Attendance records and reformatted age grade competitions coming in 2026

Six Nations Rugby have announced that the women’s age grade competition has been reformatted ahead of this year’s competition.

The competition has evolved into the U21 Women’s Six Nations. This follows the success of the U20 Women’s Summer Series, which has seen 14 players graduate to their nation’s senior teams in the Guinness Women’s Six Nations over the past two years.

Taking place between April and May, the majority of athletes will be under the age of 21, although teams are allowed to select a number of players up to the age of 23. This has been changed to strengthen the pathway between age grade rugby and senior internationals.

Moving from a week-long Summer Series format, the U21 Women’s Six Nations will now see teams take part in a three round competition that more closely mirrors the rhythm of the Guinness Women’s Six Nations.

Round One of the U21 Series will correlate with the second round of Guinness Women’s Six Nations action and feature double headers in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Galway.

The 2026 Guinness Women’s Six Nations is expected to be the biggest edition of the tournament yet.

A year ago 151,506 fans attended the tournament and this year there has been a 38 per cent increase in overall stadium capacity as Allianz Stadium, the Principality Stadium, Aviva Stadium, Scottish Gas Murrayfield, Stade Marcel Michelin and Stade Atlantique all host games.

Scotland hope to beat the 18,900 benchmark to register the largest ever crowd for a standalone women’s sporting event in Scotland and the Aviva Stadium will play host to its first standalone Ireland Women fixture.

England’s Red Roses look set to beat the Women’s Six Nations attendance record – 58,498 set in 2023 when England hosted France – in Round One when they host Ireland at Allianz Stadium. The same venue they lifted the Women’s Rugby World Cup at in front of a world record crowd. Over 50,000 tickets have been sold already.

Julie Paterson, Chief of Rugby at Six Nations Rugby, said: “The Guinness Women’s Six Nations sits in the same conversations as the WTA, WSL, and our teams standing alongside the Lionesses, in terms of the contribution to the growth of women’s sport.

“New attendance records will be set this year, the global broadcast coverage for the Championship mean millions of fans can tune in, highlighting the strong position the game is in. Much like the other women’s sports, the success of the Women’s Six Nations is the result of investment, evolution, and work to create a Championship that not only gives the players the best possible platform to shine, from a robust foundation on which to build a commercially sustainable product.

“It is important to remember how young women’s rugby is, and as 2026 welcomes the first fully aligned international global calendar, the Guinness Women’s Six Nations has led the way being the first women’s competition out of the blocks this year.

“The work is nowhere near done, we need to keep innovating and driving the game forward at pace, and this is why the launch of the U21 Women’s Six Nations Series is so important. The Women’s Six Nations celebrates the elite level of the game, but we need to make sure the foundations are solid, and the pathway to follow in the footsteps of the athletes who have gone before provides a clear line of sight to international honours and become the Six Nations stars of the future.”