Now that the NFL’s 2026 regular-season schedule is finally here, and you have watched every single schedule release video, we can start thinking about the season ahead.
Yes, we have a ranking of all 16 Week 1 games — we are very excited about the NFL’s first foray to Australia — but we can also take a look at the big picture.
Including each team’s “rest differential.”
This looks at the difference in the number of days off that the two teams have before their meeting. Here is one look at this season’s “rest differential,” as assembled by long-time NFL analyst and overall great human Arif Hasan:
As Hasan notes at the top, for games that do not have a Saturday or a Sunday date yet — the late-season games — he split those 50/50 for consistency.
Under this analysis, the Chicago Bears and the Buffalo Bills have the best “rest differentials” in the league this year, while the Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Chargers are at the bottom.
Will this matter? According to one recent study, not as much as it used to. After the 2025 schedule release, Sumer Sports looked into the rest differential and found that prior to 2011, the more-rested team enjoyed a swing of 2.2 points in their direction. As they described that advantage, it was “like benching a league average quarterback and putting Kyler Murray, who led the sixth-ranked offense in terms of success rate, in 2024.”
However, that impact has lessened thanks to the two recent Collective Bargaining Agreements between the NFL and the NFLPA. The 2011 CBA guaranteed that players get four days off during their bye weeks, decreasing the amount of time that teams could practice. The 2020 CBA included a provision to guarantee at least three days off, uness a team is playing on consecutive Thursdays.
This has reduced the impact of rest differential to just 0.3 points per game for the more-rested team.
Looking back at last season, the Detroit Lions had the best rest differential in the league, at +13.
But Detroit missed the playoffs.
However, you could note that three playoff teams — the Rams, the 49ers, and the Seahawks — ranked third, fourth, and fifth in rest differential, respectively.
And the Seahawks won the Super Bowl.
Here is last season’s rest differential chart, courtesy of Sharp Football Analysis:
Either way, come back to this at the end of the season to see what impact, if any, rest differential had on the 2026 NFL season.
