Emmy Awards Rule Changes Revealed by Television Academy Ahead of 2025 Ceremony

The Television Academy is implementing some changes to their rules ahead of the 2025 Emmys awards ceremony later this year.

On Wednesday (January 8), it was revealed that the Academy had made a big change about how actors can be nominated in Lead and Guest Actor categories.

They also revealed several other changes to the rules, which will be implemented between this year’s ceremony and the 2026 one.

Keep reading to find out more…

According to reporting by Variety, the largest change to the rules is that actors will not be able to compete in both the Lead Actor and Guest Actor categories for the same role over the years.

This is something that stars like Claire Foy have done. The actress played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and won an Emmy in the Lead Actress category in 2018. She later competed in the Guest Category and was nominated for cameo appearances in the show as the Queen.

This is the official rule: “If a performer has been nominated or has won in a lead or supporting performer category, the performer will not be eligible to submit in a guest performer category in a subsequent Emmy year for playing the same character role in the same series. They may, however, continue to enter in a lead or supporting category.”

For 2025, directors will also be able to submit themselves for their work across multiple projects instead of having to select one.

“This change will allow the director to submit an episode from each of the programs they directed,” the Academy explained about the decision.

Rules that will go into place for the 2026 ceremony will change how the nominations are given out for reality casting categories. There will also be a change for the main title theme race, which refers to the music that plays at the opening of shows.

Awards season recently kicked off with the 2205 Golden Globes. Check out all of our coverage from the event.