NHL Fighting Rules: Why Fights Are Allowed and Penalized
NHL fighting rules: the five-minute major, the instigator, aggressor and third-man-in penalties, bench suspensions, and why the league never banned it.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NHL Rules24 min read
- Penalty for fighting
- 5-minute major
- Instigator adds
- 2 minutes plus a 10-minute misconduct
- First player off the bench to fight
- 10-game suspension
- Rulebook citation
- Rule 46
Rule 46.14 of the NHL rulebook runs to eleven words: "A major penalty shall be imposed on any player who fights." That is the whole basic rule. Two players drop their gloves, the officials let it play out and then pull them apart, and each man sits in the penalty box for five minutes. Then he comes back and plays.
So fighting is against the rules in the NHL, and it is penalized every time. What sets the league apart from college hockey, the Olympics and nearly every other team sport in the United States is the size of the penalty. A fight alone is not an ejection. The heavier punishments in Rule 46 are reserved for the things around a fight: starting it, refusing to stop, piling in as a third man, coming off the bench, taking a helmet or jersey off first. Each of those has its own penalty, and several carry automatic suspensions.
Is fighting legal in the NHL? The five-minute major, and nothing more
Legal is the wrong word. Tolerated is closer. The rulebook defines a fight, attaches a penalty to it, and spends several pages on the complications.
The definition comes first. Under Rule 46.1, "a fight shall be deemed to have occurred when at least one player punches or attempts to punch an opponent repeatedly or when two players wrestle in such a manner as to make it difficult for the Linespersons to intervene and separate the combatants." One punch in a scrum is roughing, a two-minute minor. Repeated punches, or a wrestling match the officials cannot break up, is a fight.
The next paragraph matters as much. It gives referees "very wide latitude in the penalties with which they may impose under this rule," and says the discretion is deliberate, so that they can "differentiate between the obvious degrees of responsibility of the participants either for starting the fight or persisting in continuing the fight." Two players who square up by mutual consent are treated alike. A player who jumps an unwilling opponent is not treated like his victim.
- 5Minutes for a fighting major
- 2Minutes for the instigating minor
- 10Minutes for the instigator's misconduct
- 10Games suspended, first player off the bench to fight
Durations and suspension length from Rules 46 and 70 of the NHL rulebook. The misconduct is served by the player alone and does not leave his team shorthanded.
The five-minute price is very old. The league wrote fighting into its rulebook as a major penalty in 1922, when the alternative under the amateur codes of the day was to throw the fighters out, and it has never moved off that number. Everything since has been added on top.
A major differs from a minor in one important way. Under Rule 20.2 the penalized player "does not leave the penalty bench when the opposing team scores." He serves all five minutes whatever happens on the ice. The full ladder of penalty classes is laid out in our explainer on NHL penalties from a minor to a match.
Why the teams stay at five-on-five after a fight
Two men have just gone to the box for five minutes each, and yet both teams line up for the next faceoff with five skaters. First-time viewers often take this for a mistake.
It is the coincidental penalty rule. Rule 19.2 says that when major penalties of equal duration are imposed on players of both teams, "immediate substitutions shall be made" for them. The majors cancel for the purpose of manpower. Each coach sends out another player, and the game continues at full strength.
The fighters still serve every second. They also wait longer than five minutes, because coincidental penalties do not end on the clock. The players "shall not leave the penalty benches until the first stoppage of play following the expiry of their respective penalties." If play runs for three minutes without a whistle after their time is up, they sit and watch for three more minutes.
When the penalties are not equal
The cancellation only covers what matches. If one fighter is given something extra, the difference goes on the board.
The common case is the instigator. He receives a minor on top of his major, the two majors cancel, and his team is shorthanded for two minutes. Rule 20.1 says that when coincidental majors are in effect the minor is "recorded and served first." Because the instigator himself is tied up for far longer than that, a teammate has to sit in the box alongside him to serve the two minutes and step out when they expire.
The rarer case is a one-sided fight. If one player throws punches and the other covers up and refuses to engage, the referee may penalize only the puncher. A lone major with nothing to cancel it is a five-minute power play that does not end when a goal is scored, and it can decide a game.
The NHL instigator rule: an extra two and ten for starting it
Rule 46.11 does not define an instigator in a sentence. It gives referees a list of signs to look for: "distance traveled; gloves off first; first punch thrown; menacing attitude or posture; verbal instigation or threats; conduct in retaliation to a prior game (or season) incident; obvious retribution for a previous incident in the game or season."
A player who skates forty feet to grab an opponent has traveled the distance. One who drops his gloves while the other man still has his stick in his hands has taken them off first. Any or some of the criteria will do, and the referee is trusted to recognize the difference between two willing fighters and one who went looking.
The penalty is three things at once: "an instigating minor penalty, a major penalty for fighting and a ten-minute misconduct." Seventeen minutes in all. The minor puts his team shorthanded. The misconduct costs only the player, who is lost to his coach for most of a period.
| Instigator situation | In-game penalty | Automatic suspension |
|---|---|---|
| First instigator penalty of a game | Minor, major and 10-minute misconduct | None |
| Second instigator penalty in the same game | Minor, major and game misconduct | None |
| Third instigator penalty in one regular season | Minor, major and game misconduct | 2 games |
| Fourth in one regular season | The instigator penalties for that fight | 4 games |
| Fifth in one regular season | The instigator penalties for that fight | 6 games |
| Instigating in the final five minutes of regulation, or in overtime | Minor, major and game misconduct | 1 game, pending review |
The final five minutes
The last row is the one with real teeth. It was added for 2005-06, and it targets a specific habit: the team losing by three goals that sends out its toughest player in the dying minutes to settle a score.
Under Rules 46.12 and 46.21, a player ruled the instigator in the final five minutes of regulation or at any time in overtime gets the game misconduct and is "suspended for one game, pending a review of the incident." His coach is fined $10,000, "a fine that will double for each subsequent incident."
The review is the escape hatch. The league's Department of Player Safety looks at each case, and the suspension stands unless it decides the fight was "not related to the score, previous incidents in the game or prior games, retaliatory in nature, 'message sending', etc." A fight that erupts honestly at 16:00 of the third period in a one-goal game is often rescinded. One that follows a deliberate line change in a blowout usually is not. The rulebook says no team appeals are permitted, because every case is reviewed automatically.
Critics of the instigator rule, and there have always been many among players and coaches, argue that it protects the wrong man. A player who has just run a star into the boards can decline to fight, and anyone who makes him answer for it takes an extra seventeen minutes. Supporters reply that this is the point: the rule taxes vigilante justice and leaves the punishing to the referees.
The aggressor penalty: when one player will not stop
A fight has an ending that both men are supposed to recognize. One goes down, or gets his jersey pulled over his head, or simply stops throwing. The aggressor rule is for the player who keeps going.
Rule 46.2 defines him as "the player who continues to throw punches in an attempt to inflict punishment on his opponent who is in a defenseless position or who is an unwilling combatant." A second paragraph adds that a player "must be deemed the aggressor when he has clearly won the fight but he continues throwing and landing punches."
The penalty is a fighting major and a game misconduct. He is out of the game.
It is a different offense from instigating, and a player can commit both. Start a fight and then refuse to end it, and the rulebook stacks everything: the instigating minor, the major, the ten-minute misconduct and the game misconduct. Aggressor penalties are tracked across a season on the same scale as instigator penalties, with a two-game suspension for the third, four games for the fourth and six for the fifth. The playoffs run on a shorter fuse: a second aggressor penalty in one postseason brings an automatic one-game suspension, and each one after that adds a game. The slate is wiped before the Stanley Cup Final begins.
In practice the call turns on what the other man was doing. A player who drops to the ice and covers his head, the posture known as turtling, has declared himself an unwilling combatant, and every punch thrown at him after that is evidence for the referee.
The match penalties next door
Two acts in Rule 46.15 go beyond a game misconduct. A player wearing tape or other material on his hands below the wrist who cuts or injures an opponent in a fight receives a match penalty. So does a player who "punches an unsuspecting or unwilling opponent (i.e. 'sucker punch') and causes an injury."
A match penalty ejects the player, leaves his team shorthanded for five minutes and sends the matter to the league. It is the rulebook's way of saying that what happened was an assault and not a fight.
Third man in: the game misconduct that ended the gang fight
For the first half-century of the league, a fight between two players was an invitation. A teammate would arrive to even the odds, then an opponent to even them back, and within seconds there were five separate fights or one large one.
The league's answer, adopted for 1971-72, is now Rule 46.16. "A game misconduct penalty, at the discretion of the Referee, shall be imposed on any player who is the first to intervene (third man in) in an altercation already in progress." It comes in addition to whatever else he does once he gets there, and it applies to "subsequent players who elect to intervene" as well.
The exception is narrow and sensible. The rule does not apply "when a match penalty is being imposed in the original altercation." If a teammate is being attacked in a way that warrants a match penalty, a player who steps in to stop it is not thrown out for doing so.
Everybody else to the benches
A companion rule keeps the other eight skaters away. Rule 46.4 says that when a fight occurs, "all players not engaged shall go immediately to the area of their players' bench." If the fight is at one team's bench, that team's players go to their own defending zone instead. Goaltenders "shall remain in their goal crease," unless the fight is in front of it. Failure to clear the area costs the team $1,000 and its coach another $1,000.
Put the two rules together and the modern hockey fight makes sense. It is two men alone in an empty patch of ice with everyone else standing back by rule. A player who pairs off with an opponent and merely holds on, without throwing a punch, is generally left alone by the officials. The one who throws the first punch into an existing fight is done for the night.
Leaving the bench or the penalty box to fight
On May 14, 1987, before Game 6 of a conference final at the Montreal Forum, players from the Philadelphia Flyers and the Montreal Canadiens brawled during the pregame warmup. The officials were not yet on the ice. Players who had already gone to the dressing rooms came back out, some half-dressed, to join in.
The league rewrote its bench rules that summer, and what is now Rule 70 contains some of the stiffest automatic punishments in the book.
The basic prohibition is one sentence: "No player may leave the players' or penalty bench at any time during an altercation or for the purpose of starting an altercation." The first or second player from either team to do it receives a game misconduct. Then the suspensions begin. The first man over the boards is "suspended automatically without pay for the next ten (10) regular League and/or Play-off games." The second gets five.
The punishment spreads upward. The club is fined $10,000 for a first instance, rising by $5,000 for each repeat over the next three years. The coach whose players left the bench "shall be suspended, pending a review by the Commissioner," and fined up to $10,000. A club found to have reimbursed a player for the salary he lost is fined $100,000.
Ten playoff games can be most of a championship run. That is why benches no longer clear. Players today stand at the boards and shout, and nobody puts a skate over.
Fights outside the game
Rule 46.9 covers the warmup, the intermission and the minutes after the final horn. Players who fight "other than during the periods of the game" receive a major and a game misconduct, their teams are fined $25,000 each, and a player judged the instigator is suspended for ten games.
The legal change that is really a message
There is a way around the bench rule, and the rulebook knows it. A coach can make an ordinary line change during a stoppage, put his heaviest players on the ice for the faceoff, and let events take their course. Nobody left the bench illegally.
Rule 70.2 says such players are penalized for what they actually do, that a game misconduct "is not automatic in this situation," and that they are subject to supplementary discipline. Rule 46.10 adds that when "specific personnel changes have been made by one or both teams late in a game and an altercation ensues," the referee reports the incident to the Commissioner straight after the game. The home coach's advantage in choosing these matchups is explained in our guide to the last change and who plays whom.
Helmets, visors and jerseys: the equipment rules around a fight
In January 2009 a 21-year-old senior amateur player in Ontario named Don Sanderson died after his helmet came off in a fight and his head struck the ice. The fall, and not the punches, is the gravest danger in any hockey fight, and his death pushed leagues at every level to look again at what players wear when they drop their gloves.
Helmets stay on
The NHL's version arrived for the 2013-14 season and is now Rule 46.6. "No player may remove his helmet prior to engaging in a fight. If he should do so, he shall be assessed a two minute minor penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct." Helmets knocked off in the course of the fight draw no penalty.
Players briefly tried to get around it by politely removing each other's helmets before starting. The league moved quickly to treat that as a violation as well.
What happened to the visor penalty
For years the rulebook carried a curious extra: an instigator who was wearing a visor received an additional unsportsmanlike conduct minor. The reasoning was that a man with a shield over his eyes, picking a fight with a man who had none, was fighting with armor on, and that his opponent would break his hand on it.
That penalty is gone. It was dropped in 2013, the same summer the league made visors compulsory for newcomers. Rule 9.7 now requires that "all players who have fewer than 25 games of NHL experience must wear a visor," as of the 2013-14 season, and a rule that punished visor-wearers stopped making sense once almost everyone was becoming one. Older explainers still describe the extra minor as current. It is not in the rulebook.
The tie-down
Every NHL jersey has a strap sewn inside the back hem that fastens to the player's pants. Its job is to stop the jersey from coming off over his head in a fight, which matters because a fighter with no jersey gives his opponent nothing to hold, and holding is half of how a hockey fight works.
Rule 46.13 enforces it.
| What the player does | Penalty |
|---|---|
| Deliberately removes his jersey before an altercation | Unsportsmanlike conduct minor and a game misconduct |
| Removes it deliberately, and the fight never materializes | Unsportsmanlike conduct minor and a 10-minute misconduct |
| Fights with the jersey not properly tied down, and loses it completely | Game misconduct |
| Wears a modified jersey that does not conform to the uniform rule | Unsportsmanlike conduct minor and a game misconduct |
| Loses his jersey with the tie-down still fastened and intact | No penalty; the jersey is sent to the league for examination |
Around the league the strap is still called by the name of Rob Ray, the Buffalo Sabres winger whose jersey and shoulder pads had a way of coming off in the first seconds of a fight in the 1990s, leaving opponents grabbing at air.
What the linesmen are doing while the fight goes on
They are waiting, and they are doing it on purpose.
Nothing in Rule 46 tells a linesperson to dive between two men throwing punches. The definition of a fight itself acknowledges that it may be "difficult for the Linespersons to intervene." Two officials with no face protection and almost no padding, stepping between two large athletes swinging at each other, would be hurt regularly. So the working practice is to let a fight between two willing, upright, evenly matched players run until there is a safe moment to end it.
- Gloves dropTwo players square off. The referees watch the other eight skaters and note who started it.
- ClearingPlayers not involved go to their bench areas. Goaltenders stay in their creases.
- CirclingThe two linespersons move around the fighters, one behind each, close enough to step in.
- TriggerA player falls, loses his helmet, has his jersey over his head, stops fighting back, or the two tie each other up.
- SeparationEach linesperson takes one player, pins his arms and steers him away. A player who resists can be given a misconduct or game misconduct.
- PenaltiesThe referees confer, sort out instigator or aggressor calls, and report the penalties to the scorer.
A description of standard officiating practice alongside Rules 46.1, 46.4 and 46.5 of the NHL rulebook. The rulebook leaves the moment of intervention to the officials' judgment.
The triggers in the fourth step are the important part. A player on the ice cannot defend himself and may hit his head, so the fight is over when someone goes down. A bare head changes the risk of that fall, so a lost helmet brings the officials in quickly. A jersey pulled over a player's face blinds him. And when one man has plainly won, anything further is the aggressor rule waiting to be called.
Once the linespersons have hold of them, the players are expected to stop. Rule 46.5 gives the referee a misconduct or game misconduct for anyone who "persists in continuing or attempting to continue a fight" after being told to stop, "or who resists a Linesperson in the discharge of his duties."
The two referees, meanwhile, are not watching the fight at all. Their job is everything else: the third man drifting toward the pile, the bench door opening, the goalie leaving his crease.
Fights off a faceoff, second fights and the third major
On February 15, 2025, at the Bell Centre in Montreal, the United States and Canada opened a 4 Nations Face-Off game with three fights in the first nine seconds. The first two came straight off faceoffs. Each fight produced a pair of five-minute majors. Nobody was ejected.
That is the NHL rule working as written. Rule 46.10 says a fight that occurs "prior to the drop of the puck during the course of normal face-off" is "penalized as if it occurred during the regular playing time," and a fight a second after the drop is simply a fight. There is no extra penalty in the NHL for what fans call a staged fight. The American Hockey League, one rung down, has had one since 2016-17: a fight at or immediately after a faceoff brings an automatic game misconduct on top of the major. Had that game been played under AHL rules, the first four fighters would have been ejected almost before it began. How the draw itself is supposed to be conducted is covered in our guide to faceoff procedure and violations.
The second fight at the same stoppage
One provision is easy to miss. Rule 46.7 imposes a game misconduct "on any player who is assessed a major penalty for fighting after the original altercation has started." Once one fight is under way, anyone who starts another during the same stoppage is ejected, even if he squared off fairly with a willing opponent. The referee may waive it for a player whose opponent was clearly the instigator.
This is the rule, more than third man in, that prevents a single fight from spreading into several.
Three majors and out
A player can fight twice in a game and keep playing. He cannot do it a third time. Rule 20.4: "An automatic game misconduct shall be applied to any player who has been assessed a third major penalty in the same game." The majors need not all be for fighting.
The same limit applies to goaltenders, who are otherwise told to stay in their creases during a fight. A goalie who incurs three majors is "ruled off the ice for the balance of the game" under Rule 27.2. Goalie fights happen once every few seasons, usually when one skates the length of the ice to meet the other at center, and the crowd response is out of all proportion to the damage done.
How fighting is handled in college hockey, the Olympics and the minors
Every other major rulebook an American player grows up under is stricter than the NHL's.
| Competition | Penalty for fighting | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| NHL | Five-minute major | The player returns after serving it |
| American Hockey League | Five-minute major | Game misconduct for a fight at or just after a faceoff; suspensions once a player reaches a set number of fighting majors in a season |
| NCAA college hockey | Major and game disqualification | The player also misses at least his team's next game |
| IIHF tournaments, including the Olympics | Major and ejection from the game | Further suspension possible under supplementary discipline |
| USA Hockey youth and amateur play | Ejection from the game | Suspension from at least the next game |
College hockey is the starkest contrast. NCAA players wear full cages or shields, which makes punching a face pointless, and a fight means disqualification from that game and the next. Fights in American college hockey are rare enough to make news.
The international game takes the same view. The IIHF rulebook states in plain terms that fighting is not part of international hockey, and a player who fights is out of the game. That holds when NHL players go to the Olympics, because the Games are played under IIHF rules. The worst breach of that code came on January 4, 1987, in Piestany, Czechoslovakia, when a World Junior Championship game between Canada and the Soviet Union turned into a bench-clearing brawl. Both teams were thrown out of the tournament. The American tradition in international play runs the other way, toward speed and discipline, as our guide to the Miracle on Ice describes.
The developmental leagues have been tightening for a decade. The AHL suspends players who pile up fighting majors across a season, a system described with the rest of that league's structure in our guide to how the AHL and ECHL feed the NHL. The Ontario Hockey League caps the number of fights a player may have in a season before suspensions begin. The Quebec league, in 2023-24, began ejecting fighters outright.
The effect on the NHL is indirect and real. A player who reaches the league at 21 has spent his whole life under rules that ejected or suspended him for fighting. Fewer and fewer arrive knowing how.
Why the league has never banned fighting outright
The honest answer has three parts, and none of them is in the rulebook.
The deterrence argument
Hockey is played with sticks at high speed by people who can hurt each other in a dozen ways the referees will not always see. The traditional case for fighting is that it polices those ways. A player who slashes a star's wrists knows he will be made to answer for it, the argument runs, and so he thinks twice. Take away the fight and the stickwork gets worse.
The league's leadership has used a version of this for decades, describing fighting as a release that keeps tempers from finding more dangerous outlets. It was the logic behind the specialist described in our guide to the enforcer's job and why it faded: a player kept on the roster so that opponents would leave the skilled ones alone.
The players
The second part is that the players want it. Surveys of NHL players conducted with their union have repeatedly found large majorities against a ban, and any change to the penalty would have to pass through the competition committee on which players sit. A rule that the people subject to it overwhelmingly support is hard to remove.
The case against
The opposing case has grown stronger with time. Researchers at Boston University found chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of several former NHL fighters after their deaths, Bob Probert and Derek Boogaard among them. Bare-knuckle punches to the head are an obvious source of repeated trauma, and a league that suspends players for a shoulder to the head has an awkward time explaining why a fist is worth five minutes.
The deterrence argument has also been tested, in a sense, by every league that ejects fighters. College hockey and the Olympics are not noticeably dirtier than the NHL. Nobody has produced convincing evidence that fights reduce stick fouls or injuries, and plenty of fights have nothing to do with protecting anyone.
Our judgment is that the NHL has chosen to let fighting shrink without ever voting on it. Each rule added since 1971 has made it more expensive and narrower, and the league has been able to watch the numbers fall without the confrontation a ban would bring.
How the number of fights per game has fallen since the 1980s
The NHL counts fighting majors, and independent trackers have kept game-by-game tallies for decades. The numbers differ slightly depending on what is counted as a fight, so the figures here are rounded.
At the peak in the 1980s, the league averaged more than one fight per game. A typical night at the rink included one. In 2003-04, the last season before the lockout, the rate was around 0.6 a game. It fell sharply in the first season back, recovered most of that ground by the end of the decade, and then slid for good. It dropped below 0.2 late in the 2010s, and has sat between roughly 0.2 and 0.3 since. Most games now have none. These totals move every season.
Four changes did most of the work.
The instigator and bench rules. The automatic suspensions of 1987 ended the bench-clearing brawl, which had inflated the counts. The instigator rule, in something like its modern form from 1992-93, made the one-sided fight costly.
The 2005 rule package. After the lockout the league cracked down on hooking and holding, took out the red line for two-line passes, and got faster overnight. A player who could fight but could not keep up became a liability on every shift.
The salary cap. The cap arrived in the same year. With a fixed budget and a 23-man roster, a spot spent on a player who skates five minutes a night is a spot not spent on someone who can kill penalties. General managers stopped paying for fists alone.
What players learned about their brains. The deaths of several former enforcers in the early 2010s, and the research that followed, changed how players talk about the job. Fewer want it.
What is left is a different kind of fight. The arranged bout between two heavyweights, agreed with a nod before the puck dropped and unconnected to anything in the game, has nearly vanished. Today's fights are mostly reactions: a hit on a teammate, a scrum that boils over, a player answering for something he did a shift earlier. They involve regular players more often than specialists.
The eleven-word rule has not changed in any of this. It is still five minutes. Everything around it has moved, and that has been enough to turn the nightly ritual of the 1980s into something a fan may see a few times in a month of watching. More of the league's rulebook is explained across the guides on our United States sports hub.