Fremantle's Kiara Bowers and Collingwood's Brianna Davey tied for the AFL Women's best and fairest award as the league's best and fairest players, and Carlton's Darcy Vescio won her second AFL Women's leading goalkicker award as the league's leading goalkicker.

The previous two AFLW seasons were formatted with the assistance of conferences, which split the league's clubs into two ranking tables.

[1] Owing to the fact clubs will not get the opportunity to play all of their opponents once, the AFL placed the teams together in a single 2020 ladder and then broke them up into brackets to attempt a fair fixture for the 2021 season.

As the season began, Australia had largely settled into a paradigm of most states maintaining zero COVID-19 cases outside of their international travel quarantine systems; this allowed football games to be played in front of crowds, usually with reduced capacity, and unhindered interstate travel was permitted without quarantine.

However, the different state governments often responded quickly to small numbers or even single virus cases being discovered in the community; this meant border restrictions or quarantine periods were at times re-introduced at short notice, impacting interstate travel for games; and, in some cases, that city- or state-wide lockdowns could be imposed within the impacted states,[3] precluding football activities altogether.