Pokies return to player by state: the minimum each machine must pay back

The eight minimums in one table

A pokie in Australia is certified against a national technical standard, and each state adds its own appendix of limits. The return-to-player floor is one line in that appendix. It is the lowest percentage of turnover the game may be set to pay back over its life.

Every figure above is a floor for the setting, checked against the clause listed under Sources. Nothing in these tables tells you what a particular machine on a particular floor is set to.

Why the floors differ

The states wrote their gaming laws at different times and kept their own settings. New South Wales and Queensland landed on 85%. South Australia chose 87.5% and caps each hotel or club at 40 machines. The ACT and Tasmania settled on 87%.

Victoria is the one that changed. Its pub and club floor was 87% until an amendment in 2014 moved it to 85%, measured across each venue over a calendar year. Crown Melbourne stayed at 87% under its own Casino Control Act.

Western Australia is the outlier

Poker machines are prohibited in WA. The Casino Control Act 1984 stops the regulator approving any game played on one, so pubs and clubs have none. Crown Perth runs electronic gaming machines without spinning reels, approved as games such as Video Bingo.

Those machines must be certified to return at least 90%, the highest floor in the country. Since 1 December 2025 you also need a Crown Rewards card with time and loss limits to play them. The Perth guide covers what that looks like on the floor.

Queensland is the only state with a ceiling

Clubs and hotels in Queensland must sit between 85% and 92% over a machine’s lifetime. A game certified to return more than 92% can’t go on a club floor there. Casinos keep the 85% floor without the upper limit.

What a minimum can and can’t tell you

A minimum is a promise about the configuration, measured over millions of games. It says nothing about the next hundred spins, which is where your evening actually happens. The RTP explainer walks through why the gap between the two is so wide.

It also isn’t an average for the venue. Many machines are set above the floor, and the setting is usually shown in the game’s information screens or on a player information terminal. Where a venue publishes it, that’s the number to read.

Bet limits sit next to RTP

The same appendix sets the most you can stake on one spin. It’s $5 in Victorian, Queensland, South Australian, Tasmanian and NT pubs and clubs, and $10 in NSW and the ACT. At $5 a spin and 85% return, the machine is built to keep 75 cents of each bet over time.

Ainsley Duff

Editor, Payback Notes · Published 29 September 2026 · Checked 29 September 2026

Ainsley Duff writes Payback Notes from Adelaide. She reads RTP where it is actually published — state technical standards, provider game sheets and help files, venue pages — and puts a date and a link beside every figure.

What I checked for this page (29 September 2026): read the Gaming Machine National Standard Rev 12.1 Appendix B (pp. 86–88), the state appendices for WA and NT, the ACT regulation, the Tasmanian standards of 6 July 2026 and the VGCCC compliance page; the SA figures come from the national standard because the SA legislation site returned an error. Not done yet: the current consolidated SA Gaming Machines Act, and whether The Star Sydney has its own casino limits — neither is in the national tables.

How figures get in: how we verify RTP · sources for this page · how we earn. A commission never changes the RTP figures we publish or the order they appear in.