Northern Ireland Premier League consists of 12 teams. Each club plays the others three times (home and away), in which the third round of home teams is determined by the draw. The method of calculating the points of a single game is that the winner gets 3 point and both sides get 1 point for a tie. The league then "splits" into Section A and Section B, the top six teams in Section A playing each other for a fourth and final time to settle championship and European qualification issues, and the bottom six teams in Section B playing each other to settle relegation issues. The team with the highest accumulated points wins the league championship, the team with the lowest points is directly relegated to the first division, and the penultimate team will participate in the relegation playoffs.