The LoL CS per minute that actually matters for climbing isn’t 10 – it’s “more than the enemy in your role, at your rank.” A Gold ADC hitting 7 cs/min is right on the tier average. A Diamond mid laner at 7.2 is exactly average for Diamond, and the average Challenger mid only farms half a minion a minute more than that. The 10 cs/min myth is for the lanes where nothing happens; real solo-queue games have ganks, roams, fights, and the players who win them know when to leave wave on purpose. Below is the full breakdown: cs/min averages by rank and role from current tracker data, the three wave states that decide where your CS comes from, and the honest reason most low-elo players have low CSPM (it’s not mechanics).
The per-rank numbers come from two trackers we could read directly: Facecheck.gg’s champion income stats (ranked Solo/Duo, all regions) and amitilted’s CS per minute by rank, both last checked October 2026. op.gg’s champion statistics list CS per game rather than per minute, so we used it only as a sanity check. The wave mechanics come from the Riot Wiki Farming entry, and the climbing advice comes from the boost orders our team runs every week. Skip to the per-rank table if you’re just here to find out whether your CS/min number is good for your tier.
What CS per minute actually measures
CS is “creep score” – total minions plus neutral monsters last-hit during a game. CSPM is CS divided by game minutes. It’s a clean way to measure laning gold flow because minions arrive on a fixed cadence and the gold value of each wave is known.
Riot’s Patch 26.1 notes set the first cannon minion wave at wave 3 and cannon minion gold at 50 gold, plus 1 gold every 90 seconds. At 14:00, minion waves spawn every 25 seconds. At 30:00, they spawn every 20 seconds. The old fixed examples of 108 gold for a regular wave, 200 for a cannon wave, and 600 gold per minute are not permanent benchmarks.
The other thing CSPM measures, indirectly, is decision-making. A laner at 7 cs/min isn’t just mechanically last-hitting cleaner than a laner at 5 – they’re also making fewer trades that pull them off the wave, fewer fights they didn’t need to take, and fewer roams that lost more CS than they gained. CSPM is a proxy. The number itself is the result of the decisions behind it.
CS per minute targets by rank and role
The table below is the average CS per minute for each role at each rank. Every row except Emerald is Facecheck.gg’s patch 26.19 dataset (its newest, dated 7 October 2026), weighted by games across every champion played in that role, so popular champions count for more than rare ones. Tiers from Iron to Master each carry millions of player-games; Grandmaster and Challenger are smaller but still in the hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands. Facecheck has no Emerald filter, so the Emerald row is amitilted’s median instead. The full rank context for these tiers lives in the Iron-to-Challenger ladder breakdown if you want to map your CSPM number to where you sit on the ladder.
| Rank | Top | Jungle | Mid | ADC | Support | The skill jump from the rank below |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.5 | 5.7 | 1.6 | Missing minions under tower, dropping cannons, dying before back. |
| Bronze | 6.0 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 1.6 | Fewer dropped cannons, but still dies with a big wave walking in. |
| Silver | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 1.5 | Last-hits cleaner, still loses CS in trades and bad roams. |
| Gold | 6.6 | 6.4 | 6.5 | 7.0 | 1.4 | Hits most minions, beginning to leave wave for the right reasons. |
| Platinum | 6.8 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 7.2 | 1.3 | Consistent under tower, knows wave states, returns from roams. |
| Emerald (amitilted) | 7.1 | 6.8 | 7.1 | 7.4 | 1.1 | Matchup-aware, freezes vs shoves on purpose, fewer mistakes. |
| Diamond | 7.2 | 6.9 | 7.2 | 7.8 | 1.2 | Map-play-driven CS, slow-pushes timed to drake/Herald spawns. |
| Master | 7.3 | 7.1 | 7.4 | 7.9 | 1.1 | Mechanics, decisions, and wave control are reflexive. |
| Grandmaster | 7.5 | 7.3 | 7.6 | 8.1 | 1.1 | Side waves never die alone; every rotation picks one up on the way. |
| Challenger | 7.6 | 7.4 | 7.7 | 8.3 | 1.0 | Same habits as Grandmaster, fewer leaks. The gain is decimals. |
Three tells in this table. First, the gap is small. A Bronze ADC averages 6.1 cs/min and a Diamond ADC averages 7.8, so the whole “Bronze player to Diamond player” laning gap is under 2 cs/min. Iron to Challenger is 2.6. If you’ve read that Iron players farm 3-5 cs/min, that’s not what the trackers show: the average Iron laner sits at 5.5-5.7. Second, ADC pulls away from the other lanes from Gold up, and by Diamond it’s a full half-point ahead of mid and top. ADCs spend more of the game farming and less of it roaming, so judge yourself against your own role, not the ADC column. Third, support farm goes down as rank goes up: 1.6 in Iron, 1.0 in Challenger. Better supports take less farm on purpose, because every minion they last-hit is one their ADC didn’t. The role’s job is vision and roams, not gold flow.
Jungle CSPM is its own world. The numbers above are total CS, camps plus lane minions. On Facecheck’s split, a Platinum jungler’s 6.5 is about 5.5 from camps and 1 from lanes, and a Challenger jungler’s 7.4 is about 6.4 from camps. That extra camp CS comes from clearing the side camps on the way back from a gank or an objective, and never letting one sit up uncleared.
One honest caveat about low elo: games run longer. Working back from Facecheck’s damage totals, Iron through Gold games average about 31 minutes and Challenger games about 27 (that’s our arithmetic, not a published figure). Longer games spend more time in the 20-second wave cadence after 30:00, which flatters low-elo CS per minute a little. The real farming gap between Iron and Challenger is slightly bigger than the table makes it look.
Is your number good? Two trackers side by side
The two trackers measure different things. Facecheck reports a games-weighted average from one patch across all regions. amitilted reports the median player and the top-25% cut-off from about 65,000 player-games, mostly on North American servers, covering patches 25.24 to 26.20. Where they overlap they land within 0.3 cs/min of each other at every rank, so we use Facecheck for the main table because of its far bigger sample and single-patch window, and amitilted for the “is this good?” line below. The second number in each cell is the CS per minute that puts you in the top quarter of your rank and role.
| Rank (amitilted) | Top: typical / top 25% | Jungle: typical / top 25% | Mid: typical / top 25% | ADC: typical / top 25% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron | 5.7 / 6.7 | 5.7 / 6.6 | 5.4 / 6.4 | 5.5 / 6.4 |
| Bronze | 5.8 / 6.8 | 5.9 / 6.9 | 5.7 / 6.6 | 5.8 / 6.6 |
| Silver | 6.4 / 7.3 | 6.3 / 7.1 | 6.2 / 7.2 | 6.3 / 7.1 |
| Gold | 6.7 / 7.6 | 6.5 / 7.3 | 6.6 / 7.5 | 7.0 / 7.7 |
| Platinum | 6.9 / 7.8 | 6.7 / 7.6 | 7.0 / 7.9 | 7.3 / 8.0 |
| Emerald | 7.1 / 8.0 | 6.8 / 7.6 | 7.1 / 7.9 | 7.4 / 8.2 |
| Diamond | 7.1 / 8.1 | 6.8 / 7.7 | 7.0 / 7.9 | 7.5 / 8.3 |
| Master+ | 7.5 / 8.4 | 7.3 / 8.3 | 7.6 / 8.4 | 8.0 / 8.9 |
The practical read: if you’re consistently in the top-25% column for your rank, farming isn’t what’s holding you back, and the next division’s average is usually already within reach. If you’re under the typical number, CS is the cheapest LP you’ll find.
Why “10 cs/min” is a myth for solo queue
The 10 cs/min number gets quoted as the gold standard for laning, but it’s a theoretical ceiling, not a practical target. To hit 10 cs/min in a real game you’d need to last-hit every minion that walks into lane while never leaving for a roam, never dying to a gank, and never taking a teamfight. That’s not how solo queue works.
The r/summonerschool thread on cs at 10 minutes by rank has the same realization in 200 different replies: 100 CS at 10 minutes is great if it happens, but the Diamond player who finished the game with 200 CS at 30 minutes also took drake, killed two members in a fight, and pushed inhib. The number on the post-game screen is downstream of how you spent the minutes. The trackers agree. Challenger ADCs average 8.3 cs/min on Facecheck and 78 CS at 10 minutes, not 100, and only the top quarter of Master+ ADCs on amitilted clear 8.9. For the games you actually win, 8-9 cs/min is the real-world ceiling, and only ADCs at the very top live there.
The three wave states (and when to use each)
Last-hitting is the mechanical skill. Wave management is the decision skill. Every wave is in one of three states, and the difference between a Gold and a Diamond laner is mostly knowing which state to put the wave in next.
Pushing
You’re hitting minions as fast as possible and shoving the wave toward the enemy tower. Use it when you want to:
- Recall safely by pushing the wave under the enemy tower, then returning before it bounces back.
- Force a roam: push the wave, leave lane, and gank mid or set up a drake fight while the enemy laner is stuck clearing under their tower.
- Deny the enemy CS by shoving a wave under their tower at the right moment, which costs them minions even after you leave.
Freezing
Holding the wave just inside your side of the lane, last-hitting minions as they die, never letting the wave push toward enemy tower. Use it when you want to:
- Starve a stronger opponent, since a frozen wave forces them to walk into your side of the lane and your jungle to farm (prime gank setup).
- Set up a tower dive, because a frozen wave inside your half keeps your opponent overextended and visible.
- Run down the clock. If you’re winning the game, freezing top lane while your team plays mid/bot stalls the enemy split without ever fighting.
Slow-pushing
You’re hitting only the melee minions (or just the back minions) and letting your wave build up over time, so it crashes hard into the enemy tower a wave or two later. Use it when you want to:
- Set up an objective by timing the wave to crash 30-60 seconds before drake/Herald spawn, so you get there with prio and the wave already damaging tower.
- Recall with tempo: slow-push, recall, and return as the big wave crashes to bank gold and minimize CS loss.
- Bait a counter-gank, since a slow-pushing wave looks tempting; if the enemy jungler shows, yours can be waiting.
A Plat-to-Diamond laner is one who can swap states correctly in response to what their team needs. The hardstuck Plat is the one who always pushes regardless of jungle pathing, drake timer, or roam opportunity. (Most of the cs/min gap in the table above is wave-management discipline, not last-hit reps – the per-tier diagnostic in the hardstuck Silver, Gold, and Emerald breakdown goes through exactly this skill gap by rank.)
How to actually raise your CS per minute
The biggest predictor of climbing isn’t last-hit reps – it’s decision discipline around when to leave wave. That said, the mechanical floor still matters. Here’s the order we use to fix farming on accounts we climb:
- Run the Practice Tool last-hitting drill 10 minutes a day, targeting 100 CS by minute 10 with no items. Cycle through three champions you actually play so the muscle memory for under-tower last-hits locks in.
- Watch your own deaths. Every death costs you 12-25 seconds of farming and hands gold to the enemy. The single biggest CSPM improvement isn’t last-hitting better, it’s dying less by recalling at proper wave states.
- Roam on push, not on freeze. The Bronze-Silver mistake is leaving a freezing wave to roam: you lose CS, the wave crashes into your tower, and you lose more. Push first, then roam, or freeze and farm.
- Recall on slow-push, not on dying. Set up the slow-push, recall as the wave crashes, and return without missing minions. Reactive recalls on low HP cost ~30-40 CS over a typical game.
- Take side waves on the way to objectives. Mid laners and ADCs at high elo never leave a wave dying alone. If you’re rotating top for drake setup, hit the top wave on the way through.
If you’ve drilled the mechanical floor and the climb still isn’t moving, the bottleneck is usually upstream of CSPM – it’s the wave-state decisions and the recall timings that the metric reflects. Our team handles the climb for players who don’t want to spend three months grinding habits one at a time – League of Legends rank boost, same account, same MMR profile, top-tier players doing the games. Vision and CS sit alongside each other in the four-fundamentals stack; our vision score guide covers the other half of the laning-and-objectives loop.
CS per minute vs KDA, gold per minute, and damage
Lots of post-game numbers compete for attention. CSPM is the one most strongly predictive of climbing, but it’s worth knowing how the others compare.
| Metric | What it measures | Correlation with climbing | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS per minute | Gold from minions per minute | Strong | A proxy for wave management + survival, not the goal itself. |
| Gold per minute (GPM) | Total gold including kills, objectives, plates | Strong | Can hide low CS with kill streaks. |
| KDA | (Kills + Assists) / Deaths ratio | Moderate | Inflates with high-MMR teammates feeding you assists. |
| Damage per minute (DPM) | Total damage to champions over time | Weak | Some champions are just damage farmers (Karthus, Ziggs) – high DPM, often low win impact. |
| Vision score | Ward provided + ward denied (minutes) | Strong (support), moderate (others) | Easy to game by spamming wards in safe spots. |
If you only watched one of these post-game, watch CSPM – and watch it alongside your wins. A laner whose CSPM is up and whose win rate is flat usually has a decision problem somewhere else (objective rotations, fight timing, vision setup). A laner whose CSPM and win rate move up together is climbing on the right axis.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good CS per minute in LoL?
For an ADC: 7 cs/min is average in Gold, 7.8 in Diamond and about 8 in Master+, and the top quarter of each rank sits 0.7-0.9 higher (Facecheck and amitilted, last checked October 2026). Mid and top laners run about half a point below ADC from Gold upward, and junglers sit within about 0.3 of mid at every rank. If you beat your rank’s average in your role, farming isn’t your problem.
What is the average CS per minute by rank?
For ADCs on Facecheck’s patch 26.19 data: Iron 5.7, Bronze 6.1, Silver 6.5, Gold 7.0, Platinum 7.2, Diamond 7.8, Master 7.9, Grandmaster 8.1, Challenger 8.3. Mid and top are close to each other, from 5.5-5.7 in Iron to 7.6-7.7 in Challenger, and junglers run 5.7 to 7.4 including camps. Supports average 1.0-1.6 by role design, and the number drops as rank rises.
How do you increase your CS per minute?
Three changes do most of the work. Practice last-hitting under tower in Practice Tool 10 minutes a day. Stop dying to ganks and bad recalls – every death costs 12-25 seconds of farming. And learn the three wave states (push, freeze, slow-push) so you stop leaking CS by leaving wave at the wrong moments. Mechanical reps + decision discipline together raise CSPM faster than either alone.
What’s the maximum CS per minute possible?
The theoretical ceiling is roughly 10.5-11 cs/min for a lane with zero interruptions – every minion in your lane plus the side waves you pass through. In real solo-queue games the practical ceiling is about 8-9 cs/min: Challenger ADCs average 8.3 on Facecheck, and the top quarter of Master+ ADCs on amitilted clear 8.9. Games where you hit 10+ usually mean you ignored the map.
Is CS more important than KDA?
Yes for climbing. CS is gold, and gold compounds into items, towers, and tempo. KDA is a snapshot of one game that can hide whether you actually impacted the win. A 4/3/8 ADC with 8 cs/min scales into a problem the enemy team has to deal with. A 7/0/2 ADC with 5 cs/min got fed in the first 10 minutes and then disappeared.
Why is my CS per minute low even when I last-hit well?
You’re losing CS by leaving wave at the wrong times. The most common patterns: chasing kills into the enemy jungle, roaming when your wave is pushing into you, dying to ganks before recalling, or recalling reactively at low HP instead of setting up a slow-push first. Mechanical last-hitting is one piece – the other is staying in lane when the wave wants you there.
CS per minute is a useful diagnostic, but the climb runs on the decisions behind it. If you’ve drilled the mechanics and the LP isn’t moving, our team can handle the farming for you – same account, same MMR profile, top-tier players running the wave management and the recalls the way Diamond+ does. For the underlying minion gold values and wave composition, the Riot Wiki Farming entry is the canonical reference.
