Category: competition
Question: How to join a competition?
Answer: Before you start, navigate to the [Competitions listing](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions). It lists all of the currently active competitions.

Public competitions are viewable on Kaggle and appear in Kaggle search results. Depending on the privacy and access set by the host, some competitions may be unavailable for you to see or join. If a host set a competition's visibility to private, you would only see the competition's details if they shared a unique URL with you.

If you click on a specific Competition in the listing, you will go to the Competition’s homepage.

The first element worth calling out is the **Rules tab**. This contains the rules that govern your participation in the sponsor’s competition. You must accept the competition’s rules before downloading the data or making any submissions. It’s extremely important to read the rules before you start. This is doubly true if you are a new user. Users who do not abide by the rules may have their submissions invalidated at the end of the competition or banned from the platform. So please make sure to read and understand the rules before choosing to participate.

If anything is unclear or you have a question about participating, the competition’s forums are the perfect place to ask.

The information provided in the **Overview tabs** will vary from Competition to Competition. Five elements which are almost always included and should be reviewed are the “Description,” “Data”, “Evaluation,” “Timeline,” & “Prizes” sections.

- The **description** gives an introduction into the competition’s objective and the sponsor’s goal in hosting it.
- The **data** tab is where you can download and learn more about the data used in the competition. You’ll use a training set to train models and a test set for which you’ll need to make your predictions. In most cases, the data or a subset of it is also accessible in Notebooks.
- The **evaluation** section describes how to format your submission file and how your submissions will be evaluated. Each competition employs a metric that serves as the objective measure for how competitors are ranked on the leaderboard.
- The **timeline** has detailed information on the competition timeline. Most Kaggle Competitions include, at a minimum, two deadlines: a rules acceptance deadline (after which point no new teams can join or merge in the competition), and a submission deadline (after which no new submissions will be accepted). It is very, very important to keep these deadlines in mind.
- The **prizes** section provides a breakdown of what prizes will be awarded to the winners, if prizes are relevant. This may come in the form of monetary, swag, or other perks. In addition to prizes, competitions may also award ranking points towards the Kaggle progression system. This is shown on the Overview page.

Ready to join? If the competition allows anyone to join, you should be able to click "Join" and accept the competition's rules. If the competition has restricted access, the host will share a private link with you that allows you to join.

Once you have chosen a competition, read and accepted the rules, and made yourself aware of the competition deadlines, you are ready to submit!