How Many Games in an NHL Season? The 84-Game Schedule Explained

An NHL team plays 84 regular-season games in the 2026-27 season, 42 at home and 42 on the road. That is two more than the 82-game schedule that was the standard from 1995-96 through 2025-26, and the change comes from the collective bargaining agreement (CBA, the labor contract between the league and the players' union) extension the NHL and the NHL Players' Association agreed to in June 2025.

With 32 teams playing 84 games each, the league has scheduled 1,344 regular-season games for 2026-27, the most in its history according to the NHL. Both extra games for each team are against division rivals, one at home and one away, and the preseason was cut to a maximum of four games per team to make room. Below is how the schedule is built, what it replaced, how standings and playoffs work over the longer season, and how the number has moved over a century of hockey.

How the 84-game schedule breaks down

The NHL has 32 teams in two conferences of 16, and each conference has two divisions of eight. The Eastern Conference holds the Atlantic and Metropolitan divisions, and the Western Conference holds the Central and Pacific. The schedule is built from those groupings, and the league published the full scheduling matrix for 2026-27 when it released the schedule on July 16, 2026:

• Division games: each of the 7 division rivals four times, two at home and two away. 7 x 4 = 28 games.
• Conference games outside the division: each of the 8 teams in the other division of the same conference three times. Four of those opponents come to your arena twice, and you visit the other four twice. 8 x 3 = 24 games.
• Non-conference games: each of the 16 teams in the other conference twice, once at home and once away. 16 x 2 = 32 games.

Add it up and you get 28 + 24 + 32 = 84. The home and road split is even as well: 14 division home games, 12 conference home games and 16 non-conference home games make 42, with the same 42 on the road.

For a fan, that means every team in the league visits your arena at least once, every division rival visits twice, and your team sees each division rival four times over the season.

The 2026-27 calendar

Two more games per team needed more dates. The 2026-27 regular season opened on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, only the second time an NHL regular season has started in September, after 2007-08. It ends on Saturday, April 10, 2027, when all 32 teams are scheduled to play. The NHL's stats department counts 194 days from start to finish with games on 185 of them. Outside the holiday break (Dec. 23 to 25) and the All-Star break (Feb. 4 to 7), the only empty dates are Nov. 20 and Nov. 26.

Some regular-season games are played far from home rinks and still count in full. The 2026-27 Global Series sends Carolina and Seattle to Helsinki, Finland, on Nov. 12 and 14, and Chicago and Ottawa to Düsseldorf, Germany, on Dec. 18 and 20. The three outdoor games count too: the Heritage Classic in Winnipeg (Oct. 25), the Winter Classic in Salt Lake City (Dec. 31) and the Stadium Series in Arlington, Texas (Feb. 20). The All-Star Game on Long Island on Feb. 6 is a 3-on-3 exhibition and does not count.

Why the NHL went from 82 to 84 games

The 84-game season is part of the four-year CBA extension the NHL and NHLPA announced on June 27, 2025. The new agreement runs from Sept. 16, 2026 through Sept. 15, 2030, which covers the seasons from 2026-27 through 2029-30. NHL.com's summary of the ratified deal put the two schedule changes side by side: the regular season, 82 games since 1995-96, goes to 84, and the preseason is capped at four games per team.

The league's own description of the new games is brief. Its August 2026 preseason release says the shorter preseason accommodates the expansion to 84 games "with the addition of two more divisional games per team." Under the old format, each team played five division rivals four times and the other two only three times, so the schedule inside a division could never be perfectly even. Now every pair of division rivals meets exactly four times, twice in each building.

The practical effect shows up in the standings. The top three teams in each division earn 12 of the 16 playoff spots, so a balanced division schedule means no team gets an extra game against a weak rival that a competitor does not.

At the core of the deal is a swap of exhibitions for games that count. For a team that played six preseason games under the old agreement, as the Buffalo Sabres and Boston Bruins did in 2025, the total stays the same: 6 + 82 = 88 games before, 4 + 84 = 88 now. Two of those games simply moved from the column that does not matter to the one that does.

The 82-game format it replaced

For comparison, this is the matrix the NHL published for 2025-26, the last 82-game season. It matched today's format in every way except division play.

Division games totaled 26: five division rivals four times each (20 games) and two rivals three times each (6 games), with one of those three-game rivals visiting twice and the other hosting twice. Conference games outside the division totaled 24, using the same three-game pattern as now. Non-conference games totaled 32, home and away against all 16 teams in the other conference. That gives 26 + 24 + 32 = 82, with 41 home and 41 road games.

The 2026-27 change turns those two three-game division series into four-game series, so 26 division games become 28. League-wide, 32 x 82 / 2 = 1,312 games became 32 x 84 / 2 = 1,344. You divide by two because every game involves two teams.

Preseason: four games per team

Preseason games, or exhibitions, do not count in the standings or in players' official stats. Under the new CBA, the preseason is a maximum of four games per team, according to NHL.com. The number varied from team to team under the old agreement. NHL.com's report on the extension described the cut as six games down to four, and the Bruins' 2026 preseason release says the four games replace the previous six.

The first reduced preseason was short and crowded. The NHL's release lists 65 games over eight days, from Saturday, Sept. 19 through Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, across 36 NHL and neutral-site venues. Some were split-squad games, in which a team divides its training camp roster and plays two games on the same night. Montreal and Toronto did exactly that on Sept. 19, playing each other in both cities at once. Three days after the last exhibition, the regular season began.

How standings points work over 84 games

NHL standings are ranked by points, not winning percentage, and the scale did not change with the longer schedule. Any win, whether in regulation, overtime or a shootout, is worth 2 points. An overtime or shootout loss is worth 1 point, and a regulation loss is worth nothing. One side effect: a game that goes past regulation hands out three points in total, while a regulation game hands out two. How overtime and the shootout work is covered in our guide to how many periods are in hockey.

Over 84 games the maximum is 168 points. Take a hypothetical team that finishes 46-28-10 (wins, regulation losses, overtime and shootout losses). It earns 46 x 2 + 10 = 102 points. Its points percentage, points earned divided by points available, is 102 / 168 = .607.

Points percentage is most useful during the season, when teams have played different numbers of games. Say Team A has 40 points from 30 games and Team B has 41 points from 32 games. Team B leads on raw points, but Team A has collected 40 / 60 = .667 of its available points against Team B's 41 / 64 = .641. That is why fewer games played is the first tiebreaker.

When teams are level on points, the NHL separates them in this order: fewer games played (a better points percentage), more regulation wins (the RW column), more regulation plus overtime wins (ROW), more total wins, points in the games between the tied teams, goal differential, and finally goals scored. In those last two steps, a shootout win counts as one goal for and a shootout loss as one goal against.

Stanley Cup Playoffs: 16 teams, four rounds

Half the league, 16 of 32 teams, makes the Stanley Cup Playoffs, eight from each conference. The top three teams in each division qualify, which fills 12 spots. The last four go to the two best remaining teams in each conference regardless of division, known as wild cards. One division can therefore send five teams while the other sends three.

The bracket stays inside the divisions early on:

• First Round: the division winner with more points faces the wild card with fewer points, the other division winner faces the other wild card, and the second- and third-place teams in each division play each other.
• Second Round: the two first-round winners in each division bracket meet.
• Conference Final: the last two teams in each conference.
• Stanley Cup Final: the Eastern Conference champion against the Western Conference champion.

Every round is best-of-seven, so the first team to win four games advances. In the first two rounds, home ice goes to the team that finished higher in the regular-season standings. In the Conference Final and the Final, it goes to the team with the better regular-season record, regardless of division.

Now stack that on top of 84 games. A champion needs 16 playoff wins, so it plays at least 16 playoff games and at most 28 (4 rounds x 7). A team that goes the full seven games in every series and wins the Cup would play 84 + 28 = 112 games that count, plus four in the preseason. Playoff games are kept separate from regular-season stats and do not affect the standings.

How NHL season length has changed over time

The 84-game schedule is a return rather than an invention. The NHL's season records show the schedule growing as the league added teams, from 22 games in its first season, 1917-18, to 80 games by the mid-1970s. The modern history looks like this:

• 80 games from 1974-75 through 1991-92.
• 84 games in 1992-93 and 1993-94. In both seasons every club played at least two games at neutral sites, in cities such as Hamilton, Halifax, Cincinnati, Phoenix and Saskatoon, according to the NHL.
• 48 games in 1994-95, after a lockout canceled the first part of the season. Play ran from Jan. 20 to May 3, 1995, with no games between the conferences.
• 82 games from 1995-96, the standard for three decades.
• 48 games in 2012-13, again after a lockout. The season started Jan. 19, 2013, and again had no games between the conferences.
• 56 games in 2020-21, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when every game was played within a division.
• 84 games from 2026-27, the third 84-game season in the league's 109 seasons and the first in 33 years.

Two other seasons are worth knowing. There was no 2004-05 season at all, since it was lost to a lockout, so the NHL's records jump from 2003-04 to 2005-06. And 2019-20 was scheduled for 82 games but was paused in March 2020 with 1,082 regular-season games played. The regular season was never finished, so teams ended that year with different game counts.

If you follow more than one league, the NHL now sits between the NBA and MLB. Compare the formats in our guides to how many games are in an NBA season, how many games are in an MLB season and how many games are in an NFL season.

Quick reference: the NHL season in numbers

Keep this list handy for the 2026-27 season:

• Regular season: 84 games per team, 42 home and 42 away.
• Division rivals: 7 teams x 4 games = 28.
• Rest of the conference: 8 teams x 3 games = 24.
• Other conference: 16 teams x 2 games = 32.
• League total: 1,344 games, from Sept. 29, 2026 to April 10, 2027.
• Previous format: 82 games (26 division games), standard from 1995-96 through 2025-26.
• Preseason: a maximum of four games per team, which do not count.
• Points: 2 for any win, 1 for an overtime or shootout loss, 0 for a regulation loss. Maximum 168.
• Playoffs: 16 teams, four best-of-seven rounds, 16 wins to lift the Cup.

New to the sport? Read up on icing and the power play before your first game, since those two rules explain most of the whistles you will hear.