Overwatch Season 5: Dates & What Actually Resets

Season 5 (A Grim Doctrine) went live on 6 October 2026 with the season patch; Season 4 (Heroes of Busan) ran 11 August – 6 October 2026. Blizzard has not announced an end date — neither the season post nor the patch notes give one — so this page deliberately carries none; any exact date you see elsewhere is somebody's estimate. Seasons 3 and 4 each ran eight weeks, so Season 6 is expected around December 2026. We update this page the moment Blizzard publishes a date.

Here's the part competitors' "season reset" pages quietly skip: mid-year seasons do not reset ranks. When Season 6 arrives, your rank carries straight over — no placements, no drop, nothing to re-earn. The only reset in the current system is the yearly one: on 10 February 2026 every player went to Unranked and played 10 placement matches per role to re-enter the ladder. That's it for the year.

Season 5's one competitive change sits at the very top: the Top 500 leaderboard now sorts by rank instead of Challenger Score, and end-of-season titles follow rank (Blizzard's patch notes of 6 October 2026). Every other rank carried over untouched.

Season 4 did change one thing, and it deserves to be stated precisely. Blizzard added a new rank, Emerald, between Platinum and Diamond, and seeded it with a one-time Rank Redistribution: players who sat in Platinum and Diamond were the ones most likely to move, and the highest divisions of Champion became more exclusive. That is a redistribution around a new tier — not a season reset. Nobody went back to Unranked and nobody re-played placements for it.

Two more honest data points: there is no rank decay (Blizzard removed it in 2023), so you can't lose your rank by not playing; and rank progress moves per match as a percentage toward the next division — the old "update every 5 wins" copy still floating around the web is obsolete.

Because the next season boundary won't touch your rank, there's nothing to protect before the tick — no reward cliff, no reset panic. The real deadline is the yearly February reset: every division you climb now is a rank you keep for the rest of the ranked year. That's why mid-year is quietly the best time to push — and the most efficient moment for a rank boost, since the result isn't wiped a few weeks later.

At the Season 6 boundary expect new content and balance changes — but your competitive standing stays exactly where you left it. The climb only restarts at the yearly reset, when the 10-per-role placements re-seed everyone. Check where your current rank places you against the ladder, read the full rank-system guide for how per-match progress works, or let the boost option show a real price and ETA for the divisions you still want this year.

The 2026 ranked year runs under the Reign of Talon banner: the yearly reset landed with Season 1 on 10 February 2026 (everyone to Unranked, 10 placements per role). Season 3 (Into the Tiger's Den) ran 16 June – 11 August 2026, Season 4 (Heroes of Busan) ran 11 August – 6 October 2026, and Season 5 (A Grim Doctrine) has been live since 6 October 2026 as the season that opens the final chapter of the Reign of Talon story. Mid-year season boundaries change content, not ranks — Season 4's Emerald redistribution is the one structural exception on record. We log each season's dates here as they close, so this page doubles as the ladder's historical record.