Duolingo leagues in order: all 10 explained
Bronze through Diamond, how the weekly promotion works, and the part most people get wrong: your leaderboard is not other learners of your language. It is everyone, across every course.
There are ten Duolingo leagues. Lowest to highest: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, Amethyst, Pearl, Obsidian, Diamond.
Diamond is the top. Above it sits the Diamond Tournament, which is a separate competition rather than an eleventh league. Duolingo ran five leagues before expanding to the current ten.
You are not competing against learners of your language
This is the part most people have wrong. Duolingo matches you each week with learners who have similar study habits and are in a similar time zone — and it says plainly that the people on your leaderboard might not be studying the same language as you. The competition runs across all of its courses.
So the person beating you to Diamond may be three weeks into Japanese while you are two years into Spanish. Difficulty of course, difficulty of lesson, and how far through you are make no difference to the ranking. Only XP earned this week does.
How you move between leagues
The top XP earners in your leaderboard are promoted to the next league up. The lowest are demoted to the one below.
Duolingo does not publish how many move in each direction, and the number is not the same at every level. Your own leaderboard shows the current promotion and demotion zones — that display is the only reliable source for the cutoff you are actually facing, and it is worth checking rather than trusting a number from a guide.
When the week resets
Leaderboards end and restart Sunday afternoon or evening, in your device's timezone. Your reset is not the same moment as a friend's in another country.
The leaderboard tab carries a live countdown. If you are near a promotion place, watch that rather than the calendar — the cutoff can fall earlier in your evening than you expect.
The Diamond Tournament
Reaching Diamond is not the end. The top 10 learners in Diamond become eligible for the Diamond Tournament, which runs in three phases: Quarterfinals, Semifinals and Finals. Each round eliminates learners who do not make the cut, with rewards for reaching each stage.
It does not run every week. Look for the message at the top of your leaderboard saying "Top 10 qualify for the Tournament" to know whether this is a tournament week.
If you cannot see leagues at all
Three things to check, in order:
Your profile is private. Leaderboards are a social feature, and a private profile disables them along with friends. Turn them on in privacy settings by checking "Make my profile public".
You are under 13. Social features, leaderboards included, are unavailable. That one is not a setting.
You are in a classroom. Classroom settings can also control access.
Turning leagues off
Make your profile private. There is no separate league toggle, and it disables friends at the same time, so it is all or nothing.
If the pressure rather than the feature is the problem, Duolingo addresses that question directly in its own writing on leaderboards. If it is only the notifications, leave the profile public and switch off leaderboard notifications instead.
Does Super Duolingo help you win?
Not by changing any rule. Super does not alter how promotion works, how you are matched, or how XP is counted.
What it can do is remove interruptions. More uninterrupted practice can mean more XP, and more XP is what the leaderboard measures — so there is a practical effect for anyone who was previously stopped mid-session. It guarantees nothing about promotion, and any page telling you a paid plan buys league position is wrong.
We sell a Duolingo Super 12-month upgrade applied to your own account, so your streak, XP and league position carry over untouched.
What the leaderboard measures
Weekly XP, and XP is a measure of activity rather than of progress. Correct answers, bonuses and boosts all feed into how much you earn, but nothing in the ranking knows whether you are revising material you already knew or attempting something hard.
That is not a flaw so much as a design choice: leaderboards exist to keep people coming back, and Duolingo says as much about why it built them. It is worth knowing which of the two you are optimising for.
League names and order, the matching explanation, the weekly reset, the Diamond Tournament format and the leaderboard requirements come from Duolingo's own help centre and blog, checked on the date at the top of this page.
An earlier version of this page carried exact promotion counts, leaderboard group size, gem rewards and a tie-break rule taken from the Duolingo community wiki. That page is marked by its own editors as containing content no longer used in Duolingo, so those figures have been removed rather than repeated here. Where Duolingo does not publish a number, this page says so instead of supplying one.