LoL Dodge Penalty Explained: LP Loss, Queue Lockouts and When Dodging Is Worth It

Dodging — leaving champion select so the lobby dissolves — has been part of ranked strategy for as long as ranked has existed, because the penalty is small, timed and, below Master, never touches your MMR. Riot tightened the rules for the apex tiers in Season 2 2026 after dodge-heavy ladders made Master+ games hard to fill. Here is the full penalty table as it stands on patch 26.20, how the counter works across queues, and the honest maths of when a dodge is cheaper than the game.

The penalty table

Normal, Co-op vs AI and the featured game modes use the ranked lockout timers; ARAM has its own. Letting the champion-select timer expire without locking in counts as a dodge, and when several players dodge at once each of them is penalised. Missed ready checks have a parallel ladder: a warning first, then the same tiers, and since patch 14.18 repeated misses can escalate to suspensions.

How the counter works

Every dodge within 24 hours of your last penalty raises the tier by one; every 24 hours without a dodge lowers it by one, and a new dodge restarts that countdown. The tiers carry across queues, so the lockout you earn in a Normal applies to Ranked too. LP penalties stack until they reach −100 LP and never cause a demotion — a dodge at 3 LP leaves you at 0, not in the division below. Use the dodge calculator to see what your next dodge costs given today's count.

The Master+ rule from patch 26.9

When Riot reset the apex ladders in NA, EUW, EUNE, BR, LAN, TR in April 2026 it also changed what a dodge means there: at Master and above a single dodge is now treated as a full loss — the LP penalty, an MMR loss and no reset of autofill protection. Below Master nothing changed except that dodging no longer resets autofill protection either. The reason is simple: on a small ladder, chains of dodges by players waiting for a perfect draft were stopping games from starting at all.

When a dodge is worth it

Below Master the trade is 5 LP and six minutes against a game you expect to lose at about −20 LP and 30 minutes. If your read of the draft is right more than one time in four, the first dodge of the day pays for itself; the second (15 LP, 30 minutes) only makes sense for a lobby that is genuinely lost, and the third (12 hours locked out) almost never does. The common good reasons are an obvious troll pick or a player announcing they will not play, a comp with no front line against four tanks, and a known booster on the other team in your own promo window — not "I don't like this matchup".

Dodging and autofill protection

Autofill protection — the guarantee that you will not be autofilled again right after you were — used to reset when you dodged, which made the dodge a way to escape a filled role. Since patch 26.9 it no longer does, at any rank: dodge a lobby where you were autofilled and the next lobby can fill you again. Combined with the Master+ full-loss rule, the April 2026 patch removed every incentive to dodge except the draft itself. Autofill parity (both teams have the same number of autofilled players) is unaffected.