NFL overtime rules explained: regular season vs playoffs
NFL overtime rules explained: the 10-minute regular-season period, 15-minute playoff periods, why both teams now get the ball, and when games end tied.
Why it matters
Since 2025, every NFL overtime gives both teams a chance with the ball, but regular-season games can still end in a tie while playoff games cannot.
Buffalo’s offense never touched the ball. On January 23, 2022, Kansas City won a coin toss, drove the field and beat the Bills 42-36 in overtime of a playoff game, and the NFL has been rewriting its overtime rules ever since. Under NFL overtime rules today, both teams get at least one possession in the regular season and the playoffs. The difference is the clock: one 10-minute period that can end in a tie in the regular season, and 15-minute periods with no ties in the playoffs.
Quick answer: If an NFL game is tied after four quarters, a coin toss decides who gets the ball first, and each team is guaranteed a possession unless the defense scores a safety on the opening drive. After that, the next score wins. Regular-season overtime is one 10-minute period and can end in a tie. Playoff overtime uses 15-minute periods and continues until there is a winner.
The two-possession guarantee is new for the regular season. NFL owners approved it on April 1, 2025, at the league’s annual meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, copying a rule the playoffs had used since 2022. The NFL’s football operations department lists the change as proposed by Philadelphia.
How does NFL overtime work in the regular season?
When regulation ends level, the referee holds a coin toss. The visiting team’s captain calls it. The winner picks whether to receive, kick, or which end to defend.
Then comes a single 10-minute period, played as one quarter. Each team gets two timeouts, and coaches cannot throw challenge flags; every replay review is started by the replay official, according to the rules summary ESPN publishes from the NFL rulebook.
The team that receives first can score however it likes, a field goal or a touchdown, and the other team still gets the ball. The only score that ends the game on the first possession is a safety by the defense: the kicking team then wins immediately.
If the score is still level once both teams have had the ball, the game turns into old-fashioned sudden death. The next score of any kind wins.
The 10-minute clock overrides everything. If the first team scores and time runs out while the second team is still driving, the first team wins. If nobody is ahead when the clock hits zero, the game goes into the standings as a tie. There is no second period in the regular season.
What changes in the playoffs?
Playoff games cannot end in a tie, so the league gives them more room. Overtime periods last 15 minutes, as in regulation, and the game keeps going period after period until someone scores in sudden death.
The possession rule is the same as in the regular season. The extras are about the clock and timeouts: teams get three timeouts per half, with two overtime periods counting as a half, and the two-minute warning and end-of-half timing apply at the end of the second and fourth periods. If a game somehow reaches the end of a fourth overtime period, there is another coin toss and play continues.
| Rule | Regular season | Playoffs |
|---|---|---|
| Length | One 10-minute period | 15-minute periods, unlimited |
| Both teams get the ball? | Yes, since 2025 | Yes, since 2022 |
| Can it end in a tie? | Yes | No |
| Timeouts | 2 per team | 3 per team per half (two periods) |
| Coach’s challenges | None | None |
Source: ESPN summary of NFL overtime rules, October 2026; NFL Football Operations, 2025 rules changes.
Who gets the ball first, and does it still matter?
The coin toss still decides the first possession. What it no longer does is hand one team a chance to win before the other offense has taken a snap.
That said, the team that receives is not obviously the favorite any more. A team that kicks off knows exactly what it needs when its turn comes. If the first team kicks a field goal, the second team knows a field goal ties and a touchdown wins outright. If the first team scores a touchdown and kicks the extra point, the second team can answer with its own touchdown and go for two points to win rather than kick to keep playing.
Football Zebras, a website that tracks NFL officiating, notes one technical wrinkle: a coin-toss winner that wants the ball second has to choose to kick. “Defer” is the word fans expect, but in a regular-season overtime there is no second half to defer to.
The playoff version has already been tested on the biggest stage. In Super Bowl LVIII on February 11, 2024, the San Francisco 49ers won the toss and took the ball, then settled for a field goal. Kansas City answered with a touchdown drive that ended with Patrick Mahomes throwing a 3-yard touchdown to Mecole Hardman for a 25-22 win.
What happens after the first possession?
The scenarios cover most of what fans argue about on the couch:
- First team scores nothing: The second team gets the ball, and its first score of any kind wins.
- First team kicks a field goal: The second team can tie with a field goal (play continues in sudden death) or win with a touchdown.
- First team scores a touchdown: The second team needs a touchdown to stay alive. Matching the score sends the game to sudden death; beating it with a two-point conversion wins.
- Defense scores a safety on the first drive: The defense’s team wins. There is no second possession.
- Second team fails: If it punts, turns the ball over or fails on fourth down while trailing, the game is over.
In the regular season, every one of these is cut off by the 10-minute limit. A long, slow opening drive that ends in a touchdown with little time left can leave the other side only a few plays to reply.
The game behind the change: Bills vs Chiefs, 2022
The divisional-round game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, is still remembered for its last 13 seconds of regulation. Josh Allen’s touchdown pass to Gabriel Davis put Buffalo ahead 36-33 with 13 seconds left. Mahomes then moved Kansas City into range, and Harrison Butker kicked a 49-yard field goal as time expired to tie it.
Kansas City won the overtime toss, took the ball and scored on its opening drive, with Mahomes throwing an 8-yard touchdown to Travis Kelce. Under the rules of the day, the touchdown ended the game.
Two months later, on March 29, 2022, owners voted 29-3 to guarantee both teams a possession in playoff overtime, ESPN and CBS News reported. The Indianapolis Colts and Philadelphia Eagles had proposed it for all games. Owners would only pass it for the playoffs, and the regular season kept the old rule for three more seasons.
From sudden death to two possessions: a timeline
- 22 Sep 1974: The first regular-season overtime game under the new rule ends Pittsburgh 35, Denver 35. The NFL had added one 15-minute sudden-death period to regular-season games that year, extending a format already used in the postseason.
- Mar 2010: Owners vote 28-4 for “modified sudden death” in the playoffs only. A field goal on the first possession no longer ends the game; a touchdown still does. Minnesota, Buffalo, Cincinnati and Baltimore vote against.
- Mar 2012: The modified rule is extended to the regular season.
- 2017: Regular-season overtime is cut from 15 minutes to 10, with the league citing player safety.
- 29 Mar 2022: After the Bills-Chiefs game, owners vote 29-3 to give both teams a possession in playoff overtime.
- 1 Apr 2025: Owners align the regular season with the playoffs. Both teams get the ball, within the 10-minute limit.
Why did the coin toss become such a problem?
Under pure sudden death, a team that won the toss needed only a field goal to win, and kickers kept getting better.
When the league changed the playoff rule in 2010, Rich McKay, the Atlanta Falcons president who co-chaired the NFL’s competition committee, made the case with numbers. Since 1994, the coin-toss winner had won on the first possession 34.4% of the time, and over 15 years the team that called the toss correctly had won 59.8% of overtime games, NFL.com reported. “Statistically, it needed to change,” McKay said then.
The 2010 fix closed the field-goal shortcut but left the touchdown one open. By 2022, the team that won the toss had won 10 of 12 playoff overtime games played under that rule, seven of them on the opening possession, according to ESPN. McKay himself admitted the sample was thin. “It’s 12 years, 12 games,” he said.
Small or not, the pattern was hard to defend after a postseason in which the Bills’ defense, not their quarterback, decided their season.
The regular-season trade-off: fairness versus ties
The league cut the period to 10 minutes in 2017 to limit the extra snaps players take. A shorter period also makes ties more likely, and the 2025 rule adds a tension of its own. Guaranteeing two possessions inside 10 minutes means one long drive can eat most of the clock.
The playoffs avoid that by having no clock limit at all. The regular season accepts that a tied game will sometimes stay tied.
How to read an NFL overtime as it happens
Watch the coin-toss choice first. A coach who chooses to kick is betting that knowing the target matters more than having the ball first.
On the first drive, a field goal is not a finish line any more, and a touchdown is not either. The decision that often settles the game comes on the second possession: whether the trailing team, after scoring its own touchdown, kicks to tie or goes for two to win.
In the regular season, keep an eye on the clock from the first snap. Under 10 minutes, a team that controls the ball can make sure the other side gets its guaranteed possession with almost no time left to use it.
