League Ranked Reset and Placement Games (2026): What Resets, How Far, and How to Place

Riot's page on ranked years puts it in one sentence: your climb “continues uninterrupted between seasons, but resets when a new year begins”. A ranked year has three seasons, and only the first one, in January, resets your rank. This is how 2026 went:

People call the January reset a “soft reset”, and that is the right word. Your rank is cleared from the ladder, but where you land afterwards is not random: Riot says your placement takes your rank from the previous year into account, and most players start the new year about a tier below where they finished. The exact start and end dates of each season, and what is known about the end of Season 3, are on 2026 season dates.

• Your visible rank resets. Tier, division and LP are gone until you finish placements in that queue. Solo/Duo and Flex reset separately, and each needs its own five games.
• Your rating does not start from zero. Riot does not say that MMR resets in January. It says the opposite in effect: placements consider your previous rank and your results, and for players who have never played ranked, “both your Swiftplay and Normal Draft MMR will be taken into account”. The MMR page adds that your initial placement takes your Normal MMR into consideration.
• Rewards are settled first. The Victorious skin and the rank-matched chroma follow your final rank of the season that just ended; the 15-win mission starts again with the new season (patch 26.15 notes).
• Your LP history is yours to keep. Riot keeps none. If you want to compare this year's placements with last year's gains, an app has to have stored your rank after each game; LazyElo's LP tracker marks the reset on your LP line and keeps counting.

These are the rules on Riot's current placements page, dated 29 May 2026:

Two things Riot's page does not say, so we don't either: whether a provisional rank is shown during the five games, and what happens to your LP between games two and five. It also contradicts an older Riot page: the ranked-years page, dated May 2025, says “the highest you can begin a new year is at Emerald I”, while the placements page from May 2026 says Diamond III. The newer page is the one we follow.

Where sources outside Riot disagree: several pages in Google's top ten for “placement games” still say ten games. Ten was the rule until mid-2023, when Riot announced it was “lowering placement games from 10 to 5”. Five is current.

“Why did I place lower than I started last season?” is a question on Riot's own Ranked FAQ, which tells you how common it is. The short answer is that it is by design: Riot says a new year starts you “at just about a full tier below your final rank the previous year, though results may vary”. Five games can't prove much, so the system places you conservatively and lets your LP gains do the rest.

That is where the gap between rank and rating shows. If your rating is above the rank you placed at, Riot says you will see “greater LP rewards upon victory and smaller deductions upon defeat” until the two meet, which is why the first weeks of a year have the biggest gains. If you went 1–4 in placements against strong lobbies, you may have placed a tier lower than a friend who went 4–1 against weaker ones and still climb faster. How that works is in LP gains and hidden MMR.

Master, Grandmaster and Challenger players go through the same January reset and the same five placements, with the Diamond III ceiling, so every apex player starts the year below Master. 2026 added something rarer. On 21 April 2026 Riot announced that, when patch 26.9 opened Season 2, every Master+ player in NA, EUW, EUNE, BR, LAN and TR would “have their visible rank and MMR reset to Master 0LP”. The same post raised apex LP gains to a baseline of about 30 per game and called a mid-season hard reset “an exceedingly rare event we'll always avoid”. The post does not mention placement games for the players it reset. The rest of the apex rules, caps and cutoffs are in how the apex tiers work.

Decay. From Diamond up, days without a ranked game eventually cost LP: Diamond banks 7 days per game up to 28 and loses 50 LP per decay, the apex tiers bank 1 day per game up to 14 and lose 75. Below Diamond there is no decay at all. The full rules and two worked examples are in ranked decay.

Demotion. Lose more LP than you have and you drop a division; drop out of a tier and you land on 25, 50 or 75 LP of the division below, depending on how far off your rating is. Riot's example is 5 LP in Silver III, a 20 LP loss, Silver IV at 85 LP. See demotion and LP floors.

The rest of the system. Ten tiers, four divisions each below Master, 100 LP per division and the two queues are laid out in League of Legends ranks explained, the hub of these guides.