Ten years of GTA Online heists, listed in launch order with what each one introduced, who you crew with, and which still hold up. The complete reference.
GTA Online's first solo-able heist is also still one of its most reliable money makers. Here's how to set it up, what to scope, where to break in, and which target to chase.
The Cayo Perico Heist is GTA Online's only solo-runnable major heist and the highest payout-per-time activity. Here's the complete solo-runner guide.
PS5 & Xbox Series X|S launch — PC delayed beyond. Stay current with our daily intel.
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From Cayo Perico's $1.5M/hr ceiling down to Counterfeit Cash's $100K/hr grind, here's every major GTA Online business path ranked by what it actually pays per hour in 2026. Plus the weekly-event caveat that flips half the list.
For ten years, GTA Online has built itself around one ritual: gather a crew, run setups, hit the finale, split the take. The heists started as a single 2015 update and turned into the spine of the game, dragging entire businesses, properties, and recurring NPCs along with them. This is the full list in launch order, from the original Lester contracts through the modern, near-solo storylines that have replaced the old four-player formula.
Released March 10, 2015 as the opening job of the Heists Update (Rockstar Newswire). The Fleeca Job is the tutorial: a two-player smash-and-grab on a Fleeca branch using a drilling truck to crack a single safety deposit box. Lester pulls you in over the phone, and you host the planning sessions out of a high-end apartment with a heist board. It pays less than anything that follows, but it sets the entire template: a host who fronts the buy-in, prep missions you have to run in order, and a finale with cuts you negotiate at the planning screen. Every heist on this list inherits that loop.
Same launch day, March 10, 2015. The Prison Break is a four-player job that pulls Maxim Rashkovsky out of Bolingbroke Penitentiary, with one player going in undercover as a prisoner, one playing a corrupt guard, one running air support in a Buzzard, and one driving demolition. It's the first heist that asks every crew member to do a completely different job at the same moment, and the wing escape is still one of the cleanest sequences in the game. Lester hosts, the planning board lives in your apartment, and the share split has to be agreed before anyone presses ready.
Also released March 10, 2015. Four players raid Humane Labs and Research to steal a stockpile of chemical weapons for Agent 14, the IAA contact who shows up again and again in later updates. The setups stretch across the map: stealing an EMP from Merryweather, doing a deep-sea dive for a key card, fighting through Insurgents in Blaine County. The finale is a two-team split, with one half infiltrating the lab and the other flying Valkyrie helicopter cover. It is the heist that taught the playerbase what coordinated air-and-ground play looks like.
Same March 10, 2015 update. Series A is Trevor Philips' contract: a four-player run of jobs stealing meth, weed, money, and a coke shipment from rival gangs so Trevor can flip the whole stockpile to the Lost MC. The setups are a tour of the criminal underworld of Blaine County, and the finale is a wave-defense shootout at the McKenzie airfield that still trips new crews up. Of the original five, Series A has the longest setup chain, and the lowest payout per hour, which is why it became the heist most crews skipped on repeat runs.
The crown jewel of the original 2015 update, released March 10, 2015. Pacific Standard is the four-player bank heist climax: storm the Pacific Standard Public Deposit Bank in Pillbox Hill, grab the cash, then escape down the LS River on Bati bikes through a wall of police. It paid the most of the original five, and for years it was the default "play heists for money" answer the community gave new players. Lester hosts, the planning board lives in your apartment, and the bike escape sequence is, even now, the most-replayed finale in the entire heists catalogue.
Released December 12, 2017 (Rockstar Newswire). Doomsday is a three-act campaign, with its own finale at the end of each act. Act I, The Data Breaches, has you working with Lester and Agent 14 against the Cliffford AI and the IAA. Act II, The Bogdan Problem, ends in a submarine raid and a stolen nuclear missile. Act III, The Doomsday Scenario, closes out at the IAA Facility with the most elaborate finale Rockstar had built up to that point. Hosting moves out of the apartment and into the new Facility property you buy in-game. The update also introduced the Khanjali tank and the Deluxo, which reshaped the lobby for years.
Released December 12, 2019 (Rockstar Newswire). The Diamond Casino Heist is the first job with selectable approaches: Aggressive (kick the door in), The Big Con (talk your way past security), and Silent and Sneaky (avoid the cameras entirely). The target also rotates: cash, gold, artwork, and, during specific event windows, the rare diamond payout. You host out of an Arcade business, and the prep is largely free-roam, which means small crews and solo prep runs became the norm. It is the heist that proved replayability could come from variant approach plus variant loot, not just adding more setups.
Released December 15, 2020 (Rockstar Newswire). Cayo Perico is the first heist that can be run completely solo. The score is set on a private island owned by El Rubio (Juan Strickler), a Colombian drug kingpin, and you host the whole job out of the Kosatka submarine, a new property bought from Miguel Madrazo. The primary target rotates between the Madrazo Files, the Pink Diamond, the Sapphire Panther, Bearer Bonds, the Pearl Necklace, the Ruby Necklace, the Tequila Bottle, and the Panther Statue, with secondary loot stacked on top. Multiple infiltration points (main dock, north dock, drainage tunnel, airstrip, and others) made each run feel different. Cayo Perico set the template every later update has chased: high payout, solo-friendly, one property to buy.
Released July 20, 2021 (Rockstar Newswire). Tuners ships six "contracts" rather than full heists, all hosted out of the new Auto Shop property. KDJ and Sessanta hand them out: the Union Depository Contract, the Superdollar Deal, the ECU Job, the Prison Contract, the Lost Contract, the Data Contract, and later the Agatha Baker Contract. Each one is a short setup chain plus a finale, and every one can be run solo. The payouts per contract are lower than a Cayo finale, but the format, short, repeatable, soloable, became the new shape of heist content after this update.
Released December 15, 2021 (Rockstar Newswire). The Contract is built around Franklin Clinton's Celebrity Solutions Agency, a new property you buy through Franklin himself. The throughline is recovering Dr. Dre's stolen music, with Johnny "Franklin" Clinton and Lamar pulling you in. Three Security Contracts (Recovery, Asset Protection, and the rest of the rotating set) run alongside the main storyline, which ends with the IAA archive finale. It is the first heist update where the celebrity cameo and the property-buying upsell are the headline, and where the score sits inside a longer narrative arc rather than standing alone.
First Dose released June 21, 2022, and Last Dose released December 13, 2022 (Rockstar Newswire). The two updates are a single story split across the year, run by the Fooliganz crew: DAX, Labrat, and Jay Norris. First Dose added six story missions and the Acid Lab business, set up inside the back of a stolen MTL Brickade. Last Dose closed the arc with six more missions and a finale that the community treats as a heist-class score, even though Rockstar never tagged it with the "Heist" label. The Acid Lab itself became one of the most-recommended passive businesses in the game off the back of these missions.
Released March 7, 2024 (Rockstar Newswire). Cluckin' Bell hosts out of the Salvage Yard business introduced three months earlier in the Chop Shop update (December 12, 2023). It's a five-mission storyline targeting Vincent Effenburger and a corrupt corner of the Davis Sheriff's Department, ending with a raid on a Cluckin' Bell processing plant in Paleto Bay. The cinematic finale, with its slow build through the slaughterhouse, is the closest the modern heist arc has come to the tension of the original 2015 finales. Soloable, and short enough to clear in a single session.
Released June 25, 2024 (Rockstar Newswire). Bottom Dollar restores Maude Eccles' old Sandy Shores office as a working bail bonds operation, which you buy and run. The structure is closer to a bounty-hunting career than a single score: a stream of targets to track and bring in, plus story missions that escalate into a heist-style finale. It slots into the late-era pattern of property-first, episodic-content-second that began with the Auto Shop.
Released December 10, 2024 (Rockstar Newswire). Agents of Sabotage is the IAA pulling you back in through contacts at the Darnell Bros garment factory in Strawberry. The Garment Factory is the new business property of the update, and the storyline runs a series of operations against Merryweather that ends with a finale at Fort Zancudo. The community has called it the next-gen evolution of the heists formula: soloable, story-led, with the property purchase baked into the pitch, and a finale built around a single high-stakes infiltration rather than a four-player split.
The shape of a heist has changed twice in ten years. The 2015 originals were strictly cooperative, with four players and a high-end apartment as the price of entry. Cayo Perico in 2020 broke the four-player requirement and made solo the default. Agents of Sabotage and the late-era updates have taken that further, wrapping the score in an episodic storyline and selling the property purchase as the real onboarding step. The heist label still ships, but the modern version looks closer to a short campaign than a single score day.
Think you can name them all in order? Take the heists-in-order quiz.
