Teamfight Tactics Economy Guide: Gold Management and Interest Thresholds

Gold runs almost everything in Teamfight Tactics. You spend it to level up, to roll the shop for units, and you hold onto it because the bank itself pays you back each round. The players who climb aren't the ones who roll the moment they hit double digits. They're the ones who treat their economy like it matters and spend with a plan.

Most of the math here is fixed. Interest pays the same way every single game. Streak gold has set breakpoints. Leveling has a known price tag. Once those numbers live in your head, the tough calls get a lot easier to make on the fly.

How Interest Breakpoints Work at 10, 20, 30, and 50 Gold

Every planning phase, the game looks at the gold you're holding and hands you 1 extra gold for every 10 you have banked. There's a hard cap of 5 gold per round, which you hit at 50. The breakpoints look like this:

| Gold Held | Interest Paid | |---|---| | 0 to 9 | 0 | | 10 to 19 | 1 | | 20 to 29 | 2 | | 30 to 39 | 3 | | 40 to 49 | 4 | | 50 and up | 5 (cap) |

The interest gets worked out before your passive income ticks in, so the number that matters is what you're holding as the round ends. You get 5 gold of base income most rounds (it ramps up from 2 in the very early game), plus interest, plus any streak gold. Stacking all three is how a good bank snowballs.

Why 50 is the line that matters

Past 50 gold, extra money in the bank does nothing for your interest. You still only get 5. So gold sitting between 51 and 59 is, for interest purposes, dead weight. That's why experienced players talk about "sitting on 50." Once you're there, every gold above 50 is basically free to spend.

This is the loop that runs the whole game. Hold 50, earn 5 interest, then spend the overflow on leveling or rolling. Next round you're back near 50 because of the income you just banked, and you do it again. The player who runs that loop clean will out-earn someone rolling blindly almost every time.

The cost of dipping below a breakpoint

Say you're at 52 gold and you buy experience for 4 gold. You drop to 48. That pushes you out of the 50 bracket and into the 40 bracket, so your interest falls from 5 to 4. That single purchase just cost you a gold of future income, on top of the 4 you spent.

Now say you're at 54 and buy the same 4 gold of XP. You land at 50, stay in the top bracket, and lose nothing. Same purchase, totally different outcome, all because of where you started. That's breakpoint logic in one example. When you can, time your spending so you land on or just above a breakpoint (10, 20, 30, 40, or 50) rather than just under one.

Getting to 50 fast

Early on, your job is to climb to 50 as quick as you reasonably can without gutting your board. Win streaks and loss streaks both help here, and they're covered in detail below. If you can hit 50 by the end of stage 3, you're in a healthy spot, because from there your income compounds hard. Each round at 50 hands you 5 interest plus your 5 base, so you're generating around 10 gold a round before streaks even factor in.

Fast Nine vs Slow Roll Economy Strategies

There are two main ways to spend a healthy bank. You either push levels hard to reach the expensive units, or you park at a level and reroll for cheap units until they hit three-star. Both are built on the same idea: keep 50 gold and spend the overflow. They just spend it on different things.

Fast nine: level first, figure the rest out later

The goal here is to rush level 9 so you can fish for five-cost units and cap out your board. Five-cost shop odds are tiny at level 8 (around 3%) and jump to about 12% at level 9, so you genuinely need to be there to find them. You save aggressively, push levels on a schedule, and only roll enough to keep yourself from dying on the way up.

A common fast-nine curve has you at level 8 around stage 4-1 or 4-2, then level 9 around 5-2. If you're win streaking hard with an economy augment, you can sometimes push 9 as early as 4-5. The whole plan leans on having a strong early board to streak with and enough health that you can afford to greed a little for levels.

The risk is real. If you greed levels and skip the stabilizing rolls, you can lose from nearly full health before the comp comes together. Fast nine is a high-ceiling play, and it punishes you hard when the board never lands.

Slow roll: park and fish

Slow roll is the opposite shape. You pick a cheap carry (usually a one, two, or three-cost), level to the spot where that unit shows up most, and stay put. You hold 50 gold and roll the overflow every turn until your carry hits three-star. Only then do you push higher.

It works because of the shop odds. Each level has fixed odds for each cost tier, so the level you roll at decides what you're likely to see. For two-costs, level 6 gives the best odds (about 40%). For three-costs, it's level 7 (also around 40%). One-cost rerollers tend to roll at level 4, where one-costs still show up 55% of the time. Rolling at the right level means each gold of reroll goes further.

The catch is the shared champion pool. Every copy of a unit that other players buy is one fewer for you. To three-star a unit you need nine copies, and the pool only holds so many. One-costs have 30 copies in the pool, two-costs have 25, three-costs have 18, four-costs have 10, and five-costs have just 9. If two other people are chasing your same carry, you're all fighting over a shallow pool and someone ends up stuck.

Picking between them

Go fast nine when your early board is strong enough to streak, your health is comfortable, and the comp you want lives at level 8 or 9. Go slow roll when you've found an early copy or two of a cheap carry, the lobby isn't swarming rerollers after the same units, and you can survive the early game without panic rolling. Forcing slow roll into a contested pool is one of the fastest ways to bleed out, because the math of a 18-copy pool does not bend for your feelings.

Win Streaking and Loss Streaking for Bonus Gold

On top of interest, the game pays you for stringing wins or losses together. The streak gold table is the same whether you're winning or losing:

| Wins or Losses in a Row | Bonus Gold | |---|---| | 0 to 2 | 0 | | 3 to 4 | 1 | | 5 | 2 | | 6 and up | 3 |

There's also a flat 1 gold for winning any PvP round. That win bonus only shows up on wins, which is one reason win streaking earns a little more total gold than loss streaking at the same length.

What a long streak is actually worth

Stack it all up and the income gets silly. Picture a player on a six-game win streak sitting on 50 gold. Each round they pull 5 base income, 5 interest, 3 streak gold, and 1 for the win. That's 14 gold a round. Over a few rounds that gap turns into extra levels, extra three-stars, and a board the rest of the lobby can't keep up with. Streaks are the single biggest swing in your income, bigger than interest on its own.

Win streaking: the spot you want to be in

A clean win streak gives you the two things you want most, high health and a fat bank. The cost is that you have to keep spending to stay ahead. A typical win-streak leveling curve pushes level 4 on 2-1, level 5 on 2-5, level 6 on 3-1, level 7 on 3-5, level 8 on 4-2, and level 9 on 5-2. You level on pace because falling behind means losing the streak, and losing the streak kills the gold engine.

Spending to preserve a streak only makes sense if it actually keeps you winning. If the lobby is full of rerollers spiking on 3-5 and 4-1, you might throw gold at the board and still lose. Reading who's in your pool matters a lot. Sometimes the right move is to bank the interest and let the streak break rather than dump gold into a fight you were going to lose anyway.

Loss streaking: trading health for gold

Loss streaking is the deliberate version. You run a weak early board on purpose, tank your health, and cash in on streak gold plus max interest. The pay-out is great. The problem is the health bill. By stage 4 you're often sitting around 30 to 40 HP, which means every lost fight costs a life. A loss-streak curve tends to push level 8 a round earlier (around 4-1) so you can roll and stabilize before the bleeding turns fatal.

The extreme version is "open fort," where you sell basically everything, field nothing, and max out your econ. It's high variance. When it works you come out of stage 3 with a giant bank and a path to fast nine. When it doesn't, you stabilize late and scrape a bottom-four finish.

Don't die on a streak

The classic blunder is holding a loss streak into stage 4 because the gold looks nice, then dying before you can spend it. Streak gold isn't worth your last 20 health. If your board is genuinely broken, break the streak, roll until your board can hold a fight, and stop worrying about the lost income. A few rounds of survival beats a clean loss streak that kills you before you ever spend the gold.

Calculating When to Level Versus Roll for Units

Every couple of rounds you hit the same fork. Do you spend your gold on experience to push a level, or roll the shop looking for units? The call depends on what your board actually needs and how much health you can afford to lose. The shop odds, which shift with your level, settle most of the rest.

The price of each level

Buying experience costs 4 gold for 4 XP, and you also get 2 free XP at the end of every round. The XP needed to climb one level climbs fast:

| Reach Level | XP Needed | Gold if You Buy It All | |---|---|---| | 3 | 2 | 2 | | 4 | 6 | 6 | | 5 | 10 | 10 | | 6 | 20 | 20 | | 7 | 36 | 36 | | 8 | 60 | 60 | | 9 | 68 | 68 |

The gold column assumes you buy every point of XP, which you almost never do. The free 2 XP per round chips away at the real cost, so in practice you spend less than the table shows. Still, it's a useful gut check. Going from 7 to 8 is a much bigger investment than 5 to 6, and that gap shapes when you make the jump.

Roll odds shift with your level

This is the part that ties leveling to rolling. The shop's cost odds change by level, so the level you roll at decides what you're likely to see.

| Level | 1-cost | 2-cost | 3-cost | 4-cost | 5-cost | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | 6 | 30% | 40% | 25% | 5% | 0% | | 7 | 19% | 30% | 40% | 10% | 1% | | 8 | 17% | 24% | 32% | 24% | 3% | | 9 | 15% | 18% | 25% | 30% | 12% |

Look at the jump in five-cost odds from 8 to 9. It goes from 3% to 12%, roughly four times as likely. If your comp needs five-costs, rolling for them at 8 is mostly a waste. You want to be 9 first. Four-costs flip that around. Level 8 at 24% four-cost odds is the sweet spot, which is why "fast 8" comps roll at 8 for their four-cost carry. For reroll comps, you roll at the level where your target cost peaks, level 6 for two-costs and level 7 for three-costs.

A simple decision check

• Level when you need the unit slot to flip on a key trait, when you're chasing higher-cost units that only show up at higher levels, or when you've got gold piling up above 50 with nothing worth rolling for.
• Roll when your bench is stuffed with pairs and a single copy would upgrade several units at once, when you're losing HP and need to stabilize right now, or when you're already at the level that matches your target cost.
• Do both on your spike turn. A fast-8 player levels to 8 and rolls on the same turn, often 4-2, spending down to stabilize and find their carry in one push.

The golden rule: protect your breakpoints

Whatever you pick, don't dip below 50 gold on a whim. Each gold you spend below 50 is a gold of interest you won't get back. Spend above 50 freely, because it's not earning anything extra anyway. Spend below it only when you're stabilizing, hitting a planned spike, or about to die. The players who hold that line end games with more three-stars and higher levels than the ones who treat their bank like pocket change.

Recovering Your Economy After a Bad Board State

Not every game goes clean. Sometimes you get forced to roll early, your pairs never connect, and you wind up broke and bleeding by stage 3. Recovery is a skill of its own, and it usually means giving up on the pretty version of your game plan.

Stabilize before you economize

If you're sitting at 30 HP in stage 3, your economy is the second problem. Staying alive is the first. Roll to put a real board on the field even if it wrecks your interest. Dead players don't spend gold. The goal in a spot like this is to "play for HP," meaning you've given up on fast nine and you're just trying to scrape a top-four or top-six finish.

Climb back to 50 if your health allows

Once the bleeding stops and your board can actually win a fight, start rebuilding the bank. The fastest way is selling what you don't need. Bench units you're not playing are locked gold. One-star and one-cost champions sell back for full value, so dumping a pile of unused one-costs is free money. Upgraded or higher-cost champs take a small 1-gold penalty on sell-back, so think a second before cashing those in. Selling the pairs you were half-heartedly holding is often the difference between crawling back to 50 and staying broke.

Drop to a cheaper cap

When the economy is genuinely wrecked, the five-cost dream is probably over. Pivot to something cheap. Vertical trait boards, where you stack one trait deep, tend to be cheap and let you compete on HP and levels even from behind. A three-cost reroll or a four-cost board costs a fraction of a level-nine five-cost comp, and it can still snag a top four. The flexible player who swaps to a cheap, working board beats the stubborn one who dies holding out for a five-cost that never shows up.

Don't panic-roll

The worst move in a bad spot is dumping 40 gold into the shop in a panic at the wrong level. Usually you come out broke and still losing. Roll with a plan. Pick the level that matches what you need, try to stay on or above a breakpoint while you do it, and stop the moment your board can hold a fight. If you're too low on health to rebuild, pick one spike turn (often 4-1 at level 8) and commit everything there instead of bleeding gold slowly over three rounds.

A recovery example

Picture this: you got forced to roll at 3-2 to not die, and now you're at 28 gold with a shaky board. Rolling all the way down at level 6 leaves you broke with maybe one upgrade to show for it. Instead, roll to about 10 or 20 to find a two-star frontline and a real item holder, stabilize that turn, then let the interest rebuild toward 50 through stage 4. If your health is too low for that slow climb, full-send at 8 on 4-1 and hope the rolldown hits. The recovery play is always conditional on health, so read it before you spend.

Use one checkpoint to judge your own games. If you can sit on 50 gold by the end of stage 3 while holding a win or loss streak, you're running one of the better economies in the lobby, and that's usually enough to play for a top four no matter what comps are flying around.