Rugby bonus points explained: how the league table works

Anyone who comes to rugby from another sport needs a couple of rounds to make sense of the table. A team that lost on Saturday has gained a point, and one that won hasn't climbed as far as you'd expect.

It isn't the league getting it wrong. It's the bonus point system.

The basic split

Under the World Rugby system, which almost every club competition uses, each match pays out like this:

• Win: 4 points.
• Draw: 2 points.
• Loss: 0 points.

So far, nothing new. What makes rugby different are the two extra points you can earn on top of the result.

The two bonus points

Try bonus

One extra point for any team that scores four tries or more in the match, win or lose.

It's there for exactly what it looks like: so a side that's thirty points up still has a reason to go for the fifth try instead of killing the game in midfield.

Losing bonus

One extra point for a team that loses by seven points or fewer.

Seven isn't an arbitrary number: it's a converted try. The idea is that a side that stays within one score right to the end gets something for it, and the team on top doesn't get a one-point win for free.

What one match can be worth

Adding it all up, a team can come away from a single match with:

• 5 points: a win with four tries.
• 4 points: a win without the try bonus.
• 3 points: a draw with four tries.
• 2 points: a draw.
• 1 point: a loss by seven or fewer, or a loss with four tries.
• 0 points: a loss by more than seven without reaching four tries.

And yes: a team can take 2 points from a defeat, if it loses by seven or fewer and scores four tries.

Not every competition follows this to the letter. In France, for example, the FFR's amateur leagues award the attacking bonus for scoring three tries more than the opposition rather than for reaching four. If you play abroad or in a cross-border competition, check before assuming.

Tie-breakers

When two teams finish level on points, the competition decides the order, but the usual criteria go like this:

• The result between the two sides, head to head.
• Points difference across the whole league.
• Tries difference.
• Total points scored.

It's worth checking your union's or league's regulations before taking that order for granted: some competitions put points difference ahead of head to head.

Why doing it by hand goes wrong

The maths isn't hard. What's hard is doing it twenty-two rounds in a row without a slip.

The mistake is almost never in the adding up. It's in the input: someone records the score but not how many tries there were, and the try bonus vanishes. Or a defeat goes down as seven points when it was eight.

When that happens, the table is wrong for weeks and nobody notices until a club complains.

What you need to record

For a table to calculate itself you need four figures from each match, and no more:

• Points for the home side and the away side.
• Tries for each.

With those, the four points for a win, both bonus points and every tie-breaker come out without anyone adding anything up. And if a result gets corrected, the whole table recalculates instead of dragging the error through to the end of the season.

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In Kanteo the league table is calculated with World Rugby's try bonus and losing bonus from the competition's results, and it also appears on the club's public website next to the fixtures. See what it looks like.