Professional Women's Hockey League

Professional Women's Hockey League
Ligue professionnelle de hockey féminin

Upcoming season or competition: 2025–26 PWHL season
Sport	Ice hockey
First season	2023–24
Owner(s)	Mark Walter Group
No. of teams	8
Countries	Canada (4 teams) United States (4 teams)
Most recent champion(s)	Minnesota Frost (2nd) (2024–25)
Most titles	Minnesota Frost (2)
Broadcaster(s)	Canada: CBC Sportsnet TSN United States: See list
Official website	www.thepwhl.com

The Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL; French: Ligue professionnelle de hockey féminin, LPHF) is a women's professional ice hockey league in North America. The league comprises eight teams, four each from the United States and Canada. The teams play a regular season to earn one of four places in a postseason tournament that determines the winner of the Walter Cup. The PWHL is wholly owned and operated by the Mark Walter Group.

Differences between the PWHL and other North American professional hockey leagues include a 3-2-1-0 points system, terminations of penalties following a short-handed goal, best-of-five shootouts, and greater restrictions on body checking. The league's matches are broadcast nationally in Canada by the CBC and TSN, their French-language affiliates Radio-Canada and RDS, and in both languages on Amazon Prime Video. In the United States, it is broadcast by regional sports networks based in each U.S. city with a team. It is streamed on YouTube internationally, excluding Canada, as well as on Nova Sport in Czechia and Slovakia.^[1]

The collapse of the Canadian Women's Hockey League in 2019 led to the establishment of the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA), a non-profit organization that advocated for greater professionalism in women's ice hockey. PWHPA members boycotted existing leagues, including the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF), with the goal of establishing a stable, unified professional league, and worked to build a collective bargaining agreement with Mark Walter and Billie Jean King Enterprises. The Mark Walter Group acquired the assets of the PHF following its 2022–23 season. Subsequently, the PWHPA worked with the Mark Walter Group to establish a unified league with new ownership and management. The league's first draft took place in September 2023, and its first season began in January 2024.