NBL home teams won 50.3% of games last season

In the 2025-26 NBL regular season, home teams won 83 of 165 games, 50.3%. They scored 91.6 points a game and visitors scored 90.9, so the average home margin was 0.7 points. For one season, the home floor was worth almost nothing.

That is a sharp contrast with 2023-24, when home teams won 83 of 140 games, 59.3%, with an average margin of 2.8 points. This season, through November 5, 2026, home teams have won 29 of 54, 53.7%, at a margin of 1.5.

The figures come from the published results for every regular-season game in each of those seasons. We use only seasons whose listings are complete: 140 games in 2023-24 with 28 for each of the 10 clubs, 165 games in 2025-26 with 33 for each club, and the 54 games played so far in 2026-27. No game in any of them was at a neutral site. This season's results agree with the published standings for all 10 clubs: wins, losses, points scored and points allowed.

Three samples

	2023-24	2025-26	2026-27 so far
Games	140	165	54
Home wins	83	83	29
Home win percentage	59.3%	50.3%	53.7%
Average home margin	+2.8	+0.7	+1.5

Is that a real change?

The gap between 2023-24 and 2025-26 is 9.0 percentage points. With 140 and 165 games, the usual uncertainty on that difference is about 5.7 points, so the gap is roughly 1.6 standard errors. A difference that large would show up by chance about one time in nine. It is a hint of a weaker home edge, not proof of one.

The dip was also not spread evenly across the season. Home teams won 23 of the first 54 games in 2025-26, 42.6%, and 60 of the remaining 111, 54.1%. The start of last season was the unusual part.

Club by club

Each club played 16 or 17 home games and 16 or 17 away, so the club figures below rest on small samples.

Club	Home record	Away record	Margin at home	Margin away
Melbourne United	11-6	9-7	+7.8	+0.3
Cairns Taipans	4-13	5-11	-10.8	-16.1
South East Melbourne Phoenix	11-5	11-6	+9.9	+6.2
Tasmania JackJumpers	6-10	8-9	+0.6	-1.2
New Zealand Breakers	7-9	6-11	-0.3	-1.8
Illawarra Hawks	7-9	6-11	-3.6	-4.4
Perth Wildcats	10-7	11-5	+4.8	+4.7
Sydney Kings	13-4	11-5	+11.2	+12.9
Brisbane Bullets	2-14	4-13	-16.6	-13.0
Adelaide 36ers	12-5	11-5	+2.8	+6.6

Seven of the 10 clubs had a better margin at home than away, and three had a worse one. Melbourne United had the biggest home edge, 7.5 points. Adelaide had the biggest road edge, 3.8, and Sydney and Brisbane also did better away than at home by margin.

Six clubs won a higher share at home than away. Four won a higher share away: Cairns, Tasmania, Perth and Brisbane. Perth were 10-7 at home and 11-5 on the road.

This season so far

Perth are 5-3 at home and 0-2 away. The New Zealand Breakers are 2-1 at home and 2-6 away. Illawarra are 1-4 at home. Home teams as a group are 29-25.

Scoring is up. NBL teams averaged 94.7 points in the first 54 games of 2026-27, against 89.0 in the first 54 of 2025-26, which is 5.7 more, and against 91.2 for all of last season.

What the numbers show, and what we read into them

The numbers show a home edge of 0.7 points last season, 1.5 so far this season, and 2.8 in 2023-24. They also show that an edge of 2.8 and an edge of 0.7 are not clearly different with samples this size.

What it means is our reading. Home-court advantage is small in any one season and noisy across them, and we would not say the NBL has lost its home edge on the strength of 165 games. What we can say is that last season's number was lower than 2023-24's, the only other complete season we checked.

The test is easy to run. At about 100 games, check whether this season's home win rate is still near 54%. If it climbs toward 59%, last season was a dip. If it stays near 50%, that makes two low seasons in a row and the question is a better one. For how the season is laid out, with no club playing two days in a row, see our look at the NBL schedule.