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Understanding how to effectively use the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) Free Hit chip is crucial for any manager looking to boost their team’s performance.
The Free Hit is one of the most powerful tools in FPL, allowing you to make unlimited transfers for a single gameweek. This strategy can give you a major advantage during blank or double gameweeks, but using it wisely is key to climbing the overall rankings and dominating your mini-league.
In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know about the FPL Free Hit chip, how to use it, and tips to maximize its impact on your Fantasy Premier League season.
In Fantasy Premier League, you always have 15 players in your squad – 13 outfield players, and two goalkeepers.
The normal way to change these is through transfers. You get one free transfer per week, and can bank up to two at a time. You can also change players using your wildcard (more on that later).
With the FPL free hit, you can make an unlimited number of transfers – BUT, you only get those players for one gameweek.
If you want to, you can use your Fantasy Premier League free hit chip to change literally every single player in your squad.
After that gameweek has finished, however, your squad will revert back to exactly how it was beforehand.
Some say rules are there to be broken, but unfortunately this is not the case in FPL.
We must all obey the almighty FPL Towers, whatever they might decide, and this applies to the FPL free hit rules too.
Understanding the Fantasy Premier League free hit rules is crucial to… making sure you don’t mess up, basically.
Here are the most important ones, for your consideration:
You already know the top rule, above – that the free hit allows you to make unlimited transfers for one week only.
Like the other chips, you now get two free hits per season. This was updated in 2025-26, before which we only had one sad, lonely free hit for the whole year.
Aside from that though, there are two main points to unpack here.
Firstly – unlike with the triple captain and bench boost chips – you can’t cancel your free hit once you’ve activated it. As such, you need to be completely, 100% sure before you play it.
Secondly, if you’ve already made transfers that gameweek, they’ll be cancelled.
In short, your post-free hit team will revert to exactly how it was before that gameweek. If you’re going to play your free hit, don’t worry about other moves that week.
Like all things in FPL, actually nailing your usage of this chip isn’t easy.
That said, the logistics of how to use your Fantasy Premier League free hit are extremely straightforward. Here are the few steps you need to take:
Remember that the FPL free hit rules state you can’t cancel this chip once you’ve activated it. So… wait until you’re completely and utterly sure before completing the above steps.
We’ve already gone over the FPL free hit meaning and rules. Now, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of how to use your Fantasy Premier League free hit in the most effective possible way.
Back in the day, when you only had one free hit, you’d wait until late in the season – for the double and blank gameweeks.
Now that you’ve got two free hits, things work a bit differently.
Your first half free hit can now basically be used whenever the hell you like.
Rarely do we get doubles or blanks in the first half of the season, so you should essentially just use it whenever there’s a good weekend of fixtures, or you’ve got your team into a right mess.
With the second free hit, you should still wait until the right time to use it.
The reason for this is that the second half of the season is when fixtures start getting backed-up. Games get moved for cup competitions, which results in both blank and double gameweeks in FPL.
The free hit helps you out in both cases.
If you’ve got a lot of players on a blank gameweek (e.g. half your squad, which can certainly happen), it saves you from needing to make a ton of transfers – and taking a lot of hits – to solve the problem.
Attacking double gameweeks is one of the biggest ways to gain a lot of points very quickly in FPL.
The free hit is the easiest way to do that, without having to disrupt your entire team just for the sake of one gameweek.
It can certainly happen that a load of players have a great double, then rubbish fixtures afterwards. Using your free hit means you get them in for the former, and don’t have to hold them for the latter.
In short, there’s obviously not literally a ‘perfect’ time regarding when to use your FPL free hit each season.
In general though, for your second one, you should definitely wait and specifically target a big blank or double gameweek.
You’ve got three ‘chips’ in FPL, all of which can be used in the first and second halfs of the season: the free hit, bench boost, and triple captain.
In addition to those, you also get a wildcard… which is kind-of a chip, but not really.
You can find out everything you really need to know about wildcards here, and get some top FPL tips in the process. In short though, the Fantasy Premier League free hit and wildcard are similar, but still different.
Both of these handy tools will let you make unlimited transfers to your team. There is one key difference, however, in the FPL free hit vs wildcard comparison.
With a wildcard, you keep the team after that gameweek. With the free hit, your team reverts back to however it was before
Trying to choose between whether to use your Fantasy Premier League free hit or your wildcard? Then, my friend, you basically need to decide if you’re looking short-term or medium-term.
If you’re just targeting one, specific gameweek, use your free hit.
If you’re looking to make drastic changes to your squad for the next few gameweeks, use your wildcard.
Unfortunately, it’s beyond the remit of this FPL Free Hit Explained article to actually tell you exactly when to play your free hit, or who to bring in when you do so.
That being said, you can get updates on when we’re planning to play our free hits – and the players we’re targeting – every season in the Latest Tips section of the website.
In general, however, here are some (hopefully) useful tips on playing your Fantasy Premier League free hit chip.
Never, ever, ever play your chips on a whim. Instead, you should be planning at least several weeks ahead as you try and identify the perfect time to play them.
For the record, you’re not necessarily picking the players you’ll want for your free hit. Rather, you’re purely targeting fixtures.
It’s impossible to know which players will be fit or injured; in or out of form. But what you can see in advance is the fixtures.
Specifically, you’re looking for two things here.
The first is double and blank gameweeks. Doubles give you plenty of potential to score points. Blanks are weeks that you want to plan ahead for, since you don’t want to either take zeros from your players, or take big hits to get starting players out there.
The second is the actual quality of the fixtures.
By the time we’re a few months into the season, you should have a good idea of who the rubbish Premier League teams are, and can target them mercilessly.
If you see a gameweek when the stars align – when there are both doubles, and nice fixtures to target – then that’s when you should play your (second, usually) free hit.
Actually keeping track of the fixtures can be a pain in the backside.
The best way to do so, naturally, is to listen to us. We’ve not only got our very own fixture ticker, but post plenty about mid-to-long term fixture runs before they come up. And best of all, we’re never, ever wrong.
Obviously, you don’t want to get to the end of the season and find you’ve still got your free hit chip ‘left over’. What you really, really don’t want to do, however, is play it too early.
Patience is the name of the game with all FPL chips, and so it proves with the free hit.
If you have a slow start to the season, it’s always tempting to do something dramatic, like playing an early chip.
Generally speaking (not always) you should resist the temptation.
FPL is a 38-gameweek proposition. It’s very much a marathon, not a sprint, and the points you get in the last 10 weeks are worth just as much as those in the first 10 weeks.
For the second free hit, specifically, you are much better waiting until late in the season.
Let the less patient players play their chips early, and enjoy their short-term boosts. Waiting until later in the season will allow you to target double and blank gameweeks, and give you the potential to significantly outscore those people and shoot up the OR.
The name ‘free hit’ is misleading, and could definitely be improved. It implies that you’re just taking a wild swing, and there are no consequences if you don’t nail it.
While we don’t want to pile pressure on you, you should still be seeing the free hit as a major opportunity, rather than something to simply ‘play and hope’.
Playing your chips effectively can genuinely make a massive difference to your OR. Most seasons here at Full90 FPL, we’ll see major jumps late on after saving our free hit to the right time. These jumps are worth hundreds of thousands of places, and – if you play smartly thereafter – that new position can certainly be maintained.
Obviously, FPL is just a game. If you take it far too seriously, however, like we do, then you should also take the bench boost chip extremely seriously.
The FPL free hit represents a wonderful opportunity.
Whatever the state of your squad, you can change all 15 players in one fell swoop. This is the perfect way to take advantage of a big double or blank gameweek, and – in the process – see your OR shoot upwards.
After reading this Fantasy Premier League Free Hit Explained article, you should hopefully know everything you need regarding how the chip works. All that you need to do now is… play it and score a ton of points!
If you need any specific advice on how to do just that, hit us up on Twitter @Full90FPL, or keep an eye on the Latest Tips section of the website.
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