The Most Common Final Scores in the NFL

The finding: a handful of low scores rule the league

NFL final scores feel like they could be almost anything — and yet, across decades of games, the same small set of numbers keeps showing up on the scoreboard. We counted every exact final score in the bundled nflverse game log — 7,261 non-tie games from 1999 through 2025, regular season and playoffs (6,952 and 309) — ordering each result as winner’s points first, and the leaderboard is remarkably top-heavy. A tiny cluster of low, one-score finals dominates, and the single most common final score in the modern NFL is 23–20, which has happened 139 times (1.91%).

The detail that gives the game away: the three most common final scores are all decided by exactly three points. After 23–20 come 20–17 (133 games, 1.83%) and 27–24 (129 games, 1.78%). That is not a coincidence. It is the scoring grammar of football — field goals worth 3 and touchdowns worth 7 — showing up directly in the leaderboard of where games end.

The exhibit: the leaderboard of final scores

Here are the 14 most common exact final scores, straight from /data/games.csv. Every bar is a low, one-score or two-score game, and the leaders sit right on top of one another.

Read the chart from the top and a pattern jumps out. The leaders — 23–20, 20–17, 27–24 — are each separated by exactly three points, the most common margin of victory in football. Drop down the list and the same flavor repeats: 24–17 (91, 1.25%), 27–20 (77, 1.06%), 13–10 (66, 0.91%), 24–21 (64, 0.88%), 16–13 (64, 0.88%), 17–10 (63, 0.87%), 20–13 (63, 0.87%), 31–24 (62, 0.85%), 23–17 (60, 0.83%), 24–10 (59, 0.81%), and 34–31 (57, 0.79%). Every one of the 14 most common finals is a one-score or two-score game, and every winning and losing total is a clean sum of field goals and touchdowns.

The numbers behind the leaderboard

A worked example: take the leaders apart

The leaderboard stops looking random the moment you decompose a few of the totals into the plays that produce them. A touchdown with the extra point is worth 7; a field goal is worth 3. Almost every common score is just some combination of those two units.

This is why scores pile up where they do. A typical NFL offense produces a few touchdowns and a couple of field goals in a game, and the arithmetic of stacking 3s and 7s lands most teams somewhere in the high teens to high twenties. The most common finals cluster precisely where both teams arrive in that 17–to–27 band — close enough that the game is decided by a single score. Totals like 17, 20, 23, 24, and 27 are reachable by several different mixes of touchdowns and field goals, so they come up again and again; awkward numbers that require a missed extra point, a safety, or a two-point conversion are far rarer, because they need an unusual play to land on them.

The same story as the key numbers

If this feels familiar, it should. The dominance of 3 and 7 in the key numbers — the spikes in the margin-of-victory distribution — is the very same phenomenon seen from a different angle. Margins are the difference between two scores built from 3s and 7s, so they pile up on 3, 7, and their combinations. Final scores are the scores themselves, built from the same units, so they pile up on totals like 17, 20, 23, and 24. The reason the three most common final scores are all three-point games is exactly the reason 3 is the single most common margin: one team kicking one more field goal than the other is the most ordinary way for an NFL game to be decided.

All of NFL history: 20–17 is the all-time leader

The nflverse log behind the chart starts in 1999. To answer the question for the whole history of the league we added a second file. FiveThirtyEight’s public game file lists every game from 1920 to 2020, 16,810 in all, with both final scores. Where they overlap, the two files agree game for game on all 5,852 games from 1999 to 2020 (same date, same final score), so we joined FiveThirtyEight’s file for 1920–2020 to nflverse for 2021–2025: 18,234 games from 1920 to 2025, 17,914 of which did not end tied.

Over the full span the most common final score is 20–17, with 302 games (1.69%), ahead of 27–24 (244) and 23–20 (217). The ten most common, with each score’s count and rank before and since 1999:

The order moved over time. 23–20 happened 78 times in the 79 seasons before 1999 (#15 in that span) and 139 times in the 27 seasons since. 17–14 went the other way: 154 games before 1999, second only to 20–17, and 46 since (#22). Both are three-point games, and in the 3s-and-7s arithmetic of the worked example below the difference is field goals: 23–20 is two touchdowns and three field goals against two and two, while 17–14 is two touchdowns and a field goal against two touchdowns. Scoring rose too, from 38.4 combined points per game before 1999 to 44.3 since, and games decided by exactly three points rose from 11.2% to 15.1%.

FiveThirtyEight’s file also counts the All-America Football Conference (1946-49, 217 games) and the AFL (1960-69, 616 games), plus the four AFL-NFL Super Bowls. Leave all of those out and the NFL-only count has the same top three: 20–17 (293), 27–24 (239) and 23–20 (213).

Data: FiveThirtyEight, nfl-elo-game (data/nfl_games.csv, MIT License), read November 5, 2026; nflverse game log for 1999–2025.

The most common combined score: 37 points

Add the two scores together and the most common combined score from 1999 to 2025 is 37 points: 280 of 7,276 games (3.85%). It leads by a hair, with 41 points in 277 games and 51 in 275. Of those 280 games, 133 ended 20–17 and 41 ended 27–10; 24–17 supplies 91 of the 277 games at 41, and 27–24 supplies 129 of the 275 at 51. Unlike the final-score count, this one includes every game, so the 15 ties count here.

No combined score reaches 4% of games. Totals are scattered more thinly than final scores because many different finals add up to the same number: the 280 games at 37 points came from 12 different final scores. The leader has also moved with scoring:

In 2010–2019, 51 led 43 by a single game (103 to 102), and in 2020–2025 it led 44 by one (69 to 68), so the top of this list is close in every span.

2026 so far: no score has taken over

Through week 8 of 2026 (121 games, the last on Monday, November 2), no final score has come up more than three times. 33–30 is the only score to happen three times, and 21 scores have happened twice. Among the long-run leaders, 20–17 and 27–24 have each happened twice, 23–20 not at all. The 121 games produced 97 different final scores and one tie (the Giants and Commanders, 27–27 in week 5).

The most common combined score so far is 40 points (7 games), and games have averaged 46.1 combined points, against 44.3 from 1999 to 2025. 20 of the 121 games (16.5%) were decided by exactly three points. With one to three games per score, this list will keep moving as the season goes on.

Honest limitations

Reproduce it

Load /data/games.csv, keep every scored game that did not end tied (regular season and playoffs), order each result as winner’s points first, and count how often each exact (winner_score, loser_score) pair occurs. Sort by frequency and the leaderboard above falls out. The chart is produced by our chart script, which reads the bundled nflverse log directly and stamps a “Data: nflverse” footer — no network calls, nothing hand-entered. The all-time table, the combined scores and the 2026 lines come from our history script, which joins FiveThirtyEight’s 1920–2020 file to nflverse, checks that the two agree on every 1999–2020 game, and asserts each number in those sections against this page.

Correction, October 28, 2026: this page first described its 7,261 games as regular-season games. The count has always included the playoffs: 6,952 regular-season and 309 playoff games. The wording now says so, and no number on the page changed. On the 6,952 regular-season games alone the top three are the same, in the same order: 23-20 (132 games), 20-17 (124) and 27-24 (123).

Further reading

• Background: Chapter 22: Betting Market Analysis (DataField.dev).
• Key Numbers — why 3 and 7 dominate the margins, the same phenomenon viewed through the difference between scores.
• How scoring has risen — why the leaderboard of final scores drifts as offenses evolve.
• Points per drive — how those 3s and 7s get produced one possession at a time.
• How often games go to overtime — the tight, low-margin games that feed the three-point finals.
• Pro Football Reference — box scores and final results for every game in the database.