Power Rankings vs the ladder: why they disagree

By FootyNRLScore — 2026-07-11

Every Tuesday someone looks at our Power Rankings, compares them to the NRL ladder, and asks why a team sitting fifth on one list is second on the other. Short answer: they measure different things, and the gap between them is often the most interesting number on the site.

## What the ladder measures

The ladder is a bank statement. Two competition points for a win, whether you win by forty at home to a top-four side or steal it in golden point against the wooden spooner. It does not care how you won, who you beat, or who was missing. Over 24 rounds that is mostly fair, and it is rightly what decides finals spots.

## What the Power Rankings measure

Our power rating is a form measure. Each club gets an attack score and a defence score built from recent match statistics, weighted toward the last five rounds, then combined into a 0-100 rating. It asks a different question: if these two teams played this weekend, on current output, who would you back?

## Where the gaps come from

The draw is the big one. The NRL fixture is not symmetric; a team can bank six wins in eight weeks against sides in the bottom half while a rival grinds through the contenders. The ladder counts those wins identically. The power rating does not, because beating good teams by scoring efficiently and defending well moves the underlying numbers more than piling on points against a side that has stopped tackling.

Injuries are the other. When a team loses its spine for a month, the ladder remembers the losses forever. The power rating largely forgets them once the team starts performing again, which is why a side coming off a horror injury run often ranks well above its ladder position late in the year.

## Which one should you trust?

Both, for different jobs. The ladder decides who plays finals. The power rating is a better guide to who wins them. When the two disagree sharply about a team, that disagreement is usually telling you something: a ladder position propped up by a soft draw, or a good team whose season looks worse than it is.

The full methodology behind the ratings that feed our rankings is in our article on how the FNS player rating works. The rankings themselves rebuild after every round on the Power Rankings page, arrows and all.