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Level

Level in osu! is a cosmetic milestone derived entirely from total score. The osu! wiki gives the score requirement for level n as 5,000 / 3 × (4n³ − 3n² − n) + 1.25 × 1.8^(n − 60) for levels up to 100, and 26,931,190,827 + 99,999,999,999 × (n − 100) beyond that. Reaching level 100 therefore takes roughly 26.9 billion total score, and every level after it costs very nearly another 100 billion. Level tracks volume played rather than difficulty, and it has no effect on pp, global rank or country rank.

The formula

The osu! wiki states the score requirement for level n as a piecewise function:

• score(n) = 5,000 / 3 × (4n³ − 3n² − n) + 1.25 × 1.8^{(n − 60)}, for n ≤ 100
• score(n) = 26,931,190,827 + 99,999,999,999 × (n − 100), for n > 100

Below level 60 the exponential term is vanishingly small and the cubic dominates, so early levels scale roughly with the cube of the level number. Past 60 the 1.8^{(n − 60)} term doubles about every 1.2 levels and rapidly takes over, which is why the last stretch to 100 is steeper than everything preceding it combined.

Rounding, and why level tables disagree

The game does not evaluate that function directly. As the wiki describes, it keeps a pre-calculated list of the score differences between consecutive levels, with each entry rounded to the nearest integer. The wiki's worked example: the eightieth item in that list is score(81) − score(80) = 128,927,482.36216, stored as 128,927,482.

Those discarded fractions accumulate. By level 100 the total error is +1.629 score, which is why the wiki gives score(100) = 26,931,190,828.629 rather than the 26,931,190,827 that appears in the second branch of the function. Two points of score against a requirement of almost 27 billion never matters in play, but it does explain why level tables from different sources disagree in their final digits.

What each level costs

Evaluating the formula and rounding to whole score gives the figures below. The middle column is the cumulative total score needed to reach that level; the right column is the score needed to climb from the level immediately before it.

Level	Total score required	Cost of that single level
2	30,000	30,000
10	6,150,000	1,710,000
25	101,000,000	11,760,000
50	820,750,000	48,510,000
75	2,784,258,433	110,263,748
95	6,745,647,103	655,480,935
100	26,931,190,827	9,225,761,479

Level 100 on its own costs about 9.2 billion score, more than the entire climb from level 1 to level 95 put together (roughly 6.7 billion).

Beyond level 100

Above 100 the cubic and exponential terms stop applying and every further level costs a flat 99,999,999,999 score, one point short of 100 billion. Since the whole journey from level 1 to level 100 costs about 26.9 billion, a single level past 100 costs roughly 3.7 times everything that came before it.

This is why the level number effectively stalls for long-standing accounts. A player displaying level 102 has not simply played somewhat more than a player at level 100; they have banked something in the region of 200 billion additional total score. At that point the level display has stopped behaving like a progress bar and become closer to a long-service marker.

The progress bar

osu! stores level internally as a fractional number: the whole part is the level, the fraction is progress through it. The API splits these into a current value and a progress value, where progress is the fractional part multiplied by 100 and floored, giving a whole-number percentage between 0 and 99. A player shown as level 87 at 42% has covered 42% of the score gap between the level 87 and level 88 thresholds.

Because the thresholds grow so steeply, identical percentages mean wildly different amounts of score at different points. Ten per cent of level 25 is about 1.2 million score; ten per cent of level 100 is over 900 million. Comparing two players' progress percentages is only meaningful when they are on the same level.

Common misconceptions

• Level is not a skill measure. It reads total score and nothing else: every play on every map, ranked or not, including repeats and failed attempts. Difficulty, accuracy and pp play no part.
• Level is per game mode. Each ruleset keeps its own total score and therefore its own level, so a player can sit above 100 in one mode and in the twenties in another.
• Level is not ranked score. Ranked score counts only your best score per ranked map; level counts everything. Grinding one easy map for an hour moves level and leaves ranked score untouched.

Level in a TrackMyOsu session

Every TrackMyOsu snapshot stores both the level number and the level progress percentage, so a session records exactly where the bar sat when you started and where it sat when you stopped. At the levels most players occupy, that percentage moves visibly within a single sitting, which makes it one of the few statistics that shows something happened on a session where no new top play landed.

High in the nineties the bar barely twitches and a full evening may add a fraction of a per cent. Because every session is stored permanently, those fractions still accumulate into a readable long-run record, which is the only way a statistic this slow becomes visible at all.

See also

• Total score — Every submitted score added together, including failed attempts and repeats.
• Ranked score — Sum of your best passing score on every ranked, approved and loved beatmap.
• Play count — The number of plays you have submitted, failed attempts included.
• PP (performance points) — osu!'s skill rating: a decaying weighted sum of your best score on each ranked beatmap.

Related guides

Longer explainers that use this term: browse all osu! guides, or start with Understanding osu! pp, How to read your osu! stats and Star rating explained.

Sources

Definitions follow the official osu! wiki and the ppy/osu source. Session figures come from TrackMyOsu's own tracked-session database.

By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-13.