Best paying pokies for Australians, sorted by RTP

Best paying pokies at SafeCasino, ranked by RTP

RTP (return to player) is the share of all bets a pokie pays back across its full maths. The table ranks 21 pokies we found in SafeCasino’s catalogue on 18 Sep 2026 (read from outside Australia) and could match to a provider RTP, highest first. “Lower versions” are the other RTP settings the provider offers casinos for the same game.

RTPs are the providers’ published figures (game page or the game’s own config), checked on 18 and 19 Sep 2026. Volatility in brackets is the 5-bolt meter in Pragmatic Play’s own paytables; Wolf Gold has no meter, so its “Medium” is the review-site rating. Wild West TRUEWAYS’ 96.7% includes its jackpots; without them the base game returns 96.23%. Sugar Rush 1000 carries two provider figures, so it’s ranked on the lower one. Where we couldn’t get a figure from the provider, as with 3 Oaks’ 3 Coins and Playson’s Solar Queen, we left the game out rather than quote a review site’s number.

Look at the top 13. They sit between 96.48% and 96.85%, a gap of 0.37 points, which is A$3.70 per A$1,000 bet on average. Among the big names, RTP barely separates one pokie from another, so volatility and max win decide more of your choice. The gaps that cost real money are elsewhere: the bottom of the table, and lower versions of the same game. The online pokies guide groups all of these by type if you’d rather choose by mechanic.

What “best paying” means in dollars

A pokie can’t pay one player more than another; it pays everyone the same maths. “Best paying” can only mean the highest RTP, and RTP turns into an average cost per dollar bet: 100% minus the RTP.

Those are long-run averages. Over one night of a few hundred spins, luck swings the result far more than 1.87 points of RTP ever could. The figure earns its keep over volume: bonus wagering, VIP points and months of play. That’s exactly where the welcome bonus puts you. At x40, a A$200 match needs A$8,000 in bets, and picking a 96.85% pokie over a 94.98% one is worth about A$150 on average across that turnover. The wagering requirements guide works through the rest of the maths.

VIP points follow the same arithmetic. One comp point takes A$18 of real-money pokie bets (bonus-money bets earn none), so on average it costs about 57 cents at 96.85% and about 90 cents at 94.98%.

“Loosest pokies” is pub slang for the same idea. Online you rarely have to guess, because most games show their RTP in the rules. No casino has a single payout rate either; the number belongs to each game and each version.

Same game, different RTP

Providers sell many hit pokies in several RTP settings, and each casino picks the one it runs. The game looks identical; only the maths changes.

Book of Dead shows how wide the range can run: its lowest setting costs about A$120 more per A$1,000 bet than its top one, on a game that looks exactly the same.

How to check the version you’re on

Open the game in real-money mode, go to the menu or the “i” button, and find the RTP line in the rules. Read it in real mode, because that’s the version your money is on. SafeCasino’s own game descriptions round RTPs with a tilde (~96.51% for Gates of Olympus Super Scatter, where Pragmatic’s figure is 96.50%), so trust the number in the game rules over any description, ours included.

Modes inside one game

Ante bets and bonus buys can run on their own RTP. Most differ by a few hundredths: Gates of Olympus Super Scatter’s ante mode returns 96.55%, and Sugar Rush 1000’s 500x buy 96.44%. BGaming’s Aloha King Elvis is the big exception. Its base game returns 94.98%, the bottom of our table, while its free spins buys return 97.13% (high symbols) and 98.69% (giant symbol). Wild West TRUEWAYS goes the other way: its Coin Respin buy without the jackpot drops to 92.66%.

The Aloha King Elvis free spins buy costs 48x the bet. With a bonus running, the A$8 limit applies to the buy price too, so the base bet has to be A$0.16 or less, and it’s worth checking the excluded-games list in the bonus terms first. The bonus buy guide covers buy prices for other titles.

Volatility: same return, different ride

Each pair returns almost the same share of bets, yet they play very differently. A bigger top prize has to be paid for somewhere, and it’s paid for with smaller or rarer wins the rest of the time. Pragmatic’s meter climbs from 4 bolts to 5 between the original Sweet Bonanza and the 1000, and the same happens with Big Bass Bonanza.

The original Big Bass Bonanza is the neat example. It returns 0.2 points more than the 1000 and swings less, but its ceiling is 2,100x instead of 20,000x. For bonus wagering or a small balance, the 4-bolt originals give your money a better chance of lasting through the turnover. For a shot at a big hit, the 1000 and Super Scatter versions are where the ceiling sits, with odds to match. The RTP and volatility guide explains how both kinds play out over a session, and every title here can be tried in free demo mode before you choose.

Titles missing from this list, and why

Some pokies that top other “best paying” lists aren’t in our table, for four different reasons.

• Book of Dead and Legacy of Dead. SafeCasino’s Australian page mentions both, and Play’n GO rates them 96.21% and 96.58% at their top settings. The catalogue we could read didn’t list any Play’n GO game, though, so search the lobby when you log in and read the RTP line if you find them. If they’re missing, Big Bass Bonanza plays on the same 5x3, 10-line layout at 96.71%. Our Book of Dead page has more alternatives.
• NetEnt classics. Other lists open with NetEnt games such as Mega Joker and Blood Suckers. No NetEnt titles showed in the catalogue we read, so they’re left off, and SafeCasino’s terms don’t let Australians win NetEnt jackpots in any case.
• Crash and instant games. Plinko (about 99%), Chicken Road (98%) and Space XY (97%) post higher numbers than any pokie in our table, but they aren’t pokies, bonus money can’t be used on them, and they don’t count toward wagering. The crash games guide covers them as a cash-balance option.
• Jackpot pokies. Part of their RTP feeds the prize pool, and jackpot games are excluded from bonus play. The jackpot pokies page covers them separately.

Can you tell when a pokie is going to pay?

No. Every spin is settled by a random number generator, independent of the spins before it. A pokie that hasn’t paid for an hour isn’t due, and one that just paid big isn’t cold. Time of day, bet patterns and how long you’ve been playing don’t change the next result.

What you can know before you spin is how the game is built, right down to the odds of its rarest outcome. Pragmatic Play’s own game configs state how often the top prize lands:

Take the common question of winning $10,000. At A$1 a spin that’s a 10,000x win, beyond the cap of Gates of Olympus and Sugar Rush (5,000x each) and Big Bass Bonanza (2,100x) altogether. At A$5 a spin it’s 2,000x, inside the cap of every pokie in the table, though still far out in the tail of the maths.

The levers you do control are the version you play, the size of your bet and the point where you stop. The pokies tips page covers setting a budget around them. When you’ve picked a title, open the SafeCasino lobby and check the RTP line in its rules before the first spin.