The useful question about price is income per hour, and almost nobody states it.

Short answer

The reliable earners are boring and repeatable. The exciting ones have worse hourly rates once you count setup.

  • Do the daily and weekly resets first — they are the best rate available.
  • Calculate per hour, including setup and travel.
  • Give a method one honest attempt before deciding it does not work.

Siege rewards knowing the building more than knowing the gun, which is why map knowledge outranks aim here. Payout figures quoted without a time attached are marketing rather than information. The cap on a given activity matters more than its headline number.

Methods that were nerfed

It helps to understand why a step exists, because then you can adapt it when your situation is slightly different. Group multipliers change the ranking of methods completely, which is why lists disagree. Event weeks distort every comparison, and normal weeks are what you should plan around. What follows assumes you are on a current install and have not modified it.

Setup cost only matters relative to how long you intend to keep playing. A method that was patched still shows up in search results for years afterwards. A single check up front replaces a lot of guessing later.

The loop worth repeating

Idle income sounds appealing and is almost always the worst rate available. The community wisdom on this is roughly half right, and the half that is wrong costs the most time. The short version is near the top on purpose; the reasoning is there if you want to know why.

  • Finish the setup before starting the loop.
  • Ignore anything that requires an external site or seller.
  • Write down what you changed, so you can undo exactly one thing if it goes sideways.
  • Check the patch date on any figures you are comparing.
  • Group up where the multiplier is meaningful.
  • Check the version you are actually running before assuming anything is broken.

Solo versus group

If you are coming to this after a long break, the terminology has probably moved on. None of this needs a paid tool, a third-party launcher or an account on a site you have never heard of. The developers have changed their mind about this at least once, which explains the older advice. Most of the disagreement you will find online is two people describing different builds.

Everything below is framed around the current state of Rainbow Six Siege rather than a launch-week impression. Rainbow Six Siege is not shy about hiding useful information two menus deep, so some of this is simply knowing where to look. Nothing here assumes a particular playstyle beyond wanting the thing to work.

What it earns per hour

Half the pages on this topic were written for a build that no longer exists, which is why they stop matching what you see. Where something depends on your platform or region, that is called out rather than glossed over. There is usually a fast way and a reliable way, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing.

Do the cheap check before the expensive one — that ordering alone saves most of the frustration. Where two approaches both work, the one with fewer moving parts is the one to keep. There is no hidden trick here that the game is keeping from you.

Setup cost and payback time

The awkward part is rarely the step itself, it is knowing which step comes first. Screenshots age faster than text, which is why this describes rather than shows. If a step reads as obvious, do it anyway — the obvious ones are the ones people skip and then wonder about.

Where people go wrong

  • Copying a setup wholesale from a streamer without understanding what each part does.
  • Treating a rare edge case as the normal behaviour and planning around it.
  • Grinding a method that was patched months ago because a thread still ranks well.

Siege FAQ

How long does this take?

Minutes if it goes cleanly, an evening if you hit the edge case in the caveats list. Neither is unusual.

Was this method nerfed?

Several popular ones were. Check the date on whatever you are reading before committing an evening to it.

Is the investment worth it?

If you will play more than a few dozen hours, comfortably. If not, skip it and do the free activities.

Why do other guides describe this differently?

Most were written for an earlier version and never revisited. Compare the steps against what your build actually shows.

Come back to the caveats list if it does not work first time — the answer is almost always in there.