What a session actually costs
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The minimum is printed on the plaque at the end of the table, and that plaque is the only reliable figure — it changes by table, by room, by day and by shift, so no website can tell you today's number. Expect roughly A$10 to A$25 on a main-floor table at a quiet time and more on a Saturday night. But the minimum is not what the evening costs. The cost is your total turnover multiplied by the house edge, and turnover is set by how many hands you play per hour, not by the size of each bet.
Every article about table minimums gives you a number and most of those numbers are invented. Minimums are set by the venue, adjusted by the duty manager, and changed during the evening as the room fills; the same blackjack table can be A$10 at four in the afternoon and A$50 at ten at night. Anyone publishing a definitive figure for a specific venue is either quoting something they saw once or making it up.
What can be stated precisely is the structure: how the plaque works, why the number moves, and — the part almost nobody writes about — how to convert a minimum into the cost of an evening. That conversion is the useful content, because it is the difference between "the table is A$20" and "this table will cost me around A$70 an hour", and only the second number is a decision you can make.
Not travelling to a venue?
Minimums, plaques and room hours are a venue problem. If you are weighing up an online option instead, the numbers that matter are different ones — the wagering multiple, the maximum bet while a bonus is live, and the withdrawal caps.
At the end of every live table in an Australian casino there is a small sign — the plaque — showing the minimum bet, the maximum bet, and usually the minimums for any side bets on the layout. That sign is authoritative for that table at that moment, and it is changed by staff during the shift. Nothing else is authoritative: not a venue's website, not a review page, and not this one.
Read three things on it before you sit down, in this order.
There is one genuine exception to "minimums are set by the venue", and it is the most interesting published fact about Australian table minimums. Crown Sydney operates under a New South Wales restricted gaming licence, and that licence prohibits a game where a single bet falls below the game's minimum bet limit — with the limit being the higher of a statutory amount or a figure the regulator sets. As at 30 November 2023, the statutory amounts under section 22A(6)(a)(i) of the Casino Control Act were A$30 for baccarat, A$20 for blackjack and A$25 for roulette. In other words, at one Australian casino the floor under the minimum is set by statute rather than by the duty manager — and that detail becomes very useful in section three.
Minimums are a supply tool, not a price list. A live table costs the venue the same to run whether one person or seven are playing it, so the minimum is the lever that matches seats to demand. When the room is empty the minimum drops to attract players; when every seat is taken the minimum rises, because the table earns more per hour from fewer, larger bets and the queue clears.
Weekday afternoons and early evenings. Lowest minimums, fewest tables open, most choice of seat, least choice of rule set.
Friday and Saturday nights. Most tables open and the widest variety of games, at the highest minimums of the week.
Public holidays, long weekends and major events in the precinct. Expect peak minimums and a wait for a seat.
Two practical consequences. If a low minimum is what you need, go on a weekday afternoon and accept that fewer tables will be open — our opening hours guide covers what runs when. And if you arrive at a peak time and the minimum is higher than you planned for, the correct response is to walk to the electronic terminals or leave, not to play at a stake you did not budget for. A table minimum you did not plan for is the most common way an Australian casino visit goes over budget.
This is the section that changes how the rest of the page reads. The amount a casino visit costs you, on average, is not your bet size and not your bankroll. It is:
Total turnover × the house edge on the game = expected cost. Turnover is every dollar you put on the table across the whole session, not the amount you brought. A A$20 bet played 70 times is A$1,400 of turnover, even though you may never have more than A$200 in front of you.
The reason this matters is that turnover compounds silently. Your chips go round and round: a win is restaked, a push is restaked, and your A$200 cycles through the table many times over an hour. The house edge takes its percentage of every cycle, not of your original A$200.
Australia has an unusually good published demonstration of this. When the Crown Sydney licence was approved, the minimum bet limits above were accompanied by an estimate of what they imply per hour. The figures were A$2,160 of hourly gaming turnover at the baccarat minimum, A$1,800 at blackjack and A$1,500 at roulette — and the accompanying note observed that the stated minimums apply to a single hand or spin, and that hands and spins occur at high frequencies. That is a government document stating, in effect, that a A$20 minimum is a A$1,800-an-hour activity.
Apply a house edge to those turnover figures and you have the real price. At roughly 2.7 per cent, single-zero roulette on A$1,500 of hourly turnover implies an expected cost in the order of A$40 an hour. On a double-zero wheel at about 5.26 per cent, the same turnover implies roughly A$79 — the same game, the same stake, nearly double the cost. Our game odds guide lists the edge by game and bet.
A live blackjack table resolves roughly sixty to a hundred hands an hour depending on how many players are seated, how fast the dealer is and how often the shoe is changed. A roulette wheel runs fewer spins; an electronic terminal runs far more. Multiply decisions by stake and you have turnover; apply the edge and you have the expected cost of the hour. The worksheet below does that arithmetic.
Interactive worksheet
Enter the plaque minimum, how many decisions an hour you expect, and the house edge for the game you are playing. The result is an average, not a prediction: any individual session can be much better or much worse.
This is an average over a very large number of hands, not a forecast for your evening. Variance means a two-hour session can lose several hundred dollars at these inputs, and the only number you control is the one you decide to bring. Use it alongside the full-visit worksheet in our budget guide.
Two things usually surprise people the first time they run those numbers. The first is how large turnover is relative to the money in their pocket. The second is how much the edge matters: changing the edge field from 2.7 to 5.26 — single-zero roulette to double-zero — nearly doubles the cost without changing a single other input. That is why our which venue runs which game page tells you to count the green pockets on the wheel before you bet.
It is also the clearest way to see what changes when the table is replaced by a screen. Online, nothing limits the number of decisions per hour except how fast you click, and the same arithmetic runs at several times the pace — which is the first thing worth understanding about it, before any bonus number. An operator's own terms page sets out the wagering multiple, the maximum bet allowed while a bonus is live and the withdrawal caps, which are the equivalent numbers to read.
Side bets are the reason a table costs more than the plaque suggests. A A$5 side bet next to a A$20 main bet is a 25 per cent increase in your stake per hand, and it is placed on a proposition with a house edge typically several times the main game's. Added to every hand, that single A$5 can cost more per hour than the A$20 does.
Run it through the worksheet above to see it. A$20 at 2.7 per cent over 70 hands is around A$38 an hour. A$5 at, say, 10 per cent over the same 70 hands is around A$35 an hour on its own — almost doubling the cost of the session for a quarter of the stake. The exact edge varies by side bet and by venue paytable, which is precisely the problem: it is not printed next to the minimum.
Every large Australian casino runs electronic table terminals — roulette, blackjack, sic bo and baccarat on a screen, sometimes linked to a live wheel or dealer. The minimum on a terminal is usually well below the live table's, which is exactly why people move to them when the floor minimum rises.
The arithmetic does not reward the move as much as it looks. A terminal resolves far more rounds per hour than a live table: no shoe change, no chip handling, no other players, no conversation. If a live table gives you 70 hands an hour and a terminal gives you 200, then A$5 on a terminal produces A$1,000 of hourly turnover against A$1,400 on a A$20 live table — a 29 per cent saving for a 75 per cent cut in stake. At 250 rounds an hour the terminal is more expensive outright.
The honest comparison is per hour, not per bet. Put both into the worksheet with realistic round counts before deciding that the lower minimum is the cheaper option. Where the terminal genuinely wins is when the alternative is a minimum you cannot afford at all — and in that situation the other real option is to stop for the night.
Weighing up the alternative?
No plaque, no closing time, and no limit on decisions per hour. If you are going to compare, read the terms page before the headline figure.
Work backwards from the hour rather than forwards from the table. Decide how long you intend to play, run the worksheet for a realistic minimum at the time you are going, and then bring enough to survive normal variance at that stake — while treating the whole amount as spent the moment you walk in.
Our casino budget guide has a worksheet covering the whole visit rather than just the table, and your first casino visit walks through what happens on arrival if you have not been before.
For most Australian casino visits the non-gambling spend is a large share of the evening, and leaving it out of the plan is why people feel they lost more than they did. These numbers are the ones you can actually research in advance, because unlike minimums they are published.
Add those first, then decide what is left for the table. Done in that order, the table minimum becomes a constraint you check against a figure you already have, which is the entire point of the exercise.
Quick answers
It is printed on the plaque at the table and changes by table, room, day and shift — commonly around A$10 to A$25 on a main-floor table at a quiet time, higher at peak. No website can give you today's figure, including this one; read the plaque.
Crown Melbourne's minimums are set by the venue and change through the week, so read the plaque. Crown Sydney is different: its NSW licence sets a statutory floor, and as at 30 November 2023 those amounts were A$30 for baccarat, A$20 for blackjack and A$25 for roulette, with the regulator able to set a higher figure.
Minimums are how a venue matches seats to demand. A live table costs the same to run whether it is full or empty, so the minimum falls to attract players when the room is quiet and rises when every seat is taken.
Only if the pace stays the same. Cost is turnover multiplied by the house edge, and turnover is stake times decisions per hour. A A$5 terminal running 250 rounds an hour can cost more per hour than a A$20 live table running 70.
Enough for the hours you intend to play at the minimum you expect to find, treated as fully spent on arrival, and separate from the money for dinner and transport. If any essential payment depends on it, the right amount is zero.
No — the minimum is set by the floor supervisor, not the dealer. You can ask whether a lower-minimum table is open elsewhere in the room, and staff will usually tell you plainly.
They raise your stake per hand by a large proportion and carry a house edge several times the main game's, so they raise the cost of an hour substantially. They are never compulsory, and the paytables differ between tables, so if you do take one, read the layout first.
Primary sources
Minimums are set by venues and change by shift; the only authoritative figure is the plaque on the day. The statutory minimum bet limits and the hourly turnover estimates quoted above come from New South Wales licensing documents for Crown Sydney and are stated as at 30 November 2023 — a later determination by the regulator can set higher amounts.
Continue the research
A worksheet for the whole visit: transport, food, accommodation and an affordable gambling cap.
Read guide →House edge by game and bet type — the number the worksheet above multiplies your turnover by.
Read guide →What is open when, and the thirty-second check that halves the cost of a roulette session.
Read guide →ID, entry, chips, joining a table and leaving safely, step by step.
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Walking into Crown or The Star gets you an Australian regulator, a complaints path and a cashier you can stand in front of. An offshore site gets you none of those. If you still want to compare, start with its terms page.
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