LoL Season 3: Dates, Rank Carry-Over & What Happens Next

Riot’s patch 26.15 notes are explicit: “Ranked Season 3 will start at 12pm on July 29 local server time.” So the start is confirmed — Season 3 has been running since 29 July 2026, taking over from Season 2, which had been live since 29 April 2026.

The end date is not announced. The 2026 ranked year opened on 8 January 2026, and Riot has closed its ranked year in early January three years running, so early January 2027 is the reasonable expectation — not a confirmed date; historically Riot pins it down in the December patch notes. Season 3 also runs on Acts, and Act I is live now, with Act II dates unannounced. Acts are the battle-pass and event cadence: nothing at an act boundary touches the ranked ladder. We update this page the moment Riot makes a date official.

Here is the part most season guides get wrong: a season rollover inside a ranked year does not reset your rank. When Season 2 rolled into Season 3 on 29 July, you kept your tier, your division and your LP — no placements, no drop. That holds in every tier, Master, Grandmaster and Challenger included. What a new season changes is the reward track and the seasonal content, not the ladder.

The reset happens once per ranked year, in January: your rank is compressed downward by at least four divisions, the highest possible starting point is Emerald I, and you play 5 placement matches per queue to decide where you land. Your MMR persists through all of it, which is why January lobbies feel far sweatier than the ranks on the loading screen.

One exception is worth knowing — precisely because Riot labelled it as one. Patch 26.9, on 29 April 2026, hard-reset every Master, Grandmaster and Challenger player to Master 0 LP on NA, EUW, EUNE, BR, LAN and TR. Riot’s own words: “a hard reset mid-Ranked season is unideal — and an exceedingly rare event”. It is not a per-season cadence, and it did not repeat at the Season 3 rollover.

Because a season rollover doesn’t reset ranks, the real threat to a banked rank is LP decay, and the official rules are strict at the top: Diamond players hold up to 28 banked days and lose 50 LP per day once the bank runs dry; Master and above hold only 14 banked days and bleed 75 LP per day. Below Diamond there is no decay. So a rank you can’t actively defend is not safe just because Season 3 has no announced end date — either bank days with the occasional game, or lock the result in with a rank boost while the ladder is calm.

Since rank carried over, every LP you won in Season 2 is still yours in Season 3 — there is no "wait for the reset" logic inside a ranked year, and with no announced end date there is no deadline to play around either. Gains are MMR-driven with no fixed number, but typically around 20–30 LP per win at healthy MMR. If your LP gains have sagged into the teens, your MMR sits below your rank and grinding it out takes proportionally longer; the calculator above turns your from→to into a games estimate, the placement service covers the January re-entry, and the boost option prices the direct route.

The 2026 ranked year runs on three ranked seasons. Season 1 opened the year on 8 January 2026 with the annual reset and placements. Season 2 began 29 April 2026 and carried the one-off hard reset at Master and above in six regions. Season 3 started 29 July 2026, with rank carried over intact, and is the season running now — Riot has not announced its close, and the ranked year is expected, not confirmed, to end in early January 2027. We log each season’s confirmed dates here as they close, so this page doubles as the ladder’s historical record.