World Rugby Rankings: Up-to-date international rugby standings

Write for The Roar

Anyone can contribute to The Roar and have their work featured alongside some of Australia’s most prominent sports journalists.

Angus Bell of the Wallabies (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

The World Rugby rankings determine which international side is considered the world’s best.

Australia’s miraculous, last-second win over England saw a substantial shift in the world’s rankings.

The Wallabies jumped past Italy into eighth, and are now hot on the heels of England themselves, who slumped from fifth to seventh with the shock loss.

The gap grew even closer with England’s loss to the Springboks and Australia’s emphatic win over Wales, but the Wallabies losing to Scotland saw them lose some ground.

Ireland, who retook top spot following both their Six Nations win and South Africa’s Rugby Championship loss to Argentina, slumped back to third with a home loss to the All Blacks, but regained second after New Zealand’s loss to France.

Current World Rugby Rankings

Position	Team	Points
1	South Africa	92.78
2	Ireland	90.78
3	New Zealand	90.36
4	France	88.51
5	Argentina	84.97
6	Scotland	83.34
7	England	82.31
8	Australia	81.52
9	Fiji	80.07
10	Italy	78.64
11	Wales	74.01
12	Georgia	73.85
13	Japan	72.95
14	Samoa	72.68
15	USA	70.02
16	Portugal	68.82
17	Uruguay	67.06
18	Spain	65.98
19	Tonga	65.46
20	Romania	63.01

To see the complete rankings for all 105 international rugby sides, head over to World Rugby’s website.

Aaron Smith — (Photo by Renee McKay/Getty Images)

The rankings explained

The World Rugby Rankings operate using a points exchange system, where two teams will exchange points following a game against each other. That is, the losing team’s points total will be reduced by the same amount that the winning side’s is increased by.

Each side has a points rating almost always ranging from 0-100, with the no.1 side in the world often ranked between 90-100.

A range of factors impact the number of points exchanged following each match, including each side’s ranking going into the match, the location of the game – to take into account home ground advantage – and the margin of the result.

Home ground advantage to is taken into account by ‘handicapping’ the home side – their ranking is given three additional points for the purpose of comparing the relative strength of the two sides.

If the margin of victory exceeds 15 points, then the points exchanged between the side is multiplied by 1.5.

All international matches are given the same weighting as each other for ranking purposes – so a Bledisloe Cup game is given no more weighting than a match between Georgia and Italy, for example – so as to not disadvantage those sides who don’t have access to rugby’s biggest tournaments.

The one exception to this is Rugby World Cup games, for which the points exchange is doubled.