How Does Premier League Relegation Work?

**TL;DR: **The bottom three clubs in the Premier League are relegated to the Championship at the end of each season. There are no play-offs and no second chances. Whichever three teams have the fewest points after 38 matches go down, with goal difference and goals scored as tiebreakers.

Relegation is the dark twin of promotion. While three Championship clubs spend May celebrating their way up, three Premier League sides quietly head the other way. The drop usually costs upwards of a hundred million pounds in lost revenue, which is why the relegation battle is often more compelling than the title race.

The basic rule

After all 38 matches, the three teams at the bottom of the Premier League table are relegated to the Championship. The team that finishes 20th, 19th, and 18th all go down. The team that finishes 17th survives by the skin of its teeth and is generally referred to as having stayed up.

• 20th place: relegated, goes to the Championship
• 19th place: relegated
• 18th place: relegated
• 17th place: stays in the Premier League - known as the survival line
• 1st to 17th place: safe from relegation

The three clubs that go down are replaced by the three Championship clubs that come up. We covered the upward side of that exchange in how Premier League promotion works, which pairs neatly with this article.

How many points do you need to stay up?

The traditional rule of thumb is 40 points. Hit 40 and you are almost certainly safe. In recent seasons, however, the survival line has often been lower, sometimes as low as 33 or 34 points. That depends on how bad the bottom three are in any given year.

Some seasons see a relatively cut-throat bottom half where 38 points might still send you down. Others have a clear gap between the bottom three and the rest, and 35 points is enough. We unpack what that means for predictions in relegation battle bottom of the table is gold for predictors.

Tiebreakers

If two or three teams finish on identical points, the order is decided first by goal difference, then by goals scored, then by head-to-head record. This matters more than people realise, because relegation can come down to a single goal scored in October.