It’s the pre-Olympic season, which means the scramble to qualify country quota spots for the 2026 Winter Olympics is happening next week at the 2025 World Figure Skating Championships. If you know how it works to qualify spots for World Championships, you are most of the way there. But there are nuances in the Olympic qualification process that make it a different calculus, and it can be incredibly confusing if you don’t know them.
So rather than leaving you to decipher the qualification rules, I am going to lay them out here as clearly as possible, knowing that they might not be as dry as the official document. But they are still, well, pretty boring.
Before we get into the qualification procedure, a few things that are important to know. These are specific to the 2026 Olympics, so some of the numbers may be different than in previous Olympics.
Each discipline has a maximum number of “quota” spots available for countries to qualify: 29 men, 29 women, 19 pairs, 23 dance, and 10 teams (for the Team Event)
Countries are eligible to qualify for the Team Event if they qualify spots for at least three of the four individual disciplines
There are five more athlete spots available for Italy (the host country) to enter individual discipline(s) if they don’t outright qualify spots; if they don’t use these athlete spots, those athlete spots will be used to qualify countries into the Team Event if they are missing one discipline
For the remainder of this post, we will focus on the individual (i.e., non-Team Event) disciplines here
There are two competitions that provide quota spots for countries: 2025 World Figure Skating Championships and a qualifying competition in Beijing September 2025
Those who have followed this before know that Nebelhorn Trophy has been that qualifying competition for a number of years; that won’t be the case for the 2026 Olympics
For the remainder of this post, we will focus primarily on 2025 Worlds
We will start with how many spots a country currently has at the 2025 Worlds and work forward from there—this is likely the most straight forward and context-specific way of explaining. But before we go there, it’s important to know what placement points are:
A placement point is equal to the place of finish at Worlds (i.e., 1st place is 1 point, 8th place is 8 points)
Countries with entries finishing 1st through 16th will get 1 to 16 placement points, respectively
If the entry qualifies for the free skate and finishes below 16th, they get 16 placement points (e.g., qualifies for the free skate and finishes 19th overall is 16 poitns)
If the entry does not qualify for the free skate, they get 18 placement points no matter what place they finish
Countries with 3 spots in a discipline at 2025 Worlds
To qualify 3 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 3 spots: The top two placements in that discipline have to add up to 13 placement points or lower (e.g., if the top placement finishes 3rd and the second top placement finishes 9th, that adds up to (3+9) 12 placement points) AND all three entries have to have qualified for the free skate
Automatic 2 spots + a chance to qualify a 3rd spot: If a country gets 13 or lower in placement points but only two entries qualified for the free skate, the country automatically qualifies 2 spots AND gets the opportunity to qualify the third spot at the Beijing event
To qualify 2 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 2 spots only: The top two entries in that discipline have to add up to 14-28 in placement points AND both entries have to have qualified for the free skate
Automatic 1 spot + a chance to qualify a 2nd spot: If the top two entries get 14-28 placement points but only one entry qualifies for the free skate, the country automatically qualifies 1 spot AND gets the opportunity to qualify the second spot at the Beijing event
Countries with 2 spots in a discipline at 2025 Worlds
To qualify 3 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 2 spots + a chance to qualify a 3rd spot: If the two entries get 13 or lower in placement points, the country automatically qualifies 2 spots AND gets the opportunity to qualify the third spot at the Beijing event
To qualify 2 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 2 spots only: The two entries in that discipline have to add up to 14-28 in placement points AND both entries have to have qualified for the free skate
Automatic 1 spot + a chance to qualify a 2nd spot: If the two entries get 14-28 placement points but only one entry qualifies for the free skate, the country automatically qualifies 1 spot AND gets the opportunity to qualify the second spot at the Beijing event
Countries with 1 spot in a discipline at 2025 Worlds
According to the rules, it is actually not possible for one entry to qualify 3 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 1 spot + a chance to qualify a 2nd spot: If the sole entry finishes in the top 2, the country automatically qualifies 1 spot AND gets the opportunity to qualify a second spot at the Beijing event; but because each country can only send one person to the Beijing event, there is no other way for them to qualify that third spot
To qualify 2 spots for the 2026 Olympics:
Automatic 1 spot + a chance to qualify a 2nd spot: If the sole entry finishes in the top 10, the country automatically qualifies 1 spot AND gets the opportunity to qualify the second spot at the Beijing event
What about the one-spots?
After the automatic 2 and automatic 3 spots have been allocated, the remainder of the quota spots available at Worlds will be allocated to the countries that did not qualify spots in order of placement until the spots run out
The number of quota spots available at 2025 Worlds is as follows:
24 men
24 women
16 pairs
19 dance
After the Worlds quotas are filled, the remaining spots will then be filled at the Beijing qualifying event by countries that either did not already qualify any spots in that discipline or got the opportunity to qualify another spot(s) based on their placement points; the number of quota spots available at the Beijing qualifying event is as follows:
5 men
5 women
3 pairs
4 dance
In the case that there are quota places unused from 2025 Worlds, those extra spots will be added to the Beijing qualifying event; if this happens, it often only happens in the pairs event
In the case that a country decides to not use all of their automatically qualified spots in a discipline, the extra spot(s) will be added to the Beijing qualifying event (e.g., if country X qualified 2 spots in pairs but only has 1 competing pair team, they can give back that second spot to the pool)
At the Beijing qualifying event, spots will be qualified in order of placement for countries that are eligible to qualify spots
After all the spots are qualified at the Beijing qualifying event, there will be a prioritized list of substitutes based on their placement at that qualifying event
What about what happened in 2017 to US pairs?
Recent figure skating fans will remember that at 2017 Worlds, the 16-pair quota actually ran out before all the 2-spots were given out. There were 17 spots that could be automatically qualified based on placement points, and only 16 spots were available in the quota. Team USA had the highest combined placement points, and therefore had last priority. By that time, 15 spots had already been given out, so the 16th spot was given to Team USA and the 17th spot was basically thrown out and Team USA was not given a chance to earn it at the qualifying event.
As a result of that, they changed qualification procedures to include an additional rule that for a country to automatically qualify 3 spots, it has to have qualified 3 entries into the free skate at Worlds; automatic 2 spots requires 2 entries into the free skate. This mathematically eliminates the possibility of that 2017 scenario happening again.