FPL Bonus Points 2026/27: What Changed and Who Wins

FPL bonus points are the part of the scoring nobody builds a squad around and everybody argues about on a Saturday night. For 2026/27 the bonus points system has been changed in four places, and the direction is one way: goalkeepers gained, centre backs lost a slice, and anyone who runs at defenders stopped paying a tax.

The Gameweek 1 deadline is 18:30 on Friday 21 August. Four days out, it is worth knowing which of your picks the new rules quietly favour.

How do bonus points work in FPL?

Every match hands out three bonus points, two and one, to the top three players on the Bonus Points System. Ties share, so a game can produce two threes or two twos.

BPS is a second scoring system running underneath the one on your team sheet. It scores the parts of a performance that never show up as a goal or an assist: minutes, passing, clearances, blocks, interceptions, saves, chances created, errors. Your team total only ever sees the bonus that comes out of the top of it.

That distinction matters for the changes below. All four are BPS tweaks. None of them alters what a goal, an assist, a clean sheet or a defensive contribution is worth.

What changed for 2026/27?

Four things, all confirmed by FPL before the season.

Being tackled no longer costs a BPS point. It used to be minus one, every time a player was dispossessed in a duel. That deduction has gone entirely.

Clearances, blocks and interceptions now pay one BPS for every three, up from every two. The stated reason is double-dipping: defenders and midfielders already collect defensive contribution points for the same actions, so the bonus system stopped paying them twice at the old rate.

Every save is worth two BPS. The old split, two for a save from outside the box and three for one inside it, is gone. Flat two, and a goalkeeper picks up an extra BPS point for denying a big chance.

A saved penalty pays seven BPS rather than eight, with the big-chance point available on top.

Who actually wins bonus points now?

Goalkeepers are the clearest winners, and not in the way people assume. The gain is not the flat two per save, it is the removal of the location test plus the big-chance bonus. A keeper on a good defence in a busy afternoon now banks BPS for routine work he used to be underpaid for, and the shot he tips wide at 1-0 is worth more than it was in May.

Centre backs are the mild losers. A defender who racked up 12 clearances, blocks and interceptions used to be six BPS clear before anything else happened. Now he is four. That does not make defenders bad, it makes the clean sheet a bigger share of what a defender's bonus depends on, which is exactly why fixtures matter more this year than volume of defending does.

Dribblers gain quietly. A winger who takes on his full back eight times a match used to hand back BPS for every failed attempt. That is now free.

Where The Algorithm expects the bonus to land in Gameweek 1

Bonus follows clean sheets and busy goalkeepers, so the honest way to plan for it is to start with the defences most likely to keep one. These are our numbers as of 17 August 2026, for the opening round.

Arsenal at home to Coventry is the biggest number in the round at both ends: a 59.3% clean sheet and 2.63 goals expected. That is 12 percentage points clear of Man Utd at Hull, which is the next best defensive fixture in the game.

Gabriel at £8.0m is the highest-projected defender in the round on 5.60, and he is a centre back in a season that just made centre back bonus slightly harder to come by. He survives that because Arsenal's clean sheet probability is doing the heavy lifting, not his clearance count. Read that as the general lesson: back the fixture, not the defending.

The interesting one is Everton at home to Crystal Palace. It is the fourth-best clean sheet fixture in the round at 31.0%, Palace project the third-lowest expected goals of any away side in the opening weekend, and James Tarkowski is £6.0m with 9.6% ownership. Fewer than one in 10 managers own the second-highest projected defender in the round. Tarkowski also plays for a manager with no European football to rotate around in the opening month, which is worth more than a soft fixture on paper.

The verdict: goalkeeper is where the rule change actually pays, and it pays on a defence that gets tested. Raya at 32.9% owned is the consensus route and our numbers do not argue with it. Lammens at £5.0m and 18.8% is the version of the same idea that leaves you £1.0m for an attacker.

FAQ

When do bonus points get added in FPL? Provisional bonus updates live during a match and lands on your total once the game is done. It is only genuinely locked when FPL verifies the gameweek, which is why a Sunday-night score can still nudge.

Do bonus points count double for your captain? Yes. Bonus is part of a player's points, so the armband doubles it along with everything else. A captain who takes three bonus is six.

Did the FPL points system change for 2026/27? Not the main scoring. All four changes above sit inside the bonus points system. Goals, assists, clean sheets and defensive contribution pay exactly what they paid last season.

How many bonus points can a player get in one match? Three, unless the top BPS score is tied, in which case more than one player can take three.

You can check every projection in this piece yourself on our free FPL predicted points table, updated daily, no signup. If you want a read on whether your own squad is built for these fixtures, Rate My Team scores it free, and our goalkeeper board for 2026/27 goes deeper on where the £1.5m between keepers actually goes. For the chip side of the calendar, start with what a double gameweek is worth.