According to World Rugby, federations are divided into <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://publications.worldrugby.org/yearinreview2015/fr/98-1">five "bands"</a>, and are either members or associates, depending on their affiliation status with the world federation:
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<p><u>Explanations:</u>
</p>
<ul><li>the countries belonging to the <b>High performance tier 1</b> band are the countries participating in the VI Nations Tournament (in Europe: England, Scotland, France, Wales, Ireland, Italy) and in the Rugby Championship (in the southern hemisphere: South Africa, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand);</li>
<li>the countries belonging to the <b>High performance tier 2</b> band are the high performance countries that do not participate to these two tournaments (Canada, USA, Fiji, Georgia, Japan, Namibia, Romania, Samoa, Tonga and Uruguay).</li>
<li>the countries belonging to the <i>Performance 1 tier 3</i> band are Chile, Spain, Portugal and Russia.</li>
<li>the countries belonging to the <i>Performance 2 tier 3</i> band are Belgium, South Korea, Hong Kong, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.</li>
<li>finally, 99 other countries are divided into World Rugby <b>member federations</b> and World Rugby <b>associate federations</b>. The federations that are members or associates only of their continental federation and not of World Rugby are not included in this map.</li></ul>
The band division and the associated countries date from 2015. The countries that joined World Rugby (as member or associate) after that date are: Guatemala (associated in 2016), Slovakia (associated in 2016), Lebanon (associated in 2018), Burkina Faso (member in 2020), Iran (member in 2020), Jordan (associated in 2020), Nepal (associated in 2020), Panama (associated in 2020), Qatar (associated in 2020), Turkey (associated in 2020).
<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Daehan" title="User:Daehan">Daehan</a>
CC BY-SA 4.0
<p><span class="int-own-work" lang="en">Own work</span>. Sources :
</p>
<ul><li>background map : <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-World6,_compact.svg" class="mw-redirect" title="File:BlankMap-World6, compact.svg">Image:BlankMap-World6, compact.svg</a> by <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lokal_Profil" title="User:Lokal Profil">Lokal Profil</a> and <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Canuckguy&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1" class="new" title="User:Canuckguy (page does not exist)">Canuckguy</a> under licence Public Domain</li>
<li>data map : <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://publications.worldrugby.org/yearinreview2015/fr/98-1">http://publications.worldrugby.org/yearinreview2015/fr/98-1</a></li></ul>