Fourth Wing did something unusual: it pulled a very large number of people who had never read fantasy into a fantasy series, on the strength of the romance. So "what do I read next" is a genuinely hard question here — recommend something too high-fantasy and you lose them, too contemporary and it doesn't scratch the itch. These are the books that keep the specific things Fourth Wing readers came for.
What you're actually looking for
It helps to name the ingredients. Fourth Wing is a war-college setting with a lethal selection process, a heroine who is physically outmatched and wins on wits, a love interest introduced as a threat, dragons with real personalities, and a romance that is load-bearing rather than decorative. Most "if you liked Fourth Wing" lists hand you epic fantasy with a romance subplot. These four keep the romance central.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night — Carissa Broadbent
The closest structural match on this list. Oraya is a human raised by the vampire king who adopted her, and she enters a tournament where every other competitor could kill her without effort — the same underdog-in-a-lethal-institution engine that drives Fourth Wing. Broadbent writes the rival-turned-ally arc with more patience than Yarros does, and the world is darker. Start here if what you loved was the trial structure.
From Blood and Ash — Jennifer L. Armentrout
Poppy is the Maiden, raised in isolation for a ceremony nobody will explain to her, and Hawke is the guard assigned to protect her. If the part of Fourth Wing you reread was Violet and Xaden circling each other while neither could say what they knew, this is that dynamic stretched across a much longer arc. It is also the biggest series here, which matters if you want somewhere to live for a while.
Quicksilver (Fae & Alchemy Book 1) — Callie Hart
The one to pick if the heat level was the draw. Saeris Fane steals to survive in a kingdom without water and ends up on the wrong side of a portal with a fae warrior who very much does not want her there. Hart came up writing dark contemporary romance and it shows in the register — the antagonism is sharper and the spice more explicit than Yarros writes it.
A Fate Inked in Blood — Danielle L. Jensen
Freya is a shield-maiden bound by a blood oath to a jarl with ambitions to unite Skaland. Jensen writes the most straightforwardly capable heroine of the four — Freya can actually fight, which is a different pleasure from watching Violet outthink everyone. Norse rather than dragon-riding, but the politics-and-romance balance is very close to what Fourth Wing does well.
The two everyone will also tell you to read
A Court of Thorns and Roses — Sarah J. Maas
The default recommendation, with one caveat: it starts slower than Fourth Wing, and the thing everyone is promising you arrives properly in book two. Feyre kills a wolf in the woods and is taken to the fae lands as payment. Stick with it — the series became the most-recommended romantasy of the last decade for good reason, but manage expectations for the first two hundred pages.
Powerless — Lauren Roberts
The easiest on-ramp here if Fourth Wing was your first fantasy. Paedyn is an Ordinary hiding among the Elite in a kingdom that executes people like her; Kai is the prince whose job is to find them. Younger in register than the others — less spice, more pace — and the competition structure will feel immediately familiar.
If it was the dragons specifically
Worth being honest: dragon-rider romantasy is a smaller category than the recommendations suggest, and a lot of "like Fourth Wing" lists quietly substitute fae for dragons and hope you will not mind. The closest thing to the rider bond, without dragons, is a kingdom-scale political romance where the stakes are military rather than magical.
The Bridge Kingdom — Danielle L. Jensen
Lara is trained from childhood as a weapon and married to the king of the kingdom she was raised to destroy. It is the sharpest enemies-to-lovers premise on this list — she genuinely intends to betray him, and Jensen does not rush the turn. If the Violet-and-Xaden dynamic was what kept you reading, this is the purest version of it.
If you simply want more Yarros, her complete reading order covers the Empyrean books plus the contemporary and military romance backlist she wrote for a decade before Fourth Wing — a very different register, and better than its obscurity suggests. Our romantasy explainer covers where the subgenre came from, and you can filter the full catalogue by romantasy plus your heat level to see everything at once.