American Football Scoring and the Two-Point Conversion

What each American football score is worth, from which yard line the try is taken, and who is allowed to score on it — under the NFL’s rules, the NCAA’s and the NFHS’s, because the three differ and the NFL’s changed in 2015. Every answer names the rule and says where it was read.

The try after a touchdown, by code

Other places the three codes differ, read from the same sheet

Whose rule, from which season, and who is allowed to score

Six points for a touchdown, three for a field goal, two for a safety, and one or two for the try after a touchdown. Those values are the first thing anybody learns about American football and they are the least interesting thing on this page, because almost everything that actually differs between the three codes is in the try — where it is taken from, whether the ball stays live, and whether the defence can score.

“Conversion” means two different things in American football alone. A two-point conversion is the try after a touchdown taken by run or pass instead of by kick. A third-down conversion is unrelated to scoring: it is gaining the yards needed for a new set of downs. Elsewhere on this site the word names two further quantities that are neither — association football’s shot conversion, goals over shots, and field hockey’s penalty-corner conversion, goals over corners awarded. Four meanings, one word, no arithmetic in common.

The NFL moved its try-kick thirteen yards backwards in 2015, and nothing else on this page matters as much. Before that change the ball was spotted at the two-yard line and the kick came from about the ten — a twenty-yard attempt, which professional kickers made so reliably that the play was close to ceremonial. The line of scrimmage for a kick moved to the fifteen, making it roughly a thirty-three-yard kick, while the run-or-pass try stayed at the two. Two consequences follow. Extra-point percentages from before and after 2015 are not comparable with each other. And the arithmetic of going for two changed, because one side of the choice got harder and the other did not.

College and high school football never moved it. In both, the try’s line of scrimmage is the three-yard line whichever way the try is taken, so the kick is still about twenty yards and the two-point attempt starts a yard further out than the NFL’s. That means extra-point percentages are not comparable between codes either — a college kicker and a professional one are not attempting the same kick.

The sharpest difference is who may score. Under NCAA rules the ball on a try “remains live as on any field goal attempt” and “B may score two points” — B being the defence — and the NFL gained the same provision in the same 2015 change that moved the kick. Under NFHS rules the position is the opposite: the ball is “dead when kick fails or when B secures possession”, and “B cannot score”. So the same play — a blocked kick scooped up and run eighty yards the other way — is worth two points in two codes and nothing in the third. Texas and Massachusetts are the exception among high school associations, because they play under NCAA rules.

That live ball is also where American football’s rarest score comes from. The NFL’s own value table lists the try as worth “1 point (Field Goal or Safety) or 2 points (Touchdown)”, and the safety branch of that is the one-point safety: a safety occurring during a try scores a single point rather than the usual two. It is possible wherever the ball stays live through the try, which the source read here gives as the CFL, the NFL and American college football. One honest gap: this page established the value but not which team scores it in every configuration, because the NFL’s summary gives the number without the attribution and the full rule text was not reachable. The page states what it read.

On sourcing, since half of this page is other people’s rules. The NFL’s values and both try spots are read from the league’s own rule summaries, which carry their section numbers — Rule 11, Section 1, Article 2 for the values and Rule 11, Section 3, Article 1 for the spots — and the goal specification from the league’s own 2020 rulebook PDF, whose extracted text stops inside Rule 5 and therefore cannot supply Rule 11 at all. The league’s current rulebook page returns a table of contents where Rule 11’s body should be. Neither the NCAA’s nor the NFHS’s own rules book was reachable, so everything in those two columns comes either from a county officials’ association’s 2022 differences sheet or from a secondary account, and each rule above says which. Where a value is stated for all three codes on the strength of a differences document listing no difference, the page says that too, because a silent comparison is weaker evidence than a rule read directly.

A rule here belongs to a code, in a season. American football is governed separately by the National Football League, by the NCAA for college football and by the National Federation of State High School Associations for most United States high school play — and state associations modify the NFHS rules on top of that, so “high school” is not one rulebook either. The rules on this page are no exception: the NFL moved the kick after a touchdown thirteen yards backwards in 2015, and the college and high school spot never moved at all. So every number here is printed with the body that publishes it and the document it was read from, and where this page could not read a code’s own rules book it says so rather than filling the gap from another code’s.

What a score is worth is the start of the arithmetic rather than the end of it. The kicking percentage that decides whether a field goal attempt was a good idea is on the field goal kicking percentage calculator, what a team does once it gets close enough to choose is on the third down and red zone conversion calculator, and the number most often used to explain a result afterwards is on the turnover margin and differential calculator.

Every figure here is arithmetic on counts a league or a statistics provider publishes. This page produces no commercial prediction of any kind, and no page in this section does.

Frequently asked questions

Related calculators

References

1. NFL Football Operations. NFL Video Rulebook — Scoring Plays — the league’s own summaries with section numbers. Rule 11, Section 1, Article 2: “Touchdown: 6 points”, “Field Goal: 3 points”, “Safety: 2 points”, “Try after touchdown: 1 point (Field Goal or Safety) or 2 points (Touchdown)”. Rule 11, Section 3, Article 1: “15 yards from the defensive team’s goal line for a Try-kick” and “two yards from the defensive team’s goal line for a Try by pass or run”. Rule 11, Section 4, Article 1 requires a place kick or drop kick “made by the offense”. About 2,800 characters, text not video. operations.nfl.com (read 15 Oct 2026).
2. San Diego County Football Officials Association. 2022 Major NFHS/NCAA Football Rules Differences — an officials’ association’s clause-by-clause sheet for the 2022 season. On the try: NFHS has “Ball dead when kick fails or when B secures possession” and “B cannot score”, while under NCAA rules “The ball remains live as on any field goal attempt” and “B may score two points”. “A 40/25-second play clock is used” in both, but after a touchdown and the following kickoff NFHS sets 25 seconds where the NCAA sets 40; quarters are 12 minutes under NFHS and 15 under NCAA; overtime is “Equal series from 10-yard line (State Association option)” against “Equal series from 25-yard line”; hash marks “Divide field in thirds” against “60 feet from each sideline”. It arrived as flattened text with the columns run together, so only unambiguous rows are quoted. sdcfoa.org (read 15 Oct 2026).
3. Wikipedia. Conversion (gridiron football) — for 2015 the NFL moved the kick’s line of scrimmage “back 13 yards to the 15-yard line (for a 33-yard attempt)” while the two-point attempt stayed at the 2, where before “the NFL used the 2-yard line (with the kick coming at the 10-yard line for a 20-yard attempt)”. “In American high school and college football the line of scrimmage is the three-yard line”, with “the kick taking place at the 10-yard line for a 20-yard attempt”. NFL defences became able to return a failed conversion for two points in the same 2015 change; a one-point safety is possible in the CFL, the NFL and American college football; most United States high school play ends when the defence gains possession, except in Texas and Massachusetts, which use NCAA rules (read 15 Oct 2026).
4. National Football League. Official Playing Rules of the National Football League, 2020 edition (PDF) — Rule 1 on the goal: “a centrally placed horizontal crossbar 18 feet, 6 inches in length, the top face of which is 10 feet above the ground”, with uprights that “will extend 35 feet above the crossbar” and are “no less than 3 inches and no more than 4 inches in diameter”. A length check matters: the extracted text is 110,687 characters and stops inside Rule 5, so Rule 11 is not in it and the scoring values on this site are cited from the league’s rules pages instead. operations.nfl.com (read 15 Oct 2026).
5. NFL Football Operations. NFL Rulebook, 2026 HTML edition — recorded as a NEGATIVE result rather than a source. Rule 1 Section 3 (Goal) and the whole of Rule 11 (Scoring) appear only as table-of-contents headings with no body text; the rule text that does arrive is the field markings list, the 2026 rule-change table and the penalty tables. The field markings list names lines, pylons and arrows, and no red zone. operations.nfl.com (read 15 Oct 2026).
6. 2025 Major Rule Differences, a rules-differences sheet published at partletonsports.com — cited for one narrow thing and labelled as read. Its text covers a single state association’s own modifications, not NFHS defaults: “Point after try will be from the 3-yard line for 1 point and the 10-yard line for 2 points”, “Four 12:00 quarters will be used”, “Hash marks will be in the center of the field and 23′ apart”. It arrived as bullets with no table structure and the association was not independently identified, so it is used only as an instance that a state body rewrites these numbers and never as evidence of any code’s default (read 15 Oct 2026).