Growing a criminal empire in the expensive city of Los Santos isn’t an easy task, so finding out how to make money in GTA 5 and how to make money in GTA Online is a crucial first step to getting some disposable income. And we see you eyeing those luxury cars, so you’ll need that extra cash.
Before we get into our best money-making tips for GTA 5 and GTA Online, we recommend finding out how to transfer saves in GTA 5 if you’re moving from a last-gen console to a current-generation console. However, if you’re hoping to pick up some of the fastest cars in GTA 5 and GTA Online, here’s how you can get the cash rolling in in one of the best open world games ever.
How to make money in GTA Online
Here are the best ways to make money in GTA Online:
- Play game modes that offer extra money
- Spin the Casino wheel
- Finish your daily objectives
- Complete Heists
- Stick with one career (for now)
- Special and vehicle cargo
- Spend your real money
Featured game modes
Every week, Rockstar will offer some great rewards with double or triple GTA$ by playing some of the standard game modes. You can find out which of the modes is featured currently by checking out the Rockstar Social Club events, which will give you a rundown of the latest featured mode.
Spin the casino wheel
Each day in GTA Online, you can spin the casino wheel in the Diamond Casino & Resort location, allowing you to (if you’re lucky) get some free cash, or other rewards such as RP, casino chips, clothing, discounts on vehicles, or the big prize, the podium vehicle itself.
Just like in real life though, the house always wins, so spin once and leave it at that. If you collect casino chips from the wheel, trade them in for some GTA$. If you do this every day, you’ll be up in money or items fast, but if you keep gambling using your GTA$, you run a very high risk of being worse off.
Finish your daily objectives
For those of you who play live-service games, like Fortnite or Apex Legends, you’ll know daily objectives like the back of your hand. Every 24 hours, new daily objectives are available which task you with completing pretty easy goals for some quick cash.
While the rewards each day aren’t the best, completing every daily objective for a week will get you some additional bonuses, which are very much worth getting. There’s also an even better bonus reward for completing a every daily challenge in a month, so if you’re super committed and organized try logging in and completing a quick challenge every day.
Complete Heists
The bread and butter of GTA 5, and the online mode GTA Online, are the Heists. These elaborate, multi-objective missions are the biggest payday in GTA Online, but they do require you to invest some money into them first to get them set up.
You’ll definitely need to bring some friends along for the ride, as communication and working together is key to scoring the jackpot in the final mission. If you’ve ever played an MMO, think of these as raids – difficult challenges that can earn you some incredible rewards, if you know what you’re doing. There are currently 11 Heists in GTA Online, those being:
- The Fleeca Job
- The Prison Break
- The Humane Labs Raid
- Series A Funding
- The Pacific Standard Job
- The Doomsday Heist Act 1: The Data Breaches
- The Doomsday Heist Act 2: The Bogdan Problem
- The Doomsday Heist Act 3: The Doomsday Scenario
- The Diamond Casino Heist
- Cayo Perico Heist
- The Cluckin’ Bell Farm Raid
The amount you can earn from Heists will vary, depending on how many players you have (each taking a cut), whether you’ve played before, and in the case of the latter heists, you’ll lose money if you take damage. However, for those daring enough, you can complete a range of one-time challenges to earn extra GTA$, such as completing a heist for the first time, or completing all heists with the same team, while losing no lives, on hard difficulty.
Stick with one career (for now)
Gigantic paydays are always great fun, but earning passive income is the main goal in GTA Online. Money can disappear from your bank account as fast as it enters it if you aren’t careful, so investing in a business will reward you in the long run. Hey, it’s just like real life!
There’s no harm in purchasing the various business properties required to run multiple styles of operations, but we seriously recommend starting with one, namely becoming the CEO of an Organization. The reason we suggest this is that you can do import/export work, where selling vehicles and other cargo offers some seriously lucrative money, and you can always use your passive income to open other businesses down the road.
Obviously, your time is only worth how much fun you’re having, and the other businesses (such as becoming a Nightclub owner or becoming the founder of a Motorcycle Club) still offer money for your time working on it. But overall, the endgame is to be able to live a high life with some great income, and we suggest becoming a CEO as the best way to reach that goal.
Special and Vehicle cargo
If you’ve listened to our advice so far, and you should be, you’re now in a spot where you’ve started up your own Organization. That means the next step is, you guessed it, making more money. The best way to do this as a CEO is by further investing in warehouses for vehicles, completing Special Vehicle missions and sourcing standard and mid-range vehicles, and then selling them off when your warehouse is full.
Do this, and you’ll be earning a great amount of money per hour that makes the heist payouts look like pocket change.
Spend your real money
Failing all else, and if you don’t have the free time to spend hours perfecting your startups, grinding daily challenges, and working on your Heists, you can always spend your own hard-earned money. There are various GTA 5 Shark Cards, which have increasing amounts from a measly 200,000 GTA$ all the way up to the extremely expensive 8,000,000 GTA$.
We don’t recommend going for this option immediately, even if it does seem pretty tempting to take the shortcut. However, if you really really need that new virtual car to show off in the lobby, then that’s the fastest way to do so.
Now that you have some extra money, and hopefully, a fast car collection, check out the fastest bikes in GTA Online so you have some two-wheelers in your garages. But what about if you want to rack up some cash playing the single-player story of GTA 5?
How to make money in GTA 5
The best ways to make money in GTA 5 are by progressing through the story mode, committing robberies, and completing assassinations. However, you’ll naturally gain plenty of money over time as you complete heists in the campaign.
All the main missions in GTA 5 will pay out some kind of reward, and it’s usually in cash. However, it’s the heist missions in the latter half of the game that will bring in the big bucks. By the end of the campaign, you should have more than enough cash to buy some of the most expensive cars and weapons without having to grind any alternative methods.
However, if you want to make more money earlier in the gam, you can also make some quick cash by completing other criminal activities, like robbing a store or an armored truck, or by taking on assassinations.
Honestly, I stormed through the story mode when I first played the game and had no concerns about a lack of money, so I doubt you’ll be scraping by for cash, especially if you end up sinking your time in GTA Online.
That’s how to make money in GTA Online and how to make money in GTA 5. There are some great GTA 5 cheat codes you can use in the story mode if you want to have some old-fashioned sandbox fun, but unfortunately, they don’t offer any cash themselves.
