How Many Games in an MLB Season? The 162-Game Schedule Explained

Every Major League Baseball team plays 162 regular-season games, 81 at home and 81 on the road. With 30 teams, that adds up to 2,430 games on the schedule each year, since 30 x 162 = 4,860 team games and every game involves two teams.

That number has not changed since 1962, but the way the 162 games are built has changed a lot in the last few seasons. Since 2023 every team plays every other team at least once, and the old one-game tiebreaker, known as Game 163, disappeared in 2022. Below is how the schedule breaks down in the 2026 season, what happens to rainouts, which games do not count, and how baseball got to 162 in the first place. For what happens inside each game, see our guide to how many innings are in baseball.

How the 162 games break down

MLB has two leagues, the American League and the National League, with 15 teams each. Each league has three divisions of five teams: East, Central and West. Your schedule is built in three layers, from the teams you see most to the ones you see least.

Here is the breakdown that applied in the 2025 and 2026 seasons:

• Division games: 52. Each team plays its four division rivals 13 times apiece, and 4 x 13 = 52.
• Other teams in the same league: 62. That is six games against eight of those ten teams and seven games against the other two. 8 x 6 = 48, plus 2 x 7 = 14, for 62.
• Interleague games: 48. Six games against a designated rival from the other league, played as two three-game series, one in each ballpark, plus one three-game series against each of the other 14 teams in the other league. 6 + (14 x 3) = 48.

Add it up: 52 + 62 + 48 = 162. The interleague slate rotates. Each team hosts seven of those 14 series and travels for the other seven, and the sides swap on a two-year cycle: MLB said each club would host the same interleague opponents in 2026 that it hosted in 2024.

The rival pairings are mostly geographic: Yankees and Mets, Cubs and White Sox, Dodgers and Angels, Giants and Athletics, Cardinals and Royals. MLB groups many of those series into a Rivalry Weekend each May; in 2026 it ran May 15 to 17.

What changed in 2023 and 2025

Before 2023 the schedule was heavily tilted toward the division. Teams played each division rival 19 times, for 76 division games, plus 66 games against the rest of their league and only 20 interleague games.

The balanced schedule arrived in 2023. Division games dropped to 52, games against the rest of the league became 64, and interleague play jumped to 46, with a home-and-road two-game series against the natural rival and a three-game series against everyone else in the other league. That made 2023 the first season in which every team played all 29 others.

In 2025 MLB took two games from the same-league, non-division group and gave them to the rivals, who went from four meetings to six. So the middle layer went from 64 to 62 and interleague play went from 46 to 48. The 2026 schedule kept that format.

The effect on a pennant race is real. Under the old format a division contender played 76 of its 162 games, about 47 percent, against its direct rivals. Now it is 52 of 162, about 32 percent. The rest of the schedule matters more, and it looks more alike from team to team.

Doubleheaders, rainouts and the 161-game season

A season runs about six months. In 2026 the Giants and Yankees opened on March 25, the other 28 teams started on March 26, and the regular season ended on September 27. From March 26 to September 27 is 186 days, so a team that played no doubleheaders had 186 - 162 = 24 days without a game, including the All-Star break.

Rain is the main thing that bends that plan. When a game is postponed, the two teams usually make it up later, often as a doubleheader, which is two games between the same teams on the same day. In a traditional doubleheader one ticket covers both games; in a split, or day-night, doubleheader the games are ticketed separately. Our guide to how long a baseball game lasts covers how much time a doubleheader takes.

Sometimes a game is never made up. If a late-season postponement cannot change who reaches the postseason or how teams are seeded, MLB can cancel it outright. That is why every few years a team finishes with 161 games played instead of 162.

If the game does matter, it gets played, even after the season is over. In 2024 Hurricane Helene washed out two late Braves and Mets games in Atlanta, and with a playoff spot at stake they were played as a doubleheader on September 30, the day after the regular season ended. The Mets won the first game 8-7 to clinch a berth, the Braves won the second 3-0 to clinch theirs, and the Diamondbacks were eliminated without playing.

Ties in the standings: why there is no Game 163 anymore

For decades, two teams that finished tied for a division title or the last playoff spot met in a one-game tiebreaker. Because it came after 162 games, fans called it Game 163, and it counted as a regular-season game in the standings and in player stats. On October 1, 2018, there were two of them on the same day: the Brewers beat the Cubs 3-1 for the NL Central and the Dodgers beat the Rockies 5-2 for the NL West.

That ended when the postseason expanded to 12 teams in 2022. With an extra round to fit in, MLB dropped tiebreaker games entirely. Ties are now settled on paper, using regular-season results:

• First, head-to-head record between the tied teams.
• If that is even, record within their own division.
• If still tied, further steps based on records against other groups of opponents, such as games outside the division and the last half of games against teams in the same league.

The balanced schedule makes the first step more interesting. Division rivals meet 13 times, an odd number, so if every game is played one team must win the season series. But two wild-card contenders from different divisions might meet only six times, and a 3-3 split sends the tie straight to the second step.

The tiebreak also decides seeding, not just who gets in. When two division winners finish with the same record, both are in the postseason, and the tiebreak only sorts out which one gets the higher seed and the possible first-round bye.

Games that do not count: spring training, All-Star Game and the postseason

The 162 figure covers the regular season only. Several other kinds of games happen around it, and none of them change a team's win-loss record:

• Spring training: Teams play exhibition games in February and March in two groups, the Cactus League in Arizona and the Grapefruit League in Florida. Results and stats do not carry over.
• The All-Star Game: One exhibition game in July between the best players of each league. In 2026 it was played on July 14 at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia.
• The postseason: Playoff games are tracked separately. A pitcher's ERA or a hitter's OPS for the season is based on the 162 regular-season games, and postseason numbers sit in their own column.

How many postseason games a team can play

Twelve teams reach the postseason, six from each league: the three division winners and three wild cards. The two division winners with the best records in each league get a bye past the first round. The rounds are:

• Wild Card Series: best of three, with the higher seed hosting every game
• Division Series: best of five
• League Championship Series: best of seven
• World Series: best of seven

Here is the arithmetic. A team that starts in the Wild Card Series and goes the distance in every round plays 3 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 22 postseason games. A team with a bye plays at most 5 + 7 + 7 = 19. The fewest a champion can need is 11 games for a team with a bye (3 + 4 + 4 sweeps) and 13 for a team that starts in the first round (2 + 3 + 4 + 4).

So the busiest possible year for a team is 162 + 22 = 184 games, not counting spring training. From 2012 through 2021, apart from the expanded 16-team postseason of 2020, the wild-card round was a single winner-take-all game rather than a series.

From 154 to 162: a short history

Baseball seasons started much shorter. In 1876, the National League's first year, the eight teams played each other 10 times for a 70-game schedule. Both leagues settled on 154 games in 1904, when each had eight teams playing every opponent 22 times (7 x 22 = 154). Apart from some years with shortened or altered schedules, 154 remained the standard through 1960.

Expansion changed the math. The American League grew to 10 teams in 1961 and moved to 162 games, with each team playing its nine opponents 18 times (9 x 18 = 162). The National League stayed at eight teams and 154 games for one more year, then expanded to 10 teams and 162 games in 1962. That makes 1961 the only season in which the two leagues played schedules of different lengths.

The switch caused a famous argument right away. In 1961 Roger Maris of the Yankees chased Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs, set in 1927. Commissioner Ford Frick declared that a new record would only count as breaking Ruth's if it came within 154 games. Maris hit his 61st on October 1, 1961, in the Yankees' final game, the 162nd. The "asterisk" that fans remember was a press invention rather than an actual mark in the record book, and the distinction was formally dropped in 1991.

Seasons that came up short

Since 1962 the target has always been 162, but it has not always been reached. Labor disputes cut into the 1972 and 1981 seasons. The 1994 strike stopped play in August and wiped out that year's World Series, and the 1995 season was trimmed to 144 games. In 2020 the pandemic left MLB with a 60-game season, the shortest in well over a century.

How many games can one player play

A player can appear in every one of his team's 162 games, though few do. Position players need rest days, and starting pitchers work on a rotation, taking the mound roughly once every five or six days. As a rough, hypothetical example, a pitcher in a five-man rotation who never misses a turn would get about 162 / 5 = 32 starts.

The single-season record for games played is 165, set by Maury Wills of the Dodgers in 1962. The Dodgers and Giants finished the 162-game schedule tied, played a three-game playoff, and those games counted as regular-season games. With Game 163 gone, a player today is very unlikely to top 162 for one team.

The record for consecutive games belongs to Cal Ripken Jr. of the Orioles, who played 2,632 in a row from May 30, 1982 to September 1998. He passed Lou Gehrig's mark of 2,130 on September 6, 1995. At 162 games a season, 2,632 / 162 is about 16.2 full seasons without a day off.

Quick reference: MLB season by the numbers

The figures below apply to the 2026 MLB season unless noted:

• Regular-season games per team: 162 (81 home, 81 road)
• Total regular-season games, all 30 teams: 2,430
• Division games: 52 (13 against each of 4 rivals)
• Same league, other divisions: 62 (64 in 2023 and 2024)
• Interleague games: 48, including 6 against the designated rival (46 in 2023 and 2024)
• Tiebreaker games: none since 2022; ties are decided by head-to-head record first
• Postseason teams: 12; most postseason games one team can play: 22
• 162-game season since: 1961 in the AL, 1962 in the NL (154 before)

If you follow more than one sport, compare this with the NFL season, the NBA season and the NHL season. Baseball plays roughly twice as many games as basketball or hockey and nearly ten times as many as football.