game in the 17-game era was not. In Week 17 of the 2022 season, a Monday night game between Buffalo and Cincinnati was stopped in the first quarter after a Buffalo player suffered a medical emergency on the field. The league did not resume it. Both teams finished the season with 16 games, the league played 271 that year, and the owners approved a one-time resolution to handle an AFC playoff bracket in which contenders had played unequal numbers of games. It remains the only regular-season game canceled outright since the 1987 strike.

The push for 18 games

The owners would like one more. That much is not in dispute; the commissioner has said in public that he favors an 18-game regular season with a two-game preseason, and several owners have said the same. The arithmetic of the last two expansions points in the same direction. Eighteen and two is twenty.

What stands in the way is the provision described earlier. The current agreement, which runs through the 2030 season, forbids an eighteenth game outright. The league cannot add one by vote of the owners, as it added the seventeenth, because this time it holds no option. It would have to reopen the agreement with the union or wait for the next one, and in either case the players would name a price.

The union's public position has been that its members have little appetite for another game and that nothing changes without bargaining. That is not the same as never. In 2020 the players accepted a seventeenth game, nine years after refusing an eighteenth, once the terms improved. The items most often mentioned as the cost of an eighteenth are these:

• A second bye week for every team, which would stretch the regular season to 20 weeks.
• A preseason cut to two games.
• A further increase in the players' share of revenue.
• Larger rosters, and changes to offseason work and to the rules on practice in pads.

A 20-week regular season has consequences beyond the locker room. Start in early September, play 20 weeks and four playoff rounds, and the Super Bowl lands on the Sunday of Presidents' Day weekend, in the middle of February. The league regards a Super Bowl followed by a national holiday as an attraction. College football, whose championship has been drifting later into January, would have to work around it.

There is also the question the record book raised in 2021, asked again with less patience. An 18-game season would leave almost no single-season mark from the 16-game era safe, and a perfect regular season would mean 18-0.

Our judgment is that an eighteenth game is more likely than not to arrive with the next labor agreement, if not before, because the same trade that produced 16 and then 17 is available again and both sides know its value. That is a forecast, not a fact, and for now the fact is simpler. An NFL season is 17 games. For more on the sport's calendar and rules, the American football section collects every explainer on the site.