The qualification for the 2018 European Women's Handball Championship: France as host nation was directly qualified.
32 teams had registered for participation and compete for 15 places at the final tournament in two distinct Qualification Phases.
The groups were played in a home and away round-robin format from September 2017 to June 2018.
To determine the best third-placed teams from the qualifying group stage which qualified directly for the final tournament, only the results against the first, and second-placed teams in their group were taken into account, while results against the fourth-placed team were not included.
As a result, four matches played by each third-placed team counted for the purposes of determining the ranking.