FedEx Cup Playoffs Format, Explained

The FedEx Cup playoffs are the PGA Tour’s season-ending series that determines its overall champion, run across three consecutive events that progressively shrink the field. Players accumulate FedEx Cup points throughout the regular season, the top 70 make the playoffs, and the field is cut to 50 and then 30 before a winner is decided at the Tour Championship.

The format has evolved several times since the FedEx Cup began in 2007, and the most recent change, for the 2025 season, simplified the finale in a big way. Here is how the whole system works, what the “new format” actually changed, and why finishing high matters far beyond a single trophy.

What is the FedEx Cup?

The FedEx Cup is the PGA Tour’s season-long competition. Every eligible tournament awards FedEx Cup points based on where players finish, with the biggest events and the playoffs worth the most. Those points build a season-long standings table, and the player who comes out on top at the end of the playoffs is the FedEx Cup champion, effectively the Tour’s player-of-the-season by results.

Think of it as two layers stacked together: each week players compete for that event’s title and prize money, while also chasing points that feed the bigger, season-long race.

The three playoff events

The playoffs use a funnel structure, tightening the field at each stage. The table below shows how it narrows.

Event	Field entering	Cut to	Notable feature
FedEx St. Jude Championship	Top 70	Top 50	First playoff event
BMW Championship	Top 50	Top 30	No 36-hole cut
Tour Championship (East Lake)	Top 30	—	Decides the FedEx Cup

Only players who survive each stage move on, so a poor week can end a season instantly, while a strong one can vault a player up the standings. Making the final 30 at East Lake is a season goal in its own right, because it carries perks such as spots in the next year’s major championships.

The change that reshaped the finale

For years the Tour Championship used a “starting strokes” system. From 2019 through 2024, the leader in the standings began the tournament with a head start, as much as several shots under par before hitting a ball, with each player behind starting progressively higher. Whoever finished with the lowest adjusted score won both the tournament and the Cup.

Beginning with the 2025 season, the PGA Tour scrapped that staggered start. Now all 30 qualifiers begin the Tour Championship at even par and play a straightforward 72-hole stroke-play event. The winner of that tournament is simply the FedEx Cup champion. The goal was to make the finale feel like a normal, easy-to-follow golf tournament instead of a scoreboard adjusted by points.

Tournament winner versus Cup champion

A common question is whether you can win the Tour Championship but lose the FedEx Cup. Under the current format the answer is no, they are one and the same, because the level-start event decides the title directly. That was also effectively the case under the 2019 to 2024 starting-strokes model. Only in the earliest era, before 2019, when a points reset applied at East Lake, was it possible for one player to win the Tour Championship event while another claimed the overall Cup on points.

Why the playoffs matter so much

Beyond prestige, the stakes are enormous. The FedEx Cup champion collects one of the largest bonuses in golf, a figure that has climbed into eight figures and reached $25 million in recent years, on top of regular prize money. Reaching the playoffs also protects a player’s tour status and opens doors to the sport’s biggest invitational fields; in fact, qualifying for the Tour Championship is one of the recognized routes into Augusta, as our guide to how to qualify for the Masters explains. And if the broadcast leaves you puzzling over the scoring terms flying by, our explainer on what a birdie is in golf covers the vocabulary you will hear all week.

The short version: the FedEx Cup playoffs take the top 70 PGA Tour points earners through three events, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship, cutting to 50 and then 30. Since 2025 the finale is a straight level-start stroke-play event whose winner is the FedEx Cup champion, claiming a bonus that has reached $25 million.