We have finalized advancement to the 2025 FIRST Championship presented by BAE Systems and are excited to share it with you! This information can also be found on the Championship Eligibility page.
There are 600 slots available for FIRST ® Robotics Competition teams at the 2025 FIRST ® Championship. Those slots are allocated into three groups: Pre-Qualified Teams, District Teams, and Regional Teams.
There are 32 FIRST Robotics Competition teams that are pre-qualified for the 2025 FIRST Championship.
Districts receive the percentage of ‘available slots’ at FIRST Championship, rounded up to the nearest whole slot, equal to the percentage of teams they have in their District compared to the total of all FIRST Robotics Competition teams. ‘Available slots’ are calculated by taking the total number of slots at FIRST Championship and subtracting the number of pre-qualified teams. This overall calculation uses a ‘snapshot’ of teams that have registered and secured as of three weeks after initial season payment was due (this year, that was December 2, 2024).
As of that date, Districts represented 1670 of 3522 registered and secured teams and are allocated 276 slots. Allocations per District are below.
The remaining 292 slots are allocated to teams in the Regional model.
Advancement from Regional Events
As detailed in this blog post, advancement from Regional Events was expected to change this season. We’re excited to share that the volunteers helping with implementation of this new model were able to get everything completed in time so we will be making the changes for the 2025 season! The only change from our original plan for 2025 is that we plan to release slots from the Regional Advancement Pool on a weekly basis beginning after Week 2. We think that releasing slots weekly, instead of every two weeks, will help with the new hotel program. Huge thank you to the volunteers who helped us with implementing this new system!
Our goal is to release enough slots each week so that the same proportion of Championship slots have been filled as events have been completed. For example, 47 of 69 (~68%) Regional Events will be completed after Week 4, and we plan to have approximately the same percentage of Regional slots filled by that point as well.
Advancement from District Championships
The following teams competing in the District model* earn a Merit-Based Qualifying slot:
- District Championship
- FIRST Impact Award Winners
- Engineering Inspiration Award Winners
- Rookie All-Star Winners (the judges can decide if they present this award or not)
- Winning Alliance members
- as many teams in District-points total order to fill the allocated FIRST Championship slots granted per the table below.
District Secured Teams as of 12/2 FIRST Championship Slots FIRST Impact Award Winners Dean’s List Award Finalists Engineering Inspiration Award Winners Rookie All-Star Award Winners Woodie Flowers Finalist Award Winners FIRST Chesapeake 105 17 2 3 2 1 2 FIRST in Michigan 490 80 4 13 1 2 3 FIRST in Texas 170 28 2 5 2 2 2 FIRST Indiana Robotics 70 12 1 2 1 1 1 FIRST Israel 61 10 1 2 1 1 1 FIRST Mid-Atlantic 137 23 2 4 2 1 2 FIRST North Carolina 85 14 1 2 2 2 1 FIRST South Carolina* 28 5 1 2 1 1 1 NE FIRST 186 31 3 5 2 1 2 Ontario 132 22 2 4 1 1 2 Pacific Northwest 132 22 2 4 2 1 2 Peachtree 74 12 1 2 2 1 1 *Due to its size, FIRST South Carolina does not have enough Championship slots for this method to work. The following teams will receive automatic invitations to the 2025 FIRST Championship from the FIRST South Carolina State Championship:
- Winning Alliance Captain
- Winning Alliance First Pick
- FIRST Impact Award Winner
- Engineering Inspiration Award Winner
- Next highest District Points
District Points are used to fill any additional open slots (due to duplicate automatic qualifying teams or teams who decline their invitation).
In terms of District changes, thats represented below.
| District | FIRST Championship Slots | FIRST Impact Award Winners | Dean’s List Award Finalists | Engineering Inspiration Award Winners | Rookie All-Star Award Winners |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FIRST Chesapeake | 0 | +1 | +1 | +1 | 0 |
| FIRST in Michigan | -6 | -1 | -1 | 0 | 0 |
| FIRST in Texas | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| FIRST Indiana Robotics | +1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| FIRST Israel | -1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| FIRST Mid-Atlantic | -1 | +1 | 0 | +1 | 0 |
| FIRST North Carolina | +1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| NE FIRST | 0 | 0 | -2 | 0 | 0 |
| Ontario | -1 | -1 | +2 | 0 | 0 |
| Pacific Northwest | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | +1 |
| Peachtree | -4 | -1 | +1 | 0 | +1 |
Woodie Flowers had no changes
Net, Districts lost 5 slots to Regionals (281 2024 to 276 2025)
Pre-Qualified additions
In addition to those above, the following Districts will have auto-qualified teams.
Israel - 1690 (Winner), 5614 (Impact Finalist), 9739 (Unforseen circumstances preventing their RAS qualification in 2024) (Total 13)
Mid-Atlantic - 321 (Winner, HOF) (Total 24)
North Carolina - 2642 (EI), 9008 (EI) (Total 16)
Michigan - 27 (HOF), 503 (HOF), 2834 (HOF) (Total 83)
Ontario - 1114 (HOF) (Total 23)
Chesapeake - 1629 (HOF) (Total 18)
This is to the best of my knowledge
PNW gained an Engineering Inspiration slot but lost a Rookie All-Star slot.
Mind, PCH’s borders shrank by a whole state this year. The 2023/2024 PCH land mass is up one slot on the whole (PCH down 4, FSC got 5 as we went from 25 to 35–even if only 28 were secured at the cutoff).
Peachtree was GA -4 and SC +5. South Carolina split off from Georgia and became our own district. SC is actually up to 35 teams, not the 28 from the blog.
on the championship eligibility criteria site, it says
but in the regional advancement task force update it says,
Am I missing something?
Likely just a mistaken choice of phrase, everyone in the regional system has been saying “wild card” for so long it’s a hard habit to break. I assume the intended wording is more along the lines of:
“Teams from Districts that are Regional Winners will open additional slots in the regional points pool”.
Winning alliance 2nd pick does not advance.
Booooo!
What happens if a pre qualified team is in the winning alliance for the district model? Does it allow another team to advance to CMP from the points order?
I think that’s pretty much confirmed by:
- Implement proposed Regional Advancement Points Model (as described in the above linked document) to replace Wild Card, Priority Waitlist, and Open Waitlist
Basically whenever a wild card would be get assigned they just get pulled from the regional pool.
I think in general replacing the waitlists with the regional pool and reducing the prequalification slots makes team counts at the championship better (more proportionally) divided up between the different districts and the regional system.
Indiana gained a slot!!! 
Still, that seems like it is taking an automatic advancement slot from the regional to put it into the pool. Should just automatically advanced the highest pool team that attended that regional that hasn’t qualified, rather than the entire pool.
That’s basically the 2026+ system.
Edit, nevermind, I misunderstood what you said. I remember discussing that a few months ago and don’t remember why we didn’t like it. The working group hasn’t been involved in this for a while now.
Interestingly on 12/1 https://frc-events.firstinspires.org/2025/allteams listed 3761 teams. So does that mean 239 teams hadn’t secured payment by then? It seems unfair to potentially have a region miss out on representation because of it.
In the district model, the winning alliance, impact, EI, and RAS winners are qualified, and then
as many teams in District-points total order to fill the Allocated FIRST Championship slots granted per the table below.
I believe those allocated championship slots exclude prequalified teams, so yes, simply more teams would be invited based on district points.
With 28 (or 35) teams in the district, what is the South Carolina State Championship going to look like? I’m interested to see how they adjust for the small number of teams, but I haven’t been able to find any information on it.
Why would it be any different than like this event we had last year?
Unless you mean how many teams go to state… My understanding is not every team in the district will qualify for DCMP and we will have a DCMP event roughly the size of what I linked above.
Because in general not all the teams qualify for the district championship? I think in most districts it’s around half the teams qualifying for DCMP, which would leave SC with 17 or 18 teams at DCMP.
Not necessarily, especially when this would lead to an unreasonably large or small number of teams at DCMP. e.g. FIM last year had 31% (160/514) of teams attend DCMP, PNW had 39% (50/127), FIN had 60% (38/63), ONT had 72% (100/138), ISR had 74% (45/61). In 2022 (admittedly a weird year), ONT extended DCMP invitations to every team in the district. While we obviously don’t know what SC will do this year, based on historical trends in other districts, I would expect them to qualify a larger percentage (if not all) teams for DCMP rather than opting for an extremely small DCMP.
Assuming you mean “hadn’t” - it is somewhat unfair to certain regions, but from FIRST’s perspective, they don’t know how many of those unpaid teams will actually end up competing (it could be any number of them), and they need to balance those teams’ needs with the needs of FIRST and other parties to set these slots.
That is what I mean. I’m just interested in how the format will work for a small district as someone from a state with a similar number of teams. Namely, what will make this event different from the previous two district events in the state?