Ask "how much AFL can I watch for free this year" and the honest answer depends on which state you're asking from. FootyTonight pulled the AFL's official broadcast guide for every one of the 207 home-and-away matches in the 2026 season and normalised it by state. The result is a real spread, not a rounding error: 44% of games are free in the ACT, 28% are free in the Northern Territory.
It's a count of every match where a free channel (Seven, 7mate or 7plus) is listed as a viewing option in that state, not a guess about vibes or anecdote.
Free AFL matches by state, full 2026 season
| State | Free matches | Share of 207 |
|---|---|---|
| ACT | 91 | 44% |
| NSW | 90 | 43% |
| QLD | 87 | 42% |
| VIC | 81 | 39% |
| TAS | 81 | 39% |
| WA | 76 | 37% |
| SA | 63 | 30% |
| NT | 57 | 28% |
The gap between the top and bottom of that table is 34 matches, out of 207 played across the season. That's the difference between an ACT household and an NT household with the same free-to-air setup and no subscription.
Across the season, three free channels carried the coverage: 7plus appeared for 139 matches, Channel 7 for 135, and 7mate for 102 (a match can carry more than one free option, which is why these don't sum to 207).
Why the same round looks different in Perth and Melbourne
This isn't about time zones. It's about which match each state's free channel actually shows. Our data shows Seven's free broadcast splitting by region, with different matches offered free in WA and VIC in the same round — as the Round 6 example below shows. We don't have visibility into how the broadcaster decides which match to allocate to which state; we can only report what actually aired free where.
Round 6 makes the mechanism obvious. In Western Australia, the free broadcast that round was West Coast v Fremantle, carried on Channel 7 and 7plus: the derby, shown to the state that cares most about it. Over in Victoria, the free broadcast for the same round was a completely different match: Melbourne v Brisbane Lions, also on Channel 7 and 7plus. A Victorian fan checking a national AFL fixture page and expecting to catch the western derby for free would find it wasn't offered in their market that week, and vice versa for a WA fan looking for Demons v Lions.
This pattern repeats through the season. In Round 4, WA's free game was Adelaide v Fremantle while VIC's was North Melbourne v Carlton. In Round 7, WA had St Kilda v West Coast free while VIC had Brisbane Lions v Adelaide. In Round 9, WA had Melbourne v West Coast while VIC had Richmond v Adelaide. Each state is effectively watching a locally-curated free slate, not a shared national one, and a national AFL guide or a Google search from the wrong state can point you at a match your local channel never carries free.
Reading the state gap correctly
We can report the counts; we can't tell you why the broadcaster set them this way. The ACT and NSW sit at the top of the table (44% and 43%), QLD, VIC and TAS cluster in the middle (39–42%), and SA and NT trail (30% and 28%). Beyond that, the reasoning behind Seven's state-by-state allocation isn't in our data, and we're not going to guess at it.
SA and NT are the standout gap. At 30% and 28% respectively, fewer than one in three matches gets a free option in those markets across the whole season. If you're in Adelaide or Darwin and relying on free-to-air alone, you're watching noticeably less than a Canberra or Sydney household with the identical subscription (or lack of one).
What this means if you're deciding where to watch from
If your household is choosing between free-to-air and a paid subscription, the honest starting point is your own state's number, not a national average. A NSW-based fan asking "do I really need Kayo or Foxtel" is answering a different question than an SA-based fan asking the same thing. The free baseline they're comparing against differs by 13 percentage points.
For the live 2026 fixture, including which channel carries each specific match, check /afl/how-to-watch and cross-reference with /afl/fixtures for kickoff times in your state. If you want to know how many of those free games belong to your own club specifically, rather than to your state as a whole, see our companion breakdown: how many AFL games your team gets free-to-air, by state.
Data and methodology
These figures cover all 207 AFL 2026 home-and-away matches, with broadcast coverage confirmed for 207 of 207 games. "Free" means the match had at least one free-to-air option (Channel 7, 7mate or 7plus) listed for that state in the AFL's official broadcast guide. FootyTonight ingests and normalises this guide by state so fans can check coverage without cross-referencing multiple broadcaster pages. NRL broadcast data in our database is not yet complete enough to publish season-wide state figures, so this analysis covers AFL only. See how we source data for more on where these figures come from and what we don't publish.