Put an AFL ladder and an NRL ladder side by side and the shape looks the same: a ranked list, a points column, a cutoff line partway down. Look closer and the two competitions are sorting teams by different logic entirely. Neither is wrong — they're just answering "who's ahead" with different arithmetic, and that difference changes how you should read each table.
For the full breakdown of either competition on its own, see AFL ladder explained and NRL ladder explained. This one is about where they diverge.
Live ladders: /afl/ladder · /nrl/ladder
A win isn't worth the same number either way
AFL pays 4 competition points for a win, 2 for a draw, 0 for a loss, and 4 for a bye. NRL pays 2 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss, and 2 for a bye.
Halve every AFL number and you get the NRL scale — the relative gap between a win and a draw is identical in both codes. But because the raw numbers differ, "leading by 8 points" means something different depending on which ladder you're looking at: two wins' worth of margin in NRL, but only one win in AFL. If you're used to one competition's numbers and check the other mid-season, don't assume the gap between two teams translates directly — check how many wins that points gap actually represents before drawing conclusions about how close the race is.
Tiebreaker: a ratio versus a subtraction
This is the real structural difference. When AFL clubs are level on points, the ladder sorts by percentage — total season points scored divided by total season points conceded, times 100, recalculated after every match. When NRL teams are level on points, the ladder sorts by points differential — total season points scored minus total season points conceded. There's no such thing as "the percentage of a match" — it's always a whole-season running total, which is why AFL broadcasts never quote a percentage for a single game the way they'd quote a scoreline.
A ratio and a difference respond differently to the same result, but only at the margin — because percentage is diluted by everything a club has already scored and conceded that season, one match moves it by a fraction of a percentage point, not by hundreds. Take a club sitting at a season-to-date 1000 points for, 1000 against (exactly 100% and a PD of 0) heading into its next match:
- Win 120–20 (a 100-point margin): percentage becomes 1120/1020 × 100 = 109.8%. PD becomes 0 + 100 = +100.
- Win 150–50 (also a 100-point margin): percentage becomes 1150/1050 × 100 = 109.5%. PD becomes 0 + 100 = +100.
Same 100-point margin, same PD outcome either way — but the low-scoring blowout (120–20) lifts percentage slightly more than the high-scoring one (150–50), because conceding fewer points shrinks the denominator more than scoring extra points grows the numerator. The gap is small — 0.3 of a percentage point in this example — but it compounds over a season, and it's the reason percentage and PD can rank two equal-points clubs in a different order even when their match results look identical on paper. Points differential, by contrast, only cares about the margin: a 100-point win adds exactly +100 whatever the final score.
Practically: in AFL, a club chasing percentage gets slightly more benefit from suppressing the opposition's score than from padding its own, because the denominator carries a bit more leverage. In NRL, a point scored and a point conceded move the differential by exactly the same amount regardless of context. Neither method is "more correct" — they're different ways of weighing a big win, and AFL and NRL have picked different ones.
The finals cutoff sits in a different place
AFL's 2026 season runs a Final Ten System — the top 10 clubs after the home-and-away rounds qualify, out of an 18-club competition. NRL's finals field is the top 8, out of a 17-club competition. As a share of the competition, that's 10/18 (about 56%) of AFL clubs making finals versus 8/17 (about 47%) of NRL clubs.
That gap changes what "missing the cut" means in each competition. In AFL, missing finals means finishing in the bottom 8 of 18 clubs. In NRL, missing finals means finishing in the bottom 9 of 17 clubs — a slightly larger share of the ladder misses out. A club sitting exactly mid-table is inside the finals picture under AFL's cutoff and outside it under NRL's.
What this means when you're reading both in one sitting
If you follow both codes, the habit worth building is: don't eyeball the numbers and cross-compare. A team's percentage or points differential only tells you something when compared to other teams in the same competition, using the same method. "Team A is on 145% and Team B is on +60" isn't a comparison — they're different units. Read each ladder against /afl/fixtures or /nrl/fixtures for that competition's remaining draw, and let each code's own tiebreaker tell you what's actually at stake for the teams near the cutoff.
Official sources
The rules above come from those official sources. For where our own ladder and fixture data comes from and how often it updates, see how we source data.