AFC Championship Odds 2026 And NFC Championship Odds: What This Market Actually Costs
AFC championship odds 2026 are posted at every major sportsbook, and the AFC board has almost nothing to do with the season that just ended. The Baltimore Ravens went 8-9 and missed the playoffs. They are the favorite. The Kansas City Chiefs went 6-11 and missed the playoffs. They are the fourth choice. The New England Patriots went 14-3, won the conference and played in Super Bowl LX. They sit third, longer than the 8-9 Ravens and a tick inside the 6-11 Chiefs.
That is a position, not an accident. This market has decided that January was noise and that health and regression are the real signal. You can take that side or you can fade it, and most articles about this board will spend their whole word count telling you which. I want to start somewhere else, because there is a number that decides whether any conference ticket is worth buying before you have an opinion at all, and it is not printed anywhere on the board. What the board charges you decides it. I measured that at all three rungs of the futures ladder, and the answer changes how you should bet this market.
In Summary
- The Full AFC And NFC Boards Are Below, all 32 teams at DraftKings' price, with the best available number across six sportsbooks on every AFC team and the top five in the NFC.
- The Ladder Charges By The Size Of The Pot. Measured across DraftKings-attributed boards: a division ticket costs 7.9%, a conference ticket 13.8%, a Super Bowl ticket 18.4%. The conference rung sits between the other two, and it is not the bargain of the three.
- Line Shopping Is The Only Edge On This Board I Can Prove. The AFC board sums to 115.9% at DraftKings. Buy each AFC team at the best of six books and it drops to 108.1%, cutting the hold from 13.7% to 7.5% without an opinion.
- No Ticket Here Is Reliably Worth Betting, And I Am Going To Show You Why The Ones That Look Best Are Traps. A standard de-vig says the Jets are a +20% edge at +15000. That number is an artifact of the method, not money.
- If You Are Betting The Ravens Anyway, Take FanDuel's +550, Never DraftKings' +470. No forecast required — it is 17% more profit on a winning ticket.
- The AFC Board Is Priced On Projection, Not Results. The 8-9 Ravens are +470 and the 6-11 Chiefs +770, while the reigning conference champion is +760 and the reigning AFC North winner is tenth.
AFC Championship Odds 2026: The Full Board
Every AFC team's price to win the conference, DraftKings first as a reference point, then the best number available across the six books priced here.
| Team | DraftKings | Best available | Where |
|---|
| Baltimore Ravens | +470 | +550 | FanDuel 🎁 |
| Buffalo Bills | +510 | +510 | DraftKings 🎁 |
| New England Patriots | +760 | +850 | BetMGM 🎁 / Caesars 🎁 / BetRivers 🎁 |
| Kansas City Chiefs | +770 | +800 | bet365 |
| Los Angeles Chargers | +830 | +830 | DraftKings |
| Houston Texans | +850 | +950 | Caesars |
| Denver Broncos | +1025 | +1025 | DraftKings |
| Cincinnati Bengals | +1025 | +1100 | Caesars |
| Jacksonville Jaguars | +1500 | +1500 | DraftKings |
| Pittsburgh Steelers | +2300 | +3500 | BetMGM |
| Indianapolis Colts | +2900 | +2900 | DraftKings |
| Tennessee Titans | +5500 | +6600 | BetMGM / BetRivers |
| Las Vegas Raiders | +7600 | +8000 | bet365 |
| Cleveland Browns | +8600 | +12500 | FanDuel |
| New York Jets | +8600 | +15000 | FanDuel |
| Miami Dolphins | +15000 | +15000 | All six |
AFC prices collected 2026-07-15; the source board carries no update stamp of its own, so treat it as a same-week snapshot rather than a to-the-minute quote. Futures move daily on camp news — pull the live board before you bet anything here.
New England is the row most people will argue about, and the argument has a clean answer: the Patriots added A.J. Brown from Philadelphia for a 2027 first and a 2028 fifth. That single deal explains both boards at once — it is why the reigning champion is a live +760 rather than a fading one, and and it is why the Eagles now sit at +820 in the NFC. Same trade, two prices, two conferences.
But the row I keep coming back to is Pittsburgh, and not for the reason you would expect. The Steelers won the AFC North last season and made the playoffs as the No. 4 seed. The Ravens finished 8-9 behind them and did not qualify. Today the Ravens are the conference favorite at +470 and the Steelers are the tenth choice, at anywhere from +2300 to +3500 depending on which app you open. Hold that 1,200-cent spread in your head. It comes back later, and it decides the most interesting question on this board.
NFC Championship Odds 2026: The Full Board
The NFC runs the same play as the AFC, and it is even more brazen about it. Seattle beat the Rams 31-27 at Lumen Field in January to reach the Super Bowl, then won it. Seattle is +600. The Rams are +295. This board has the defending champion at better than double the price of the team it eliminated on the way to the title — and the reason is not a football result at all. One trade did this, and we will get to it.
Structurally the NFC is a different shape from the AFC: one heavy favorite, then five teams — Seattle, Philadelphia, Green Bay, Detroit and San Francisco — packed inside 360 cents of each other.
| Team | DraftKings | Best available | Where |
|---|
| Los Angeles Rams | +295 | +300 | BetMGM / BetRivers |
| Seattle Seahawks | +600 | +600 | DraftKings / FanDuel |
| Philadelphia Eagles | +820 | +1000 | BetMGM |
| Green Bay Packers | +900 | +1100 | Caesars / FanDuel |
| Detroit Lions | +930 | +930 | DraftKings |
| San Francisco 49Ers | +960 | — | DraftKings |
| Chicago Bears | +1250 | — | DraftKings |
| Dallas Cowboys | +1300 | — | DraftKings |
| Tampa Bay Buccaneers | +2200 | — | DraftKings |
| Minnesota Vikings | +2400 | — | DraftKings |
| Washington Commanders | +3000 | — | DraftKings |
| New York Giants | +3500 | — | DraftKings |
| New Orleans Saints | +3700 | — | DraftKings |
| Carolina Panthers | +3800 | — | DraftKings |
| Atlanta Falcons | +5500 | — | DraftKings |
| Arizona Cardinals | +20000 | — | DraftKings |
We could only confirm second-book prices for the top five NFC teams; the rest are DraftKings' posted numbers, so treat the "best available" column as unknown rather than absent below Detroit.
There is the trade, and it is the whole answer. The Rams at +295 are the shortest conference price in football, and they bought it. Los Angeles sent Jared Verse plus a 2027 first, a 2028 second and a 2029 third to Cleveland for Myles Garrett, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year — the first time since 1997 a reigning DPOY changed teams the following offseason. They then sent four picks to Kansas City for Trent McDuffie and made him the highest-paid cornerback in NFL history at four years and $124 million. Matthew Stafford, the reigning MVP after a 46-touchdown season, came back rather than retire. On June 2, before the Garrett deal settled, the Rams were around +400 to win the NFC. They are +295 now.
So the board moved Los Angeles a hundred cents on transactions and left the team that actually beat them at +600. Hold the two halves of that up together: the AFC board demoted a 14-3 conference champion for being 14-3, and the NFC board demoted a Super Bowl winner for not making headlines in June. This market is not rewarding what happened. This market rewards what changed. Which is exactly why the question worth asking is not "are the Rams good," but "what does it cost to say so."
What Each Rung Of The Ladder Actually Costs
Here is the promise from the top, and it is the part of this market almost nobody measures.
A futures bettor has three rungs available for essentially one opinion. You can back a team to win its division, its conference, or the Super Bowl. The mechanics are identical and our futures betting guide and how to bet on the NFL primer cover them; what differs is the price of admission, and you can measure it directly. Add up the implied probability of every team in a market. Exactly one team wins, so a fair market would total 100%. Whatever it totals above that is the sportsbook's cut.
I ran that on all three rungs using DraftKings-attributed numbers collected in the same research window, so nothing here is an apples-to-oranges comparison across books.
| Rung | Market size | Board totals | The house edge |
|---|
| Division | 8 markets of 4 teams | 108.5% | 7.9% |
| Conference | 2 markets of 16 teams | 116.0% | 13.8% |
| Super Bowl | 1 market of 32 teams | 122.5% | 18.4% |
The conference row averages both boards: the AFC totals 115.9% and the NFC 116.0%. That is why AFC-only figures below read 13.7% rather than 13.8% — same measurement, one conference instead of two.
The pattern is the whole finding: the tax scales with the size of the pot. Every time the field doubles, the book takes roughly five more points off the top. The eight division markets are remarkably disciplined about it, too, landing between 108.4% and 108.7% without exception, which tells you this is a deliberate pricing target rather than eight independent judgments.
So where does that leave the conference rung? Honestly, in the middle, which is precisely what it sounds like and less than it is usually sold as. A conference ticket is not the bargain of this ladder. The division board is, at nearly half the price. What the conference rung actually buys you is a real number: the Rams pay +100 to win the NFC West and +295 to win the NFC, and the second of those pays like a ticket worth making a season out of. You are paying about six extra points of tax for a payout that roughly triples. Whether that trade is worth it is a question about your bankroll, not about the board. But you should make it knowing the trade exists, because the Super Bowl rung is where it stops being worth it: another 4.6 points of tax on top, for the right to attach a single February game you cannot handicap in July to an opinion you already expressed.
If you would rather see all three rungs priced side by side than take my word for the spread between them, OddsShopper Pro is free for 7 days and prices markets across the books with the no-vig fair number beside each. The rest of this article is the work you can do without it.
The Rams, SoFi, And The One Honest Exception
That last point deserves a test rather than an assertion, because there is a tempting version of it that is wrong and I want to be clear about which is which.
Divide a team's Super Bowl chance by its conference chance and you get what the board implies about a single question: if this team wins its conference, how often does it win the Super Bowl? Do that with raw prices and every contender comes back above 50%, which looks like a smoking gun. It isn't. The Super Bowl board carries 18.4% tax and the conference board 13.8%, so the numerator is inflated harder than the denominator, and the ratio is junk. The fix is to strip the tax out of both boards first, then divide.
| Team | Conference (fair) | Super Bowl (fair) | Implied "wins it if they get there" |
|---|
| Los Angeles Rams | 21.8% | 12.6% | 57.5% |
| Seattle Seahawks | 12.3% | 6.8% | 55.2% |
| Buffalo Bills | 14.1% | 7.4% | 52.5% |
| Philadelphia Eagles | 9.4% | 4.8% | 51.2% |
| Denver Broncos | 7.7% | 3.9% | 50.7% |
| Baltimore Ravens | 15.1% | 7.4% | 49.0% |
| Los Angeles Chargers | 9.3% | 4.5% | 48.9% |
Once both boards are clean, these settle where they should. Exactly two teams reach the Super Bowl and exactly one wins it, so weight each team by its own conference chance and this figure has to average exactly 50%. It does, to four decimal places. Strong teams landing slightly above the line is arithmetic rather than scandal: a good team that reaches the Super Bowl meets a weaker-than-average opponent when it gets there. The board is not overcharging contenders here.
Except at the top, and here the honest number is smaller than the tempting one. The Rams sit at 57.5%. The tempting read is that SoFi is worth all 7.5 points above a coin flip — but I just told you every contender clears 50% on arithmetic alone, so that is the same trap again. The real comparison is Seattle: 55.2%, the next-best team on the board, who does not get to play the game at home. Super Bowl LXI is at SoFi Stadium, the Rams' building, and the premium the market is paying for that is 2.3 points. Small. But it is the only place I have seen the SoFi factor priced at all. It is also why, if you like Los Angeles this year, I would still take the +300 NFC ticket at BetMGM or BetRivers over the Super Bowl ticket: the home-field edge is real, but you are paying 18.4% to access it instead of 13.8%.
Line Shopping Cuts The Tax Nearly In Half
The 13.7% the AFC board charges assumes you bet at one book. Almost nobody should.
Rebuild that same AFC board using the best available price on each team, the bolded column from the table above. Ravens at FanDuel's +550 instead of +470. Patriots at +850 instead of +760. Steelers at BetMGM's +3500 instead of +2300. Add it up and DraftKings' 115.9% becomes 108.1%. Two numbers describe that move and it is worth keeping them straight: the board total falls 7.8 points (115.9 to 108.1), which is 6.2 points of hold (13.7% to 7.5%). The first is the size of the board's overround; the second is what it actually costs you. I use the hold figure throughout. You did not handicap a team, read a camp report, or form a single opinion. You clicked the better number, and it moved this market from the middle rung's price to roughly the price of the cheapest.
Which is the entire argument for the habit, and the habit is the same whatever you bet. The live NFL odds screen — shop the number across the major books puts each book's price on a market in one row, so taking the best one stops being a research project and becomes a glance; our real-time NFL odds guide walks through reading it market by market. Futures are the slowest, least-shopped corner of that board, which is exactly why the gap there is 6.2 points instead of a fraction of one. One caveat worth saying plainly: capturing all 6.2 points of hold means having funded accounts at all six books priced here. Fewer accounts capture less of it — a second book on the Ravens alone is still the difference between +470 and +550.
Where do those 7.8 points come from? Not evenly, and the pattern matters for the next section. The Jets go from 1.15% implied at DraftKings to 0.66% at FanDuel, a 42% cut. The Steelers go from 4.17% to 2.78%, a 33% cut. The Ravens, at the top of the board, go from 17.5% to 15.4%, only 12%. The tax is loaded onto the longshots, which is the favorite-longshot bias showing up in a single afternoon's prices: the books know nobody line-shops a 1% ticket, so that is where they hide the rent.
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Worked Example: Price The Ravens Yourself
The math above is worth doing without us, so here it is end to end on one team. Watch the units, because this is where most people slip.
Step 1. Turn the price into a probability. For a plus-money price that is 100 ÷ (odds + 100). The Ravens at DraftKings' +470:
100 ÷ (470 + 100) = 100 ÷ 570 = 0.1754, or 17.54%
Step 2. Add up all 16 teams. Run that conversion on every AFC team and sum it. DraftKings' board totals 115.91%, or 1.1591. In a fair market it would total 1.0, because exactly one of these teams wins the AFC. The extra 0.1591 is the book's cut.
Step 3. Divide the cut back out. The simplest method assumes the cut is spread evenly, so scale the team's number down by the board total:
0.1754 ÷ 1.1591 = 0.1514, or 15.14%
Step 4. Turn the fair probability back into a price. That is (1 ÷ probability) − 1, then multiply by 100. Keep the probability as a decimal here:
(1 ÷ 0.1514) − 1 = 5.607 → +561
So DraftKings' own board says the Ravens' fair price is about +561, and DraftKings will sell it to you at +470. FanDuel will sell you the identical ticket at +550, about 11 cents off fair. Same team, same season, same outcome. One book is charging you nearly the whole tax and the other is charging you almost none of it.
Now the important part, and the reason Step 3 says "assumes."
Why The Best-Looking Bets On This Board Are Traps
Run that de-vig across the whole AFC board and three teams come back as apparent edges. They are, in order: the Jets at +15000 (+20.6%), the Browns at +12500 (+18.6%), and the Steelers at +3500 (+5.8%).
If you have read this far, you already have the tools to see why the first two are worthless, and it is the callback I promised. Two sections ago we measured that this board's tax is loaded onto the longshots, with the Jets carrying a 42% markup versus the Ravens' 12%. Step 3 assumes the opposite. It spreads the cut evenly across every team, which means it systematically overstates a longshot's fair probability, which manufactures a fake edge on exactly the teams where the assumption is most wrong. The method breaks worst precisely where it looks most exciting. A +20% edge on the Jets is not money, it is the error term of my own arithmetic wearing a costume.
The Steelers are the interesting case, and where that 1,200-cent spread comes back. BetMGM pays +3500 on a team DraftKings prices at +2300. That is a real disagreement between two books about a team that won its division last year, and it is the kind of thing worth hunting. But look at what "fair" depends on:
| What You Anchor "Fair" To | Steelers fair price | Your edge at +3500 |
|---|
| DraftKings Alone | +2682 | +29.4% |
| All Six Books' Consensus | +3303 | +5.8% |
| The Best-Price Board From Above | +3793 | −7.5% |
The edge shrinks across those rows, and then it changes sign. And I have no principled reason to prefer the first row: DraftKings is the shortest of the six books on Pittsburgh, which makes it the outlier rather than the center, and BetMGM runs the lowest hold of the six at 12.3%, which is not what a soft book looks like. A number that swings from +29% to −7.5% depending on which defensible method I pick is not an edge I have found. It is a measurement of my own uncertainty, and the honest thing to do with it is say so rather than dress the friendliest row up as a pick.
So here is my read on this board, and it is not the one I expected to write. There is no conference future I would bet with confidence today. Every apparent edge sits either in the longshot zone where the math breaks or inside its own error bars. That is what an efficient market with a 13.7% tax looks like from the inside, and anyone selling you a confident July futures pick is selling you their rounding error.
What I would actually do with this board is narrower and duller and works: if you are betting the Ravens anyway, bet them at FanDuel's +550, not DraftKings' +470. That is 17% more profit on the same winning outcome, and it requires no forecast, only that you look. Do the same on the Patriots at +850 rather than +760, and on the Bengals at +1100 rather than +1025. And if a six-month hold is not your speed at all, NFL player props give you a shorter feedback loop and a fresh line to shop every week, no January wait required.
What The AFC Board Is Asking You To Believe
Step back from the tickets and the board makes one coherent, aggressive claim: the teams that were good are cheap, and the teams that were not are expensive. Denver went 14-3 and took the No. 1 seed: +1025. New England went 14-3 and won the conference: +760. Pittsburgh won its division: +2300. Baltimore went 8-9 and missed the playoffs: +470.
The argument underneath is not stupid, and Kansas City is where it is strongest. The Chiefs' season ended when Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL and LCL in Week 15 against the Chargers, the same day they were eliminated. A 6-11 record with a healthy Mahomes is not a 6-11 roster — even one that shipped Trent McDuffie to Los Angeles for four picks. The market is pricing the quarterback, mostly, and that is a defensible thing to price.
The best test of that claim is not on the conference board at all. Drop one rung, to the cheapest and most carefully priced market of the three, and it puts Baltimore and Pittsburgh side by side one last time. DraftKings' AFC North board carries the lowest tax on the entire ladder at 108.44%, and it prices Baltimore at -115 and Pittsburgh at +510. Set that against the same book's conference prices from the top of this article:
| DraftKings' Own Price | Ravens | Steelers | Ravens are this much likelier |
|---|
| To Win The AFC North (7.8% Tax) | -115 | +510 | 3.3× |
| To Win The AFC (13.7% Tax) | +470 | +2300 | 4.2× |
Resist the urge to call that widening a finding. It isn't one. A division market measures a team against three opponents and a conference market against fifteen, so a stronger team's ratio advantage compounds as the field grows — a perfectly fair, zero-vig market produces the same pattern. That trap is worth naming because it is the identical mistake as the Jets' fake +20%: a structural artifact that looks like a signal if you want one badly enough.
What the division board does tell you is simpler and more useful. Baltimore's price is not a conference-board quirk. The market likes the Ravens at -115 on the cheapest, tightest, most carefully priced rung on the whole ladder — the rung where it charges 7.8% instead of 13.7% and where all eight markets land inside a 0.27-point band. The 8-9 record really is being read as noise rather than evidence, consistently, at every price point the book offers. That is a coherent position held all the way down.
So the board is making a bet, not a mistake, and my read is that it has pushed that bet one step past the evidence — a conference where the reigning champion is third, the No. 1 seed is seventh, and the reigning division winner is tenth. If I am wrong, it is because health really does dominate. If I am right, the Patriots at +850 and the Steelers at +3500 are where it shows up first. Notice that I still cannot turn either into a confident bet, which is the point of everything above. Check it yourself against the division board, where the tax is half, and Super Bowl 2027 futures, where it is a third more again.
AFC And NFC Championship Odds FAQ
What are the AFC championship odds for 2026?
Baltimore is the favorite at +470 on DraftKings, followed by Buffalo +510, New England +760, Kansas City +770 and the Chargers +830. The best available number on the Ravens is FanDuel's +550. Prices were collected July 15, 2026 from an undated source board, so treat them as a same-week snapshot; they move daily.
What are the NFC championship odds for 2026?
The Rams are a heavy favorite at +295 on DraftKings, with Seattle +600, Philadelphia +820, Green Bay +900 and Detroit +930 behind them. The Rams' best available price is +300 at BetMGM or BetRivers.
How much do NFL conference futures cost in vig?
DraftKings' AFC board sums to 115.9% implied probability, a 13.7% house edge. Buying each team at the best price across six books drops the same board to 108.1%, a 7.5% edge. Line shopping recovers about 6.2 points, nearly half of it.
Why do the Ravens look even more favored on the conference board than on the division board?
They do, and it proves nothing. DraftKings makes Baltimore 3.3× likelier than Pittsburgh to win the AFC North, and 4.2× likelier to win the AFC. That widening is structural, not a signal: a division market measures a team against three rivals and a conference market against fifteen, so a stronger team's ratio advantage grows as the field grows. A fair, zero-vig market produces the same pattern. It is the same trap as the Jets' fake +20% edge — an artifact that looks like information.
Which rung of the futures ladder is cheapest?
The division board, by a distance: DraftKings' eight division markets average a 7.9% house edge versus 13.8% at the conference rung and 18.4% at the Super Bowl. The tax scales with the number of teams in the pot. The conference board's compensation is that it pays a real number where a division favorite often pays close to even money.
Why are the Ravens favored after going 8-9?
The market is pricing the roster rather than the record: an 8-9 season the books read as underperformance, plus the Trey Hendrickson signing. Whether you agree is exactly the bet a Ravens future asks you to make.
When do these odds settle?
The conference championship games are played in January 2027, and the winners meet in Super Bowl LXI at SoFi Stadium in February 2027.
The Board Has Made Up Its Mind. Know What It Charges To Argue
The AFC conference board is one of the most confident statements the futures market makes all year. It has the 14-3 reigning champion behind an 8-9 team, the No. 1 seed at +1025, and a division winner one book prices at +2300 and another at +3500.
You can take the other side of that or you can agree with it. What this exercise convinced me of is that the argument is the cheap part and the ticket is the expensive part. Eighteen points at the Super Bowl rung, fourteen at the conference rung, eight at the division rung, and roughly six of those fourteen refundable to anyone willing to open a second app. Those numbers were true before you had a take on Patrick Mahomes' knee, and they will still be true in January when one of these sixteen teams is holding a trophy and the other fifteen tickets are confetti.
Whatever you end up betting this season, price it the way this article priced the Ravens: on the live NFL odds screen — shop the number across the major books, against the best number available rather than the first one you see. And if you want to see what our experts are actually backing this week, the free expert picks today are posted daily.
Try OddsShopper Pro free for 7 days — NFL markets priced across the major books, with the no-vig fair number beside the best one available. Code NFLCONF20 takes 20% off your first payment if you stay.
