LCK rewrites its spending rules: a six-point test and a four-tier tax

The LCK, South Korea's professional League of Legends league, has changed the way a star player's pay is counted against a team's spending limit. In a rulebook notice published on September 8, 2026 on the LoL Esports site, the league said the discount it grants for high-achieving players will now rest on the results of the past three years, and that no team may apply it to more than two players. The same notice announces a new plan for the brackets of the league's luxury tax, the charge a team owes when its player spending passes the limit, and a change to how long a contract may run.

The notice itself is short and carries no figures. The numbers sit in the rulebook it links to, and Sheep Esports, the esports news outlet, set them out on September 10: a player needs six points, earned from titles, to qualify; the tax moves from two brackets to four; and contracts signed under the old terms keep them until they end. The rulebook's cover gives two dates, a revision on August 19 and an effective date of September 18.

LCK rulebook update notice of September 8, 2026, and the rulebook's terms as reported by Sheep Esports on September 10, 2026.

What the LCK announced on September 8

The league presented the update as coming ahead of the offseason, the weeks after the competitive year when contracts end and teams rebuild their line-ups. The league's own 2023 announcement of its spending rules calls that period the stove league.

It lists three sets of changes. The first concerns the length of contracts for players and for coaching staff, under Article 1.4.2 and Article 2.9.7 of the rulebook. The second concerns Appendix 3, the part of the rulebook that holds the Balanced Spending System, the LCK's name for its spending rules, also known by the English initials SFR, for Sporting Financial Regulations. The third, inside the same appendix, adds measures the league may take when a team does not hand in the documents the system requires.

On the spending rules, the notice says two things in its own words: eligibility for the high-achiever discount is now judged on performance over the past three years, and the number of players who may receive it is limited to two per team. It adds that the plan for changing the luxury tax brackets has been updated. Everything beyond that comes from the rulebook text, which the league published with the notice.

How the spending limit works

The system dates from July 19, 2023, when the LCK office announced it on the same site. The league wrote then that the combined pay of each team's five highest earners had risen by 71% in two years, and that teams were spending most of their operating budgets on player salaries.

The mechanism it chose is not a hard ceiling. There is no limit on what one player may earn, and a team is free to spend above the line. What the league measures is the total pay of a team's five best-paid players, not of the whole roster. That total is compared with an upper limit, which the LCK said it sets from the league's recent revenue and recalculates every two years. A team above the limit owes a luxury tax on the excess, at rates that rise by bracket.

The 2023 announcement also set a recommended floor, a minimum a team should spend, placed at about 70% of the revenue the league distributed to each team on the 2022 figures. The money raised by the tax is shared equally among the teams whose spending sits between the floor and the limit. A team under the floor receives nothing from it.

The discount stars used to earn for good

From the first day, the system made room for the best-known players. Under the 2023 terms, a player with five or more LCK titles, or with three or more international titles such as the Mid-Season Invitational or the World Championship, counted for only half of his real pay in the calculation. A second reduction, of 30%, applied to a player who had spent three or more years with the same team. The two could be combined, and the league office wrote at the time that a player meeting both conditions would count for roughly 30 to 40% of what he was actually paid.

The purpose was stated by the league in that announcement: let teams keep their stars and reward those that build a player over several years, without the pay of those players pushing the team over the limit.

By the time of this update the achievement rule had become a career-long scale. Sheep Esports describes the terms now removed: a player who had gathered enough points over his career qualified permanently, with minimums to reach in domestic and in international competition at the same time, and his pay counted at 50%. The loyalty rule stood as the outlet describes it, with the pay of a player who had stayed three consecutive seasons at one organization counted at 70%. Both are gone from the new text, according to the outlet's reading of the rulebook.

Six points over three years

The replacement is a single test. To qualify, Sheep Esports reports, a player needs at least six points earned in the three years before the date on which the calculation starts. Domestic and international results are added together, with no separate minimum for each. A player who qualifies counts at 50% of his pay, as before. Each team may name two such players at most.

The points come from titles only, and each competition has its own value.

The two values for an LCK title follow the league's calendar. A title won before January 1, 2025 is worth 1.5 points, which Sheep Esports explains by the fact that the LCK was then played across two splits a year. The outlet writes that the league has since moved to a single-season format, and a season title from 2025 onward is worth 2.

A worked example shows how high the bar sits. A player who wins the World Championship, the LCK season title and the LCK Cup inside the three-year window reaches 3 plus 2 plus 1, which is exactly six. Two LCK season titles and one LCK Cup give five, one short. Under the scale, no single title is enough. Two are enough only when both are World Championships: a World Championship and a Mid-Season Invitational add up to five.

The second change in the test is that the status is no longer permanent. A career's worth of trophies opened the old discount for good. A three-year window means a title stops counting once it is more than three years old.

Four tax brackets, and who keeps the old terms

The tax itself has been rebuilt. Sheep Esports reports that the rulebook now divides spending above the limit into four brackets instead of two. The outlet gives the top of the scale: a rate of 60% on the part of a team's spending that exceeds 250% of the upper limit. It does not give the rates or the boundaries of the three brackets below.

The move to the new scale is cushioned. According to the same report, the increase in tax a team faces is adjusted in proportion to the share of its spending that comes from contracts signed before the change. A team whose pay is mostly locked in under old deals therefore feels less of the new scale than one that signs most of its players afresh.

The third element is the one the league's notice describes in a single line: measures for the case in which a team does not submit the material the system depends on. The notice does not detail them.

The new test does not reach back into contracts already signed. Sheep Esports reports a transition clause: a player who met the former criteria and whose contract was signed before July 19, 2026 keeps the 50% reduction until that contract ends. A team with more than two such players keeps the reduction for all of them for as long as those deals run, even though the new limit is two.

The outlet names four players who hold that legacy status: Faker, Chovy, Canyon and Ruler. It adds that Canyon's contract expires this year, so a renewal would be assessed under the six-point test.

For every other player, and for every contract signed from now on, the question is the same at each calculation: six points in three years, and one of the team's two places.

Contracts no longer have to end on the same day

The other half of the update concerns the calendar of contracts. League of Legends esports has a global official contract end date, which the LCK rulebook defines as 23:59 UTC on the third Monday of November. In 2026 that is November 16.

The notice says a contract may now end on another date. Sheep Esports explains what was removed: the requirement that a short-term deal run from the start of the LCK Cup to the global end date. A short deal can now stop earlier. One limit remains, and the notice states it: a multi-year contract that runs past a global end date must be written to finish on one. The rulebook also limits a player's contract to four seasons.

The notice applies the same change to coaching staff contracts under Article 2.9.7, the article that also holds the league's minimum pay for coaches. The rulebook sets those floors at 60 million South Korean won a year for at least one head coach, 40 million for at least one other member of the coaching staff and 20 million for every other member, before tax.

What comes next

The revised rulebook takes effect on September 18, 2026, thirty days after the revision date on its cover. Contracts written to the global end date expire on November 16.

Before that comes the World Championship, which Riot Games has scheduled from October 15 to November 14, 2026. It is the title the new scale values most, at three points, half of what a player needs.

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