When is Q-School 2027?
Seven days of darts, split into two stages. The First Stage runs across three days from 4 to 6 January and exists to cut the field down. The Final Stage runs for four days from 7 to 10 January, with 128 players at each venue, and that is where the Tour Cards are won.
Each day of the Final Stage is its own one-day event. A player who is knocked out on the Thursday starts again on the Friday, which is why Q-School is usually described as the most punishing week in darts rather than the hardest single tournament.
| Date | Stage | Day |
|---|---|---|
| Monday 4 January | First Stage | 1 of 3 |
| Tuesday 5 January | First Stage | 2 of 3 |
| Wednesday 6 January | First Stage | 3 of 3 |
| Thursday 7 January | Final Stage | 1 of 4 |
| Friday 8 January | Final Stage | 2 of 4 |
| Saturday 9 January | Final Stage | 3 of 4 |
| Sunday 10 January | Final Stage | 4 of 4 |
Where is Q-School 2027 being held?
Both venues are familiar. Arena MK has hosted the UK school for several years and also stages Players Championship weekends; Wunderland Kalkar, a former nuclear power station turned leisure park on the Lower Rhine, has become the permanent home of the European school. Which one a player enters is not a free choice for most: the PDPA’s own guidance puts players from the UK, Republic of Ireland and Gibraltar into the UK school and players from other European nations into the European school. Players from outside Europe may pick either.
| UK Qualifying School | European Qualifying School | |
|---|---|---|
| Venue | Arena MK, Milton Keynes | Wunderland Kalkar, Germany |
| First Stage | 4–6 January | 4–6 January |
| Final Stage | 7–10 January | 7–10 January |
| Final Stage field | 128 players per day | 128 players per day |
| Entry fee | £475 plus VAT | £475, no VAT |
| Fee includes | DRA Sanction Fee | DRA Sanction Fee |
| Default eligibility | UK, Rep. of Ireland, Gibraltar | Other European nations |
How much does Q-School cost?
£475 at either school, and the PDPA breaks that down as a £400 entry plus the £75 DRA Sanction Fee. The asymmetry worth noticing is VAT: the UK fee attracts it as a legal requirement, the European fee does not, so the two headline numbers are the same but the UK entry is the dearer of the two once the invoice arrives. Anyone who wins a card then pays a further £100 to upgrade to full PDPA membership.
There is no per-day pricing. One fee covers the whole week, which is part of why the entry lists run so long — a player who travels to Milton Keynes for a single day has paid the same as one who plays all seven.
Who gets in free?
A meaningful slice of the Final Stage is funded by performance on the secondary tours rather than bought. The top 16 on the final 2026 Challenge Tour Order of Merit who do not already hold a 2027 Tour Card get free entry to the Final Stage, and the Development Tour’s top 16 are treated the same way. The top eight non-card holders on the 2026 Women’s Series and PDC Affiliate Tour rankings also enter at no cost.
Challenge Tour and Development Tour places are free entry to the Final Stage; the Women’s Series and Affiliate Tour places are free entry to the Qualifying School. Only players without a 2027 Tour Card are eligible. Sources: PDC, PDPA.
Outside Europe there are funded places too. The Australian Darts Association gives the leading player on its 2026 tour a free Final Stage entry, decided after its closing weekend.
Players who lose their Tour Card at the end of this season are exempt through to the Final Stage, but exemption is not entry — they still have to submit one, and pay. There is also an opt-out that gets missed: a player who loses their card can elect to play Winmau Challenge Tour events only in 2027, which still requires the entry fee and written notice to the PDC. You can see who is currently in danger of needing any of this on the live Tour Card Race.
The rule that reshapes the field every morning
The detail buried in the PDC’s announcement is how the Final Stage keeps its numbers up. Each of the four days is topped up to 128 players using the First Stage Ranking List, replacing anyone who has already won a Tour Card or withdrawn.
That has two consequences. A player who wins a card on the Thursday vacates a place, so the field a player faces on the Sunday is not the field they faced on the Thursday. And First Stage results keep mattering after the First Stage has finished: the further up that ranking list a player sits, the earlier they are called in as places open. Finishing the First Stage strongly is worth something even to players who had already secured a Final Stage spot.
Points on the Q-School Ranking List come one per win — from the first full round each day in the First Stage, and from the last 64 onwards in the Final Stage. Ties are split on leg difference, then legs won, then average, with a play-off if players still cannot be separated. Live standings for both schools sit on the UK Q-School and EU Q-School pages once play begins.
What 2026 tells you to expect
The 2026 Qualifying Schools drew a record 925 players across the two venues, more than 500 of them at Kalkar and close to 400 at Milton Keynes. Twenty-nine Tour Cards came out of it, 13 from the UK school and 16 from the European one.
Two things have shifted for 2027. The dates have moved a day earlier — 2026 ran 5 to 11 January — and the entry deadline has moved considerably earlier with them, from 2 January to 28 December. Players used to entering in the gap between Christmas and the new year have five fewer days.
What the PDC has not confirmed yet
Two things are genuinely unknown, and it is worth being clear about which. The first is how many Tour Cards are available: the entry announcement does not give a number, and it cannot until the season ends and the PDC knows how many of the 128 cards are retained through the ProTour Order of Merit, won on the secondary tours, or handed back.
The second is the allocation rule. At the 2026 schools, cards went to the last two players standing on each day of the Final Stage, with the remainder distributed from the Q-School Ranking List. That was itself a change from the older format, in which a player had to win every round in a day to take a card outright. The PDC’s 2027 announcement does not restate the rule either way, so treat the 2026 mechanism as the likely one rather than the confirmed one until the Event Brief goes out after the deadline.
Who might turn up
Entry lists are not published until the window closes, so January’s cast is guesswork for now. The one name already attached to the conversation is Adrian Lewis, who has spoken publicly over the past year about a Q-School route back to the circuit he walked away from, and who said this week that he has had conversations about entering, while stopping well short of confirming it. His stated ambition is the Challenge Tour in 2027 rather than an immediate return to the main tour.
The rest of the picture fills in over the next ten weeks: the season calendar has the Players Championship Finals and the World Championship still to run, and both will decide whose names end up on the Kalkar and Milton Keynes entry lists.