We've already broken 2026 AFL broadcast coverage down by state and by team. This one asks a different question: as the season moves round by round, how much of it is actually free anywhere, and which channels are doing the carrying? FootyTonight archived every match's broadcast listing across all 25 rounds of the 2026 home-and-away season and rebuilt the season as a timeline rather than a single tally.
The headline: only 2 of the season's 25 rounds had every match free somewhere. The other 23 rounds left at least one match — often several — with no free-to-air option in any state.
Free coverage, round by round
The table below counts, for each round, how many matches were played and how many of those had a free-to-air option (Channel 7, 7mate or 7plus) in at least one state. A match only needs to be free somewhere to count here — this is a looser bar than any single state's own free count, which is why the numbers are higher than the state breakdown in our companion piece.
| Round | Matches | Free somewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 5 | 3 |
| 1 | 9 | 5 |
| 2 | 7 | 4 |
| 3 | 7 | 4 |
| 4 | 8 | 6 |
| 5 | 9 | 5 |
| 6 | 9 | 5 |
| 7 | 9 | 6 |
| 8 | 9 | 5 |
| 9 | 9 | 5 |
| 10 | 9 | 6 |
| 11 | 9 | 9 |
| 12 | 7 | 6 |
| 13 | 8 | 8 |
| 14 | 7 | 6 |
| 15 | 7 | 6 |
| 16 | 7 | 6 |
| 17 | 9 | 7 |
| 18 | 9 | 8 |
| 19 | 9 | 6 |
| 20 | 9 | 7 |
| 21 | 9 | 8 |
| 22 | 9 | 8 |
| 23 | 9 | 6 |
| 24 | 9 | 7 |
Round 11 and Round 13 are the only two where every listed match had a free option somewhere in the country. Every other round shipped at least one match that, wherever you lived, wasn't on free TV — the gap is smallest in the low-round-count weeks like Round 12 (one match short of full) and widest in rounds like Round 1 and Round 5, where only 5 of 9 matches had any free listing at all.
That "free somewhere" bar is generous — it doesn't mean free in your state, just free in at least one state nationally. Our state-by-state breakdown shows what that looks like once you narrow it to a single market: see free AFL coverage by state for the full 8-state table, including why the same round can look completely different in Perth versus Melbourne.
Which channels carried the season
This is a count of broadcast listings, not matches. A single match can appear on more than one channel — free-to-air and pay TV simultaneously, or two free channels in different states — so these numbers are rows in our broadcast database, not a count of distinct games. Don't read "7plus: 139" as "7plus showed 139 different matches"; read it as "7plus was listed as an option 139 times across the season."
Free-to-air listings:
| Channel | Listings |
|---|---|
| 7plus | 139 |
| Channel 7 | 135 |
| 7mate | 102 |
Pay TV listings:
| Service | Listings |
|---|---|
| Kayo Sports | 254 |
| Fox Footy | 170 |
7plus, Seven's streaming platform, carried slightly more listings than the Channel 7 broadcast itself, with 7mate — Seven's secondary free channel, used for concurrent or lower-profile matches — some way behind both. On the pay side, Kayo Sports carried more listings across the season than Fox Footy, though the two aren't mutually exclusive: a match with a Fox Footy listing is very often also on Kayo Sports, since Kayo is Foxtel's streaming counterpart. We're reporting listing counts as they sit in our database, not making a claim about which platform "owns" more matches exclusively.
Why round-by-round coverage isn't flat
We can report that 23 of 25 rounds left at least one match without any free option, and that two rounds had full free coverage. We can't tell you why Seven chose to schedule it that way — how many matches a broadcaster puts to free TV in a given week is a commercial decision made well upstream of anything visible in a broadcast guide, and we don't have visibility into that process. What we can say is what the archive shows: free coverage isn't a fixed weekly quota. Some rounds (11, 13) had zero gaps; others (1, 5, 8, 9) had four gaps out of nine matches.
If you're trying to plan around a specific round rather than the season as a whole, the state breakdown is the more useful tool — a round that looks thin nationally can still be fully free in your own state, and vice versa.
A note on NRL
We don't have a season-wide version of this table for NRL, and the shape of what's missing is worth stating plainly. Our database holds 157 NRL broadcast listings covering 48 matches — and all 48 sit in rounds 20 to 25, eight per round. Nothing before round 20 exists. That's because nrl.com's draw data only exposes broadcast listings for the current round, so our daily ingest has been able to capture them going forward but there is no historical feed to backfill from, unlike the AFL guide we used to fill in that competition's full season.
For the rounds we do hold, NRL's free listings split across 9Now (21), Channel 9 (20) and 9Gem (20), with Fox League (48) and Kayo Sports (48) on the paid side. Those are counts for six rounds, not a season, and we won't present them as anything else.
Data and methodology
This covers all 207 AFL 2026 home-and-away matches across 25 rounds (Round 0 through Round 24), with broadcast coverage confirmed for every match. "Free somewhere" means at least one Australian state had a free-to-air listing (Channel 7, 7mate or 7plus) for that match in the AFL's official broadcast guide — it does not mean free nationally or free in every state. The channel tables count broadcast listing rows in our database, including cases where the same match is listed on more than one channel or in more than one state. NRL figures are reported separately and explicitly as a partial sample, not a season total, because nrl.com only exposes broadcast listings for the current round, leaving us with rounds 20-25 only and no way to backfill earlier ones.
FootyTonight ingests and normalises the AFL's broadcast guide so fans can check coverage without cross-referencing multiple broadcaster pages or digging through archived listings themselves. For more on where this data comes from and what we do and don't publish, see how we source data. For the live 2026 fixture and current broadcast listings, check how to watch AFL and AFL fixtures.