Guide · 5 min read

Every FPL chip explained

You get eight chips a season, in two sets of four. Each set has a window, each window has a hard deadline, and an unused chip is simply gone. Here is what each does and when it can be played, taken from the game's own settings.

The eight chips and their windows

The game publishes its chip rules in the same data that powers this site, so these windows come straight from it rather than from memory.

Two things stand out. Wildcard and Free Hit can't be played in gameweek 1, because until the first deadline you can change your squad as much as you like anyway. And every first-half chip stops at gameweek 19. You can play a first-half chip in gameweek 19 itself, but once that deadline passes, which this season is 2 January 2027, anything unused from the first set is lost. The second set opens for gameweek 20, whose deadline falls four days later.

Wildcard

A Wildcard gives you unlimited free transfers for one gameweek, and the changes are permanent. Whatever squad you build with it is the squad you carry forward. It's the chip for a rebuild: when three or four of your players have stopped starting, when your structure was wrong from the beginning, or when you want to set up for a run of fixtures without paying 4 points a move.

The arithmetic is simple. If fixing your team would take five transfers and you have one free, that's 16 points of hits. The Wildcard does it for nothing. What it doesn't do is change the money. You still sell each player at his selling price, including the sell-on fee on any rise, so a Wildcard can't conjure a budget you don't have.

Free Hit

A Free Hit also gives unlimited transfers, but only for one gameweek. When that gameweek ends, your squad reverts to exactly what it was before, with the same team value. It's a one-week lease on a different team.

That makes it the chip for extreme weeks: a blank gameweek where half your team has no fixture, or a double gameweek you want to load up on without wrecking the squad you've built for the weeks after. Its value is the gap between what your real squad would have scored and what the borrowed one does, which in a normal week is small and in a week where you'd otherwise field seven players is enormous.

Bench Boost

Bench Boost counts the points of all fifteen players instead of eleven. Your four substitutes score for real that week. Its value is exactly what your bench scores, so it's worth most when your bench is strong and every one of the fifteen has a fixture, ideally two.

It's also the chip managers reach for earliest. In gameweek 1 of this season, over 814,000 teams played Bench Boost. The game publishes chip counts for every finished gameweek and you can see them on the gameweek pages. The logic is that before the season starts you can build fifteen fit players you actually chose, so your bench is at its most deliberate, and the first-half chip has to be used by gameweek 19 regardless. The cost of that logic is giving up the chance of a stronger week later in the half.

Triple Captain

Triple Captain multiplies your captain's score by three instead of two. If he scores 10, you get 30 rather than 20, a straight 10-point gain over a normal week. Its value is whatever you expect your captain to score in the week you play it, so it belongs in the week where that expectation is highest: a double gameweek if one comes, or the best single fixture in the window if not. The decision is worked through in the captaincy guide.

How the halves change the game

When chips came one to a season, each was a long-term asset you could hold for the perfect week. Now each chip has a shelf life of nineteen gameweeks. The first-half set has to be spent in a period where rearranged fixtures are rarer, because postponements haven't piled up yet, so the case for waiting is weak. Play the first Wildcard when your team needs it, not when a calendar says so. Play the first Bench Boost and Triple Captain in the strongest ordinary weeks you can find, and don't let either reach gameweek 19 unused.

The second half is where the season's chaos lives: the blanks and doubles that come from cup rounds and postponements. That's where a Free Hit on a blank, a Wildcard before a big double and a Bench Boost on the double itself can add fifty points to a season. When to play Bench Boost and Free Hit covers the conditions to look for, and The shape of an FPL season shows where the halves fall against the months.

Chips in a mini-league

A chip in hand is a threat. If your closest rival still has Bench Boost and Triple Captain and you have neither, a 25-point lead is thinner than it looks. The Rivalry Report scores chip usage, meaning what each chip actually returned in the week it was played, and counts what each manager has left. Leagues with a League Pass also get a chip watch across the whole table, so everyone can see who is still armed.

Compare two managers to see whose chips have been earning their keep, and whose are about to expire.