What's the fastest way to level up in GTA online?

What's the fastest way to level up in GTA online? I want't to level as fast as possible to beat my friends. But what is the fastest way to level up?


The best way to level up is easily to perform jobs. Rockstar patched the ability to replay missions, so I would recommend doing either races or survival.

Try out this quick race for farming levels:

Settings

  • Type: Race
  • Laps: 1
  • Map: Criminal Records
  • Vehicle: motorcycles

Time to complete this takes about 30 seconds and you will get about 800 XP.

Each wave of Survival you will earn about 1000 RP per wave when you play alone.


Something I like to do to rank up fast is to have sex with hookers.

You get 1000 RP on each encounter.


If you go into a Last Team Standing mission with some friends and while on the team select screen, have everybody join one team. The mission starts and ends within seconds saying that you all won. You can get a couple thousand dollars and about 900-1000 RP for it. Including loading times, you should get 900-1000 RP every 60 seconds or so.

This is a much faster way of leveling than the previous method I used which was to repeat the Criminal Records race over and over.

(By the way, the Last Team Standing mission that I discovered this on was Cypress Flats. Don't know if it works with every LTS but I would assume that it does.)


With Friends

If you're playing with a friend, it's relatively easy to 'boost' if you're both game for it. This thread goes over a method, using the Criminal Records race.

Some key points to note:

  • They suggest running enough laps that you hit the cap of 5,000 RP. This cuts down on the downtime while you reload/restart the race.
  • Most of the RP comes from the special awards you get for things like beating your lap time, staying in first place the entire lap, etc.

Of course, you can do a variety of things with friends, like running missions or farming in private deathmatch lobbies, etc. This method is probably the fastest but maybe more grinding than you really want to do.

Without Friends

If you're not with friends, you can either play solo or try to join up with random folks. You will almost always get better rewards for playing with other people, except in the case where the lobby is large and you're not in the top third or so of players. You also won't make money going solo in some job types like racing and parachuting.

Without Friends: Solo

If you're going to go the solo route, running the Criminal Records race repeatedly is probably your best bet. It has the best RP-to-time ratio I've found of events to date.

Without Friends: With Random People

However, I'd suggest playing with random strangers if you're up for it. As most of your wasted time is in joining lobbies and waiting for people to join and/or the rounds to start, I suggest using a Quick Job. The best random job type I've found is pick Random Parachuting.

Parachuting trumps racing since all the parachuting events are 2 minutes long or less. Plus, many parachuting events only have 4 slots, which mean you've got a good chance of finishing in the top three and getting the best rewards.

Picking a race at random might end you up in some long race that has a poor RP-to-time ratio. You will make roughly 70-80% of the RP from the fastest parachuting mission than you would in Criminal Records racing, but the RP bump from playing with others (not to mention the money) tends to beat the loss here.

I don't suggest running missions - the RP-to-time ratio is pretty poor. If you want to do missions, at least avoid ones where you have to track and recover a moving vehicle - these tend to take a long time for very little gain. Almost all of Simeon's missions are this way.

Similarly, unless you are blazing fast with clearing Survival, your RP-to-time ratio is going to be pretty bad. It takes a few minutes per round, and it takes longer at the higher rounds unless you're playing with a coordinated team.

Of course, you can feel free to do what you want, this is a game and it is about having fun. Also, your personal abilities will play a role. However, this has been what's worked best for me.

RP-Related Notes

  • The amount of RP you earn scales with your level, so if you aren't earning as much as someone else, chances are good that you're lower level than they are.
  • Playlists! Make a playlist and you'll earn a bonus 100 RP per event in the playlist when you complete it. You can make them from the pause menu. Making a playlist also bypasses the between-round voting screen, which makes it even faster to farm RP.
  • A lot of random stuff also earns you RP, for instance, losing cop stars is worth some RP. As you wander about, you're likely to get some just for playing.