The league was formed as Landesliga Niedersachsen in 1947, operating with four divisions in variable strength, all up with 42 clubs.

The four regional divisions were named after the capital city of the district, being Hanover, Hildesheim, Braunschweig and Osnabrück.

Additionally, some clubs from Lower Saxony also played in the Amateurliga Bremen, a trend that continues to a lesser degree even today.

From the start, the Landesliga Niedersachsen was a feeder league to the Oberliga Nord which its champion had the option of promotion to.

The reasons for this were the fact that Lower Saxony, as the strongest association in northern Germany was permitted to send more than one team to the promotion round and the high finishes of reserve teams of the likes of Hannover 96, Arminia Hannover and Eintracht Braunschweig in the league, which were ineligible to enter the promotion rounds.

The system for promotion from the Landesliga remained mostly unchanged and the league continued to operate on sixteen clubs.

For the Verbandsliga Niedersachsen, this meant a further slip, now to tier five, and a split to two separate divisions again, but also, for the first time in its history, direct promotion for the league champions.

While the first and third placed team from the 1993-94 season gained entry to the new Regionalliga, the other twelve clubs of the top-fourteen were promoted to the Oberliga Niedersachsen/Bremen.

The first season of the new separated leagues saw a strong imbalance of clubs, West operated on sixteen, East on twenty-one teams.

The 1999–2000 season saw another league system change with the reduction of numbers of Regionalligen, this however had only one effect on the Verbandsligen, no direct promotion was available this year.

The four northern German states were then the only region without an Oberliga and the five Verbandsligen sat right below the Regionalliga Nord, parallel to the two NOFV-Oberligas.

At the end of the 2007-08 season, the five winners of the northern Verbandsligen played with the sixth placed team from the Oberliga Nord for one last spot in the Regionalliga.

At the end of the 2011–12 season, the top four clubs, being the Goslarer SC, BV Cloppenburg, VfB Oldenburg and BSV Schwarz-Weiß Rehden, were directly promoted to the Regionalliga Nord while the sixth placed club, SV Holthausen/Biene, unsuccessfully entered a promotion playoff with the runners-up from the Oberliga Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein-Liga.