The Year-Round Office Pool Calendar
Quick answer: There is a poolable league in season every single month of the year. Football carries September through January, basketball and hockey cover the winter, European soccer runs August to May, and baseball fills the summer. Run one pool at a time and hand your group off from season to season, and the pool never actually ends.
Most office pools are seasonal by accident rather than by choice. Someone sets one up in September because football is starting, it runs beautifully for four months, and then it stops — not because anyone wanted it to, but because nobody thought about what comes next. Here is what comes next, month by month. Exact dates shift year to year; the supported sports page has the current windows for every league.
September – January: football owns the fall
The NFL regular season runs early September to early January, with the playoffs through early February. College football starts in late August and runs to early December, with bowls and the playoff stretching into mid-January. Between them they cover five straight months, which is why this is where nearly every group starts.
For a first pool, a pick’em pool on the NFL is the easiest thing to sell to a whole office. If your group is sharper, a confidence pool on the same schedule keeps strong players engaged deeper into the season. And if you want two pools running at once, a college football pool with a curated weekly slate is a natural companion — different games, different night, same group.
November – April: basketball and hockey take the winter
This is the handoff most groups miss. The NBA regular season runs late October to mid-April and the NHL runs early October to mid-April; NCAA basketball fills early November to early March. All three are already underway while your football pool is finishing, which makes the transition easy — you can announce the next pool during the football playoffs while everyone is still paying attention.
The one adjustment worth making: these leagues play most nights rather than once a week. Rather than dumping a full week of games on the pick sheet, curate a slate — the commissioner selects which games appear, or sets a number of games each player must pick from the card. A ten-game weekly slate turns a daily sport into something that feels like the football pool your group already knows.
August – May: soccer runs almost the whole year
The European leagues are the secret weapon of the year-round commissioner. The Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 all run August through May, and the UEFA Champions League adds a league phase from September to January and knockout rounds from February into late spring. MLS runs on a different calendar entirely — late February to mid-October, with playoffs into December.
Soccer also happens to fit the pool formats unusually well. Each club plays roughly once a week, which gives you the weekly rhythm that makes confidence and survivor pools work, and the fixture list is known well in advance. A survivor pool on a European league is a genuinely good format, because the no-repeat rule bites hard across a 38-match season.
April – September: baseball covers the summer
MLB runs late March to late September with the postseason into early November, which is exactly the stretch when every other pool has stopped. It is the least conventional office pool season and, for that reason, often the most fun — expectations are low and nobody has a system yet.
Baseball plays nearly every day, so the same advice applies as for basketball and hockey: curate a weekly slate rather than asking anyone to pick 100 games. A pick’em pool on ten selected games a week is the format that keeps a summer pool alive without becoming homework.
Putting it together: a simple year
You do not need to run everything. A group that wants one pool at a time and no gaps can do the whole calendar with four handoffs:
- September – January: NFL pick’em or confidence. The anchor pool.
- January – April: NBA, NHL or college basketball, on a curated weekly slate.
- February – May: a Champions League knockout pool, if your group has any soccer interest at all.
- May – September: MLB on a ten-game weekly slate, then straight back into football.
The trick is announcing the next pool before the current one ends. A group that finishes a season and hears nothing for six weeks has dispersed; a group that gets “same crew, new sport, link is here” during the last week of the old pool mostly carries over intact.
What it costs to run more than one
Less than most people expect, because billing counts unique people rather than pools. A player in your football pool and your basketball pool is one seat, not two — so the second, third and fourth pool of the year add no cost for anyone who was already playing. It is free up to four players, then roughly $3 per additional player over the free four, $2 per player at 30–99 and $1 at 100 or more, billed annually. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Every format — pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor and single pick — is available on every league we support, so switching sports never means learning a new system. The pool hosting page covers what stays automatic when you do: scores, spreads, locks, standings and tiebreakers.
Start your next pool free, or check the supported sports page to see which season starts soonest.