The 1985–86 Yorkshire Cup was the seventy-eighth occasion on which the Yorkshire Cup competition had been held. This season there were no junior/amateur clubs taking part, no "leavers", but one new entrant in the form of newcomers to the league, Sheffield Eagles and so the total of entries increases by one up to seventeen. This in turn resulted in the necessity to introduce a preliminary round to reduce the number of clubs entering the first round to sixteen.