How BWF rankings, points and seeding work

The three documents behind a draw

A BWF draw can look like a verdict handed down from above, but it is assembled from a handful of documents. The World Ranking System turns results into points and points into a list. The General Competition Regulations, mainly Regulation 11, say who is seeded from that list and where the seeds go on the sheet. The World Tour Regulations add a second list that exists only to pick the field for the season-ending Finals.

This guide takes them in that order. The rules and tables are BWF’s, from the editions in force since April 2026 (November 2025 for the World Tour Regulations). The players, points and draws in the examples are invented.

How points are awarded

Players and pairs earn points in graded tournaments. The amount depends on the grade of the event and on how far you got in it, and singles and doubles share one table.

A World Championships or Olympic title pays 14,500, and the World Tour Finals pay 14,000. On the regular World Tour a Super 1000 title is worth 12,000 as a base, more when the prize money is higher. The ladder then steps down through Super 750 (11,000), Super 500 (9,200) and Super 300 (7,000) to Super 100 at 5,500. Grade 3 events start at 4,000 for an International Challenge.

Plotted round by round, the levels overlap more than their names suggest.

A Super 1000 semi-final pays 8,400, which beats both a Super 300 title (7,000) and the runner-up prize at a Super 500 (7,800). A Super 1000 quarter-final, at 6,600, is only 400 short of that Super 300 title. A player who keeps reaching the late rounds of the big events can outscore one who wins the small ones.

Inside a level the ladder has much the same shape everywhere. The runner-up collects about 85% of the winner’s total, a semi-finalist 70%, a quarter-finalist 55%, a last-16 loser about 40%, a last-32 loser about 25% and a last-64 loser about 10%.

• A wildcard who loses their first match gets no points.
• In group play, a finishing position is paid as the same position in a knockout. At the World Tour Finals, third in a group gets 8,900 and fourth gets 7,800.
• At the Olympics, bronze is worth 11,500 and fourth place 10,500.

The 52-week window and the best-ten rule

A player is ranked once they have played at least one graded tournament in the past 52 weeks. With ten or fewer tournaments in that window, the ranking is simply the sum of the points. With eleven or more, only the ten best results count. BWF publishes the lists every week.

Because of the cap, an extra loss never costs anything: a result only counts if it beats one already in the ten.

The window has a wrinkle that matters to anyone defending a title. Points stay on the list for 52 weeks or until the same tournament is next held, whichever comes first, so this year’s result replaces last year’s instead of adding to it. Suppose the player above won a Super 500 last year for 9,200 and this year goes out in the last 32 for 2,220. The 9,200 comes off and the 2,220 goes on, and the total drops from 56,110 to 49,570. That is a fall of 6,540 rather than the full 6,980, because the eleventh-best result (2,660) moves up into the ten.

When two players have the same points, the one who has played more tournaments ranks higher. If that is identical as well, they share a rank and the next place is skipped. The regulations spell it out with a sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 9, 10.

Ranking doubles pairs

Men’s doubles, women’s doubles and mixed each have their own list, and each ranks pairs rather than players. The points belong to the pair.

That is awkward for seeding. Two strong players who have just teamed up have almost no points together, and a draw that ignored them would drop a likely semi-finalist among the unseeded. The regulations handle it with two estimates, used for seeding and for ordering the main and qualifying lists.

There is a ceiling. A pair seeded on a real World Ranking can take any of seeds 1 to 4. A pair seeded on a notional or adjusted ranking cannot be placed higher than 5 in the main draw, unless there are not enough ranked pairs to fill the seeds.

The World Tour ranking

The second list is the World Tour Ranking, which BWF is calling the Race to Guangzhou this season. It counts only World Tour events and takes a player’s best 14 results, no more than three of them from Super 100 tournaments. Its job is to pick the Finals field: the top eight in each discipline, with no more than two from any one member association. Ties go to the player or pair with more World Tour tournaments played, then to whoever has more points since 1 July, then to a draw of lots.

Seeding does not use this list. Seeds come from the World Ranking, which also feeds qualification for the Olympic Games and the World Championships.

How seeds are chosen

BWF does the seeding at the World Championships, the Olympics and on the World Tour. Continental confederations do it for continental championships and lower-grade events. The list used is the World Ranking as published on a reference date set in BWF’s tournament timelines, and Regulation 11.6 says it applies even if some results are missing, so a title won after the cut-off changes nothing. The best-ranked entry is seed 1, the next is seed 2, and so on. Entries level on the ranking are separated by lot.

Seed numbers count entries, not the whole ranking. If the world No. 1 stays home, the highest-ranked player who did enter is seed 1.

The number of seeds depends only on the number of entries.

The cut-offs are sharp: a Super 300 with 32 entries gets eight seeds, and one with 31 gets four.

Withdrawals after the draw shift the seeds around. If a seed pulls out before the end of the team managers’ meeting, the next group down moves up, working through the groups 1–2, 3–4, 5–8, 9–16 and then the unseeded. When seed 2 withdraws, whichever of seeds 3 and 4 is in the bottom half takes the vacated position, and the gap that opens is filled from the next group.

Where the seeds go in the draw

Seed 1 is placed at the top of the draw and seed 2 at the bottom. The remaining seeds are drawn by lot: seeds 3 and 4 into the two quarters left over, seeds 5 to 8 into the eighths left over, and seeds 9 to 16 into the sixteenths. Unseeded entries fill the rest in the order drawn.

The aim is to keep the strongest players apart for as long as possible. If every seed wins, seed 1 meets one of seeds 5 to 8 in the quarter-final, one of seeds 3 and 4 in the semi-final, and seed 2 in the final. Seeds 1 and 2 cannot meet earlier.

Which of seeds 3 and 4 lands in seed 1’s half is settled by lot. The No. 3 seed can therefore end up on the No. 1 seed’s side of the draw, and so can the No. 4 seed.

Byes go next to the seeds first. With 30 entries the two byes sit at slots 2 and 31, giving seeds 1 and 2 a free first round. A 30-entry draw also has only four seeds.

On nationality, the rule is that players from the same member association should not meet in the first round wherever that can be avoided. In Grade 3 and 4 tournaments an association’s two best-ranked entries are also drawn into opposite halves. Qualifiers’ places in the main draw are drawn by lot, with no separation at all.

A 32-player draw, worked through

Take a Super 300 men’s singles draw with 32 entries, which earns eight seeds. These are the eight best-ranked entries on the reference date.

Yash Bhatt and Neel Gupta are level on 55,230, but Bhatt has played ten tournaments to Gupta’s nine and so ranks above Gupta. The world ranks run from 11 to 34 because seed numbers count only the players who entered.

Seeds 1 and 2 are placed first: Malhotra at slot 1, Iyer at slot 32. The lot then puts Nair (3) at slot 9 and Sen (4) at slot 24, and sends seeds 5 to 8 to the four remaining marked slots: Joshi (7) on 5, Bhatt (5) on 13, Reddy (8) on 20 and Gupta (6) on 28.

If the seeds all win, the quarter-finals are Malhotra v Joshi, Nair v Bhatt, Reddy v Sen and Gupta v Iyer, and the semi-finals are Malhotra v Nair and Sen v Iyer. A different lot for seeds 3 and 4 would have produced Malhotra v Sen and Nair v Iyer instead. The rules prefer neither.

Seeding a club draw

Most of this scales down to a club tournament.

1. Choose the ranking and the date. Take your club or state list as it stood on one date and use that snapshot for every entry. A late result does not change it.
2. Count entries, then seeds. 32 to 63 entries earn up to eight seeds, and 16 to 31 earn up to four.
3. Place and draw. Seed 1 goes at the top and seed 2 at the bottom. Draw seeds 3 and 4 for the other two quarters, then seeds 5 to 8 for the remaining eighths.
4. Settle the tie-break first. BWF ranks the player with more tournaments played higher, and draws lots at seeding if entries are still level. Write down whatever your club chooses.
5. Byes and clubs. Put byes beside the seeds first, and keep players from the same club apart in round one where you can.

Sources and editions

1. BWF Statutes, Section 5.3.3.1, World Ranking System, version 6.0, in force from 26 April 2026: points table, 52-week and best-ten rules, tie-breaks, publication, group-play points.
2. BWF Statutes, Section 5.1, General Competition Regulations, version 8.0, in force from 27 April 2026: Regulation 11 (who seeds, ranking date, seed counts, placement, separation, seed withdrawals) and notional and adjusted pair rankings.
3. BWF Statutes, Section 5.2.2, World Tour Regulations, version 5.0, 8 November 2025: World Tour Finals qualification, best 14 results, tie-breaks.
4. BWF Statutes, Section 5.3.3.4, Explanation of Adjusted and Notional Ranking, in force from 14 October 2019: the worked method behind the pair estimates.
5. BWF Statutes, Section 5.3.8, Technical Diagrams and Tables: Seeding and Byes, version 1.0, 19 February 2020: slot numbers and bye positions.
6. BWF, How Ranking Works: the five ranking lists and the Race to Guangzhou.

These regulations get revised. Check the BWF Statutes page for the current editions before relying on a figure here.