The bounty system of League of Legends has largely remained a mystery for many players, particularly with it seeing ongoing changes, though knowing how it works can help players get a competitive advantage.
League of Legends has seen many changes in 2025, from putting a hard cap on how many free skins players can get in a year to reducing overall Blue Essence acquisition methods. Thanks to all the changes, newcomers and League veterans alike can find themselves confused about the game’s mechanics.
Bounties, for example, are essential for players to understand. They enable the losing team make a potential comeback by getting more gold-earning opportunities. They also force the winning team to play more safely to protect the opposing team from earning more gold. However, League of Legends has a confusing bounty system, and it may sometimes seem like undeserving champions bear the brunt of the bounties. Here’s how champion and objective bounties work in 2025.
Champion bounties work in League of Legends as of 2025 by considering every player’s stats, including kills, deaths, and earned gold.
While some players assume a positive K/D/A means the player is guaranteed a bounty, that isn’t necessarily the case. Every champion in the game starts with a base bounty of 300 gold, which increases or decreases depending on the player’s performance. Reaching a bounty of 400 gold puts that champion in a shutdown state, showcasing their additional bounty on the scoreboard to both teams.
The goal is to ensure that players consistently performing well are treated as a bounty objective for the enemy team. Players build towards a bounty by generating gold through killing minions or monsters, and even through the use of support items. Their bounty also increases if they get kills and assists while shutting down an enemy champion.
A player with a bounty of over 1,000 gold gets placed in an extended bounty state. Getting shut down in this state doesn’t reward the killer with the entire bounty, but only with 1,000 gold. The player’s remaining bounty is then applied when they spawn, allowing for further gold to be claimed from them. In this way, a particularly rich player can be farmed for multiple bounties successively in the same game.
Objective bounties in League of Legends are given to players who trail behind after the game time reaches 14:00.
The game determines which team is behind through a combination of gold, experience, and the number of epic monsters slain. The number of turrets is also considered, and bounties are placed exactly one minute after the losing team drops below the threshold.
After a bounty has been given to a team, that team temporarily gets increased gold for claiming objectives. These objectives include slaying epic monsters and destroying turrets. The bounty goes away if the team gains a lead against the enemy before the bounty timer ends. The exact time depends on how well the other League of Legends team is performing in the game.
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