How the 2025 Draft order is determined

The NFL Draft order is determined by a combination of regular season records, postseason performance, and the strength of schedule in the 2024 season.

The Super Bowl winner is ranked 32; their opponents are 31.

Next, the remaining teams are assigned to 4 groups based on their playoff performance: losers of the Conference Championships (29, 30), Divisional Playoffs (25-28), and Wild Card games (19-24); and non-playoff teams (1-18).

Within those groups, teams are ordered based on win-loss record in the regular season, with the better record getting the later pick. Teams in different groups with the same W-L record are not tied. For example, the team with the highest record of Wild Card losers will be 24, even if it has a better record than a Divisional Playoff loser.

If there is a tie within a group (examples: 2 Wild Card losers with a 10-7 record, or 4 non-playoff teams with a 8-9 record), there are additional tiebreaker steps, which starts by the easier (lower) strength of schedule picking first. This year, the Steelers, Broncos, and Buccaneers are all tied at 10-7 with the same strength of schedule. If two or all three teams are eliminated in the same playoff round, here’s how the draft tie would be broken, starting with the team with the better draft choice:

• Broncos before Steelers due to the Steelers head-to-head win
• Buccaneers before Broncos due to the Broncos head-to-head win
• Buccaneers before Steelers due to their worse record in common games (5-6 vs. 7-4)
• In a three-way tie, the order is Buccaneers, Broncos, and Steelers; the conference tiebreaker is applied first, then the Bucs-Broncos tiebreaker.

Teams that are involved in a tiebreaker will cycle through the order each round, based on the tiebreaker order. Thus, in a 4-team tiebreaker, a team will rotate 1-4-3-2, the second team 2-1-4-3, the third 3-2-1-4, and the fourth 4-3-2-1.

2025 basic draft order

For the 2025 NFL Draft, the basic order of selections shown below (not including trades and compensatory and supplemental selections). PS is how far a team advanced in the postseason. Sched is the win percentage of a team’s opponents (strength of schedule). Subsequent rounds shows the order cycle in Rounds 2-7, where the first round follows the basic order. (When these columns are blank, that team has the same position every round.) Color banded rows group the teams that are involved in the same tiebreaker cycle.

The 49ers and Falcons have forfeited their fifth-round selections. The 49ers were sanctioned for a salary cap violation caused by accounting errors that miscalculated their total compensation in 2022. The Falcons were docked their draft choice due to tampering violations by contacting three players in 2024 prior to the signing period opening. In the fifth round, the table shows those picks shifting up one.

Image via Green Bay Packers