How the LoL Honor System Works and How to Reach Honor 5

Honor is the only progression system in League of Legends you cannot rush, cannot buy from Riot, and cannot fix with a good week of play. It measures one thing: whether other people are glad you were in their game.

That makes it the quietest wall in the client. Players who have spent years on the game still sit at Honor 3, and a lot of them do not find out what that costs them until the moment it blocks something.

Here is how the system actually works, what each level is worth, and what moves it.

How Honor works

After every match, your teammates get a prompt to honor one player. When they pick you, you earn a small amount of progress toward your next checkpoint.

That is the entire engine. There is no honor score you can grind directly, no mission, no purchase.

Riot caps two things deliberately:

• How much a single game can contribute. One great game does not jump you a level.
• How much a single premade can contribute. Five-stacking with friends and honoring each other in a loop does not work, because repeated honors from the same people stop counting for much.

The result is a system that only responds to a long, wide sample of different teammates. It is slow by design.

The levels

Two things about this table matter more than they look.

Honor 3 is the floor, not an achievement. Riot reset every existing account to Honor 3 in early 2025 and ended annual honor resets at the same time. So Honor 3 means "nothing has gone wrong", not "you have been rewarded".

Levels 0 to 2 are a different problem entirely. They are not slow progress, they are an active penalty state following a restriction. Getting out of them is about serving the time cleanly, and no amount of play speeds that up.

What Honor 5 actually unlocks

This is the part most players underestimate, because these cosmetics have never been purchasable.

• Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch, plus their eligible chromas
• The Three Honors skins for Malzahar, Akshan and Shen
• Ally-targeted pings
• The visible Honor 5 recall
• More frequent Battle Pass XP drops

Reaching Honor 5 for the first time under the updated system grants those cosmetics permanently. There is no store page for them and no event that sells them. Either you get there or you do not own them.

Honor 3 gates the Victorious skin

Here is the one that catches people out every single season.

The Victorious skin requires 15 ranked wins and Honor Level 3 or above. Players who dropped below 3 after a chat restriction earlier in the year hit the win count, then find out in the final week that the skin is not coming.

Honor recovery is slow, so this is not something you fix in the last fortnight of a season. If you are chasing the reward, check your level now rather than in November. We cover the full requirements in our guide to getting the Victorious skin.

Honor quietly pays you in BXP

Honor is not just cosmetic. It feeds the Battle Pass directly: random Honor drops award 150 BXP at Honor levels 3, 4 and 5, and the higher your standing, the more often they land.

At 400 BXP per Battle Pass milestone, those drops are a real contribution across an Act, and they are entirely passive. You get them for behaving normally.

That means Honor and Battle Pass progress compound. Sitting at Honor 3 when you could be at Honor 5 costs you cosmetics and pass levels at the same time.

How to climb faster

There is no trick, but there are clear accelerants.

Play more games with different people. Because premade honors are capped, a wide spread of teammates moves you faster than the same duo partner every night.

Be useful in ways people notice. Honors go to the player who shotcalled, who stayed calm after a bad start, who did not flame the 0/5 jungler. Being quietly good is worth less than being visibly steady.

Say something early. A short positive message in the first two minutes measurably raises your odds of being honored at the end. People remember the tone of a game more than the scoreline.

Mute rather than argue. Every argument you win costs you the honor from the two people watching it.

Do not go quiet after a loss. The honor vote happens after defeats too, and post-loss games are where most honors are actually won, because almost nobody is pleasant in them.

What drops your Honor

Only punishments move you down. Chat restrictions drop your level, and a game ban drops it hard.

Being reported does not lower your Honor on its own. Reports feed the behavioural system, and only a confirmed penalty affects your level.

There is no decay. If nothing goes wrong, you never slide backwards.

Frequently asked questions

Skip the grind to Honor 5

Honor is the one system where playing more does not help if the way you play is the problem, and where the reward is locked behind hundreds of games rather than skill.

If you want the Honor 5 cosmetics without spending a season earning them, our boosters raise Honor standing the only way it can be raised, by playing a lot of clean games that teammates want to honor: Honor boost.

We cover the levels from 3 upward, which is where every account now starts.