Duckworth-Lewis (DLS) Calculator
Estimate a revised target when the chasing team's innings is reduced before or at the start of their innings.
This is an estimate, not the official figure. The ICC's exact Professional Edition resource tables are proprietary; this calculator interpolates from published reference points of the D/L-S Standard Edition. It also only covers the classic case — overs lost before or at the very start of the second innings — not mid-chase stoppages after wickets have already fallen.
Formula: Par Score = Team 1 Score × (R2 ÷ R1), where R1 and R2 are the resource percentages available to each team based on their overs. The target to win is the par score rounded down, plus one run.
What Is the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) Method?
The Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method exists because rain and limited-overs cricket have never gotten along. When a match gets interrupted and overs have to be cut from an innings, simply reducing the target in proportion to overs lost creates absurd, unfair situations — DLS was built specifically to fix that by accounting for both overs and wickets, not just overs alone.
It replaced an older, much simpler method after a particularly infamous incident at the 1992 World Cup, where South Africa's target dropped from 22 runs off 13 balls to 21 runs off just a single ball following a rain delay — a swing so nonsensical it effectively ended their tournament and forced cricket to take the problem of rain-adjusted targets seriously.
Formula & Worked Examples
The method is built around the idea of 'resources' — a combination of overs remaining and wickets in hand — expressed as a percentage of the maximum a team could have. If a team's resource percentage is R1 for their innings and the chasing team ends up with a reduced resource percentage R2, the revised target is the first team's score scaled by R2 divided by R1, then rounded down and increased by one run to win.
Why It Matters
Before DLS, the simplest rain-adjustment methods ignored wickets entirely, which meant a team could lose several early wickets, effectively be in trouble, and still face a target calculated as though they had all ten wickets in hand the whole time. DLS fixes that by recognizing that a team five wickets down with ten overs left has drastically fewer resources than a team with all ten wickets and the same overs remaining, even though the overs count is identical.
It matters most in tournaments with reserve days and tight scheduling, where a match simply can't always be replayed in full. Knockout games in global tournaments have swung on DLS calculations more than once, which is part of why the method gets so much attention — and criticism — whenever it produces a target that feels unintuitive to fans watching at home.
The method is also deliberately conservative in one sense: it assumes teams bat close to optimally given their resources, which isn't always true in practice. A team that was cruising and suddenly finds their innings cut short might not have been batting at the pace DLS assumes they 'should' have been, which is one of the recurring criticisms leveled at the system even by people who otherwise accept it as necessary.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Assuming a DLS target scales purely with overs lost, ignoring wickets entirely — this is exactly the flawed approach DLS was designed to replace.
- Confusing the par score (used to determine a winner if the match is abandoned mid-chase) with the revised target (the number needed to win outright if play continues).
- Expecting a publicly available calculator, including this one, to match the ICC's official figures exactly — the real professional-edition resource tables are proprietary and not published, so any independent calculator is necessarily an estimate.
- Overlooking that DLS resource percentages are recalculated any time an innings is interrupted more than once, not just applied a single time at the very start.
- Treating DLS as something unique to one format — it applies across ODI and T20 cricket alike, with the underlying resource tables adjusted for the different innings lengths.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn't this calculator's target identical to the official one?
Because the ICC's exact resource tables for the current Professional Edition have never been made public. This calculator interpolates from published reference points from the earlier Standard Edition, which gets close but won't always match to the exact run.
What's the difference between the par score and the target?
The par score is the score the chasing team needs at a given point to be considered level if the match is abandoned right then. The target is the actual number of runs needed to win if the match continues to its revised conclusion.
Does DLS only apply to the team batting second?
In practice, yes, in the vast majority of cases — DLS is almost always used to adjust the second team's target after their innings gets interrupted, since the first team's score is already fixed by the time DLS is applied.
Why was DLS created in the first place?
Because older rain-adjustment methods, which mostly just prorated targets based on overs lost, produced wildly unfair results — most famously the 1992 World Cup semi-final, where South Africa's target became mathematically impossible after a short delay.
Is DLS the same as the Duckworth-Lewis method?
It's an evolution of it. Tony Lewis and Frank Duckworth created the original method in the 1990s; statistician Steven Stern refined it further, and the name was updated to Duckworth-Lewis-Stern to reflect that.