What Do the New WPL 2027 Retention Rules Mean for Teams Before the Kochi Auction?

The retention picture for WPL 2027 is clearer on dates than on numbers. Franchises now know they must submit their retained and released lists by September 28, with the auction itself set for October 28 in Kochi. What nobody has confirmed yet is how many players each team can actually keep. The squad cap stays at eighteen, the overseas limit at six, and the purse untouched at fifteen crore, but the one figure every war room wants, the maximum retention count, has not been made public.

BCCI Locks September Deadline For Franchises

BCCI sent the formal communication to all five WPL franchises on September 16, giving them twelve days to sort their squads. Every retained and released name is due by September 28, a full month before the league heads to the auction table. For franchise think tanks, this is the deadline that decides everything else that follows this winter, from contract talks to travel planning.

The auction itself lands on October 28 at the Grand Hyatt in Kochi, with the new season running from January 14 to February 7, 2027. Squad rules carry over largely untouched: eighteen players per roster, six of them overseas, and a purse of fifteen crore per franchise, identical to last year’s number.

WPL 2027 Auction Retention Rules Kochi

No official cap on retentions has been published for the upcoming cycle, and that silence matters. Last year’s mega auction limited teams to five retained players each; this year’s edition is a mini auction, the format the IPL runs without any retention ceiling at all.

That leaves franchises reading the tea leaves. Delhi Capitals and Mumbai Indians, who each held onto five names last time, could plausibly keep far more this time if the mini auction format applies its usual logic. The table below lays out what has actually been confirmed for each side, as opposed to what is still guesswork.

For context, the 2025 mini auction carried no retention ceiling at all, and Bengaluru kept seven players outright, including Smriti Mandhana, Ellyse Perry and Sophie Devine. The 2026 mega auction was the outlier, hard capped at five, which is why Mumbai and Delhi let go of names as big as Alyssa Healy and Meg Lanning simply to fit the new limit.

The 2026 Squads Still Matter

Every squad heading into the September 28 deadline is still built on last year’s mega auction. Jemimah Rodrigues captains Delhi, Harmanpreet Kaur leads Mumbai, and Smriti Mandhana returns as Bengaluru’s captain after guiding the franchise to the WPL 2026 title. None of that changes automatically once the retention window opens.

What could change is who gets let go. Delhi and Mumbai already used their five retention slots last year and now face a real choice: keep faith with a title-winning core or use the flexibility of a mini auction to reshape their squads. Gujarat Giants and UP Warriorz, who retained just two and one player respectively in 2026, have far more room to manoeuvre without breaking up much, and the right to match rule that debuted last year gave Warriorz four RTM picks off the back of that single retention alone.

The Hunt For A Home Venue

Where the 2027 final will actually be played is still unsettled. Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and the Reliance Stadium in Vadodara, commonly referenced as Kotambi Stadium, remain the two venues furthest along in discussions among board officials.

Varanasi has been floated but only as a distant possibility, with BCCI’s cricket operations team yet to inspect the ground before committing to it. Bengaluru’s Chinnaswamy Stadium would need permissions from local authorities that haven’t materialised yet. Vadodara already hosted the 2026 final, when Royal Challengers Bengaluru beat Delhi Capitals, giving it a track record the newer venues simply cannot match right now. Franchises are already shaping their retention strategy around the WPL 2027 auction retention rules that Kochi will enforce this October, even before the venue picture is fully settled.