NFL Moneyline Tie Rule: How UK Sportsbooks Settle Drawn Games

The week the Lions and Cardinals broke my Sunday

December 2019. Detroit at Arizona. I had the Lions on the moneyline at roughly 11/8 and went to bed in the early hours, BST, fully expecting the bet to lose because Detroit’s defence had been giving up touchdowns through a sieve. Instead, the game ended 27-27 after overtime. I woke up to a notification that my bet had been voided, my stake returned, and my single accumulator leg had vanished without consequence. A tie. In a regular-season NFL game. In London time it felt like winning a lottery I had not bought a ticket for.

Ties in the NFL are rare enough that most British punters never see one in a typical season. They sit at the back of every operator’s terms and conditions like a fire-exit sign, unnoticed until the day you need them. But the rules are precise, they vary between two-way and three-way markets, and they behave very differently in the playoffs than in the regular season. After a decade of putting money on American football from a UK perspective I have come to treat the tie rule as one of the small things that quietly distinguishes the disciplined punter from everyone else.

The anatomy of an NFL tie and why they survive

An NFL tie happens when the score is level at the end of regulation, the overtime period elapses without resolution, and the league rules permit the game to end without a winner. This is only possible during the regular season. Playoff games are played until somebody wins, with additional overtime periods stacked on top of each other until a touchdown or successful field-goal attempt settles it.

Regulation NFL games last 60 minutes split into four quarters. Regular-season overtime is a single 10-minute period under the rules in force from the 2025 season onwards. If the score is level after that 10-minute window expires, the result is recorded as a tie. The change from a 15-minute overtime to 10 minutes was made to protect player health and has had the predictable side effect of making ties slightly more common, although they remain unusual enough that most fixtures will go decades without one.

The structural reason ties survive in the regular season is that the NFL season is short. Adding extra overtime periods to every regular-season game would lengthen broadcasts unacceptably and add injury risk for marginal scheduling gain. The league judged that a handful of ties per season was an acceptable price for a manageable broadcast window. Punters who bet through UK books inherit that judgement whether they like it or not.

How rare are NFL ties in practice

The historical record is unambiguous. Across the last decade or so the NFL has produced roughly one tie per season on average, sometimes none, sometimes two. The 2024 regular season had a single tie. The 2022 and 2023 seasons each had one. The 2019 season delivered the Lions-Cardinals draw I described above and one other.

The reason rarity matters for the moneyline punter is straightforward: pricing. Two-way moneyline markets at UK sportsbooks ignore the tie possibility entirely because it would cost too much in price-setting complexity for a sub-1% event. Three-way markets price the tie explicitly, usually at extremely long odds – 33/1 or longer for evenly matched games, double or treble that for mismatches.

The broader context is that NFL audiences in the UK keep climbing despite this quirky outcome bucket. The 2025 regular season averaged 18.7 million viewers per game across the US measurement panel, up 10% on the prior year and the second-highest result since systematic measurement began in 1988. More eyeballs, more bets, more occasions where a tie ripples through the betting landscape. Last year’s Wave of GSGB participation data already showed sports betting had become the most popular gambling activity in Great Britain outside of lottery draws, and NFL is a real contributor.

Moneyline settlement when the game ends drawn

This is where the two-way and three-way distinction matters. On a two-way moneyline – the default in most British sportsbooks for NFL games – there is no draw price available. The market assumes one of two outcomes: home win or away win. If the game ends tied, both sides of the moneyline are voided and the stake is returned. The same logic applies to half-time and quarter moneylines on a two-way basis: a tied period voids the wager.

The wording you will see in operator terms is usually “Dead Heat Rule does not apply; stake returned in full on a tie.” That phrase signals a void rather than a dead-heat split. The dead-heat formula, which divides the stake by the number of tied participants, is reserved for markets like top-scorer or first-touchdown where multiple players can finish equal. For a binary win-or-lose market, ties simply void.

One subtle point: in-play moneyline bets are subject to the same final rule. If you backed a team in-play during overtime and the game ended tied, your in-play stake is also voided. The operator does not freeze settlement on overtime ticking down; it waits for the final whistle, applies the result, and either pays out or refunds. This is why I never cash out an in-play tie market – the cash-out value will not match what the operator would have refunded if I had held to the whistle.

Three-way moneyline as the British alternative

The three-way moneyline includes the tie as a priced selection alongside home and away. Pick one of the three, and your bet wins only if that exact outcome is produced. If you backed home and the result was a tie, you lose. If you backed the tie at 50/1 and the score really did stay level after overtime, you collect a substantial return on a tiny stake.

Three-way moneylines are not the default UK display. Most operators offer the two-way line by default and the three-way as a secondary market accessed via a tab or dropdown. The pricing structure differs as a result. On a two-way line the favourite might be 4/7 and the underdog 13/8, with no draw priced. On the three-way the favourite drifts to roughly 8/13, the underdog to about 15/8, and the draw is priced explicitly to soak up the remaining probability – often 28/1 to 40/1 in a typical match-up.

The three-way is a reasonable choice for punters who want longer odds on the favourite-or-underdog pick and accept the risk of losing on a tie that would have refunded them on the two-way. The two-way is the conservative play. For accumulator inclusion, the three-way changes the maths of a leg push noticeably, because a draw on a three-way produces a loss rather than a void, taking out the whole accumulator.

Playoff and regular-season handling, side by side

Playoff games cannot end in a tie under NFL rules. Overtime continues in 15-minute periods until someone scores, with a brief intermission between periods. Books therefore treat all playoff moneylines as effectively binary in practice, even if the underlying market type is technically two-way or three-way. A tie price on a playoff moneyline, where offered, is treated as a 1000/1 throwaway selection.

Operators occasionally void a playoff moneyline if a game is suspended or abandoned without a winner being determined. That is a different rule – a void rather than a tie settlement – and it falls under the postponed-games clause rather than the tie clause. In practical terms the playoff punter never has to think about ties. The regular-season punter does, particularly during the December slate when teams resting starters are more likely to produce a low-scoring overtime period that runs the clock out.

One useful overlap: the overtime betting rules and the tie rules are siblings. If you want the deeper breakdown of how OT affects spreads, totals and moneylines, my NFL overtime betting rules guide walks through the playoff and regular-season divergence in more detail. The short version is that the moneyline tie rule is the only place where the regular-season 10-minute overtime materially changes the bet outcome. Everywhere else, OT is just additional game time.

Created by the "NFL Betting Rules" editorial team.