League of Legends Ranks Explained (2026): Every Tier in Order

All League of Legends ranks in order

Riot splits ranked players into ten tiers. The first seven have four divisions each, so there are 28 steps below Master. The last three are one big ladder each, where only your LP counts.

Divisions and LP

You win League Points (LP) for a victory and lose them for a defeat. Riot's rule of thumb is that you need 100 LP to climb each division. Go past 100 and you move up at once, and you keep the leftover LP. At 100 LP in division I you move into the next tier on your own: there is no series of games to win first. In a new tier you usually start in the lowest division (IV), and when you drop a tier you land in the highest division (I) of the tier below.

How much LP a single game is worth is not a fixed number. It depends on your hidden matchmaking rating, which is why two players at the same rank can gain very different amounts. Our guide to LP gains and MMR explains what your gains say and has a calculator for the games to your next division.

Master, Grandmaster and Challenger

The three apex tiers work differently. Each is a single division with no upper limit on LP, and Riot says fewer than 1% of players ever reach them.

• Master: you get there with 100 LP in Diamond I. Your first three games are protected from demotion. Drop below 0 LP after that and you go back to Diamond I, on 25, 50 or 75 LP.
• Grandmaster: you need at least 400 LP and more LP than the lowest Grandmaster player on your server. Fall below 400 LP, or below that lowest Grandmaster, and you drop back to Master.
• Challenger: the same rule at 800 LP, against the lowest Challenger player on your server.
• Daily update: the Grandmaster and Challenger standings are recalculated once every 24 hours, when the clock passes midnight on your server. You don't move up the moment you pass the cutoff.

Grandmaster and Challenger have a fixed number of spots in each region. These are Riot's numbers for Ranked Solo/Duo:

Oceania is left out on purpose: Riot's page gives it 100 and 50 in its summary table and 700 and 300 in its regional section, and we can't tell which one is current. Flex has its own, mostly smaller numbers on the same page.

At the start of Season 2 in April 2026, Riot reset every Master, Grandmaster and Challenger player in North America, Europe West, Europe Nordic & East, Brazil, Latin America North and Turkey to Master with 0 LP, rank and MMR both. In the same post it said the baseline LP for a win or loss in the apex tiers would go up to about 30. Riot calls hard resets like this rare and something it will always try to avoid.

Placement games

You play placement games when you are new to ranked or when a new ranked year begins. Riot's current page says:

• There are five placement games in each ranked queue.
• You can't lose LP in them: a loss gives 0 LP. Going AFK counts as a loss.
• Where you land depends on your results, how strong your opponents were and your rank from the year before. Your Swiftplay and Normal Draft MMR count too.
• You can't place higher than Diamond III. Riot's older page on ranked years says the highest start is Emerald I, so the two pages disagree; the placements page is the newer one (May 2026).

The rank reset

Ranks reset once a year, not every season. A ranked year has three seasons, and Riot puts it like this: your climb “continues uninterrupted between seasons, but resets when a new year begins”. After the reset you play your five placement games again. Riot expects most players to start the new year about a full tier below where they finished.

The 2026 reset came with the first season, on 8 January 2026. The one exception this year was the apex reset in April described above. For the season dates of 2026 and what is known about the end of Season 3, see League of Legends season dates.

Decay

Only Diamond and higher can decay. Every game you play banks days; each day without a game uses one. Once your bank is empty, you lose LP every day until you play again.

If decay takes you to 0 LP or below, you drop a division. Apex players who decay go to Diamond II, not Diamond I. Decay keeps running while an account is banned. Near the end of a season, Riot advises keeping at least one more banked day than there are days left, because decay runs one last time before the season closes.

Demotion

Lose more LP than you have and you drop a division. Riot's own example: at 5 LP in Silver III, a loss of 20 LP puts you in Silver IV with 85 LP. Dropping a whole tier, say from Silver IV to Bronze I, comes with protection: you land on 25, 50 or 75 LP, depending on how far off your rank the system thinks your real skill is. Riot's page does not describe a fixed number of protected games after you reach a new tier below Master.

Solo/Duo and Flex

You have two separate ranks. Ranked Solo/Duo is played alone or with one friend. Ranked Flex takes groups of one, two, three or five players; a group of four has to play unranked. Each queue has its own rank and its own end-of-season rewards.

Who can duo depends on rank. Since patch 26.15, Master players can duo only with players close to their rank, and Grandmaster and Challenger players (and anyone with a Grandmaster or Challenger MMR) cannot duo at all. Lower down, the rules are looser; Riot's tiers and queues page has the full table.

How many players are in each rank?

Riot's support pages don't list a percentage per tier, and we won't make one up. What Riot does say:

• Fewer than 1% of players reach Master or higher.
• Grandmaster and Challenger are capped per server (the table above).
• In March 2026 Riot wrote that Iron had held about 14% of players worldwide, and moved more experienced players from Iron into Bronze. It also moved the top end of Diamond into Master.

For a live count per tier, League of Graphs tracks the ranked players it sees. Treat any percentage as a snapshot of one site's sample, not as Riot's number.

Questions

What is the highest rank in League of Legends?

Challenger. You need at least 800 LP and more LP than the lowest Challenger player on your server, and it holds 300 players at most on the biggest servers.

What is the lowest rank?

Iron IV, the lowest division of Iron.

How many ranks are there in League of Legends?

Ten tiers. Counting divisions, that is 28 divisions from Iron IV to Diamond I, plus the three apex tiers.

How much LP do you need to rank up?

100 LP per division. Going from Iron IV to Master takes 28 divisions, but placement games usually put you well above Iron IV.

Do ranks reset every season?

No. Ranks reset once a year, at the start of the first season in January. Between the three seasons of a year your rank carries on.