Escape from Tarkov Money: Roubles per Hour, Not per Raid

The equation

Income per hour = (average extracted value) × (survival rate) ÷ (minutes per raid, including loading and stash time). Three things follow. A raid that dies is worth zero, so the second term dominates. A raid that takes forty minutes costs you the two raids you could have run instead. And “average extracted value” rewards consistency far more than it rewards one lucky find. A player extracting 25,000 roubles from a fifteen-minute raid, nine times out of ten, is earning more than a player extracting 90,000 from a forty-minute raid that succeeds half the time.

Where income actually comes from

Scav runs are the floor. They cost nothing, they carry their own gear, and a clean scav loot run is pure profit. This is the income that funds the PMC kit — see the scav karma page for why shooting in a scav raid destroys the value. Short PMC loot runs are the middle. One map, three containers, one extract, out. The loot page covers what to take. Hideout production is the background layer. Crafting turns cheap inputs into items that sell for multiples of their component cost, and it runs while you are offline. Flea market trading is the top layer and the one to leave alone until you know prices. Buying low and selling high requires knowing both ends of a market that moves daily.

The cost side nobody counts

A raid costs: ammunition, medical supplies, insurance, and the gear you lose when you die. Players who track income but not expenditure think they are richer than they are. A kit that costs 100,000 and dies half the time costs 50,000 per raid on average, which is a huge fraction of the income from that raid. Cheap kits with good ammunition are the standard answer. The weapon page explains why the cheap receiver with expensive rounds beats the expensive receiver with cheap ones.

The two-week plan

Week one: scav runs plus one map you learn. Sell everything to two traders for the loyalty levels. Week two: add hideout crafting and start running the PMC on the same map with a kit you can afford to lose twice. That plan does not produce a spectacular raid. It produces a bank balance that keeps growing while you learn, which is the only thing that compounds.