osu! pp milestones: what reaching 1k, 2k and 5k pp involves
osu! pp milestones are not evenly spaced, because profile pp is a weighted sum of a player's best 100 scores with each score weighted 0.95 to the power of its rank minus one. Those hundred weights add up to about 19.9, so a milestone describes the average strength of a whole top 100 rather than the size of one great play. After subtracting bonus pp, 1,000 pp implies a top 100 centred somewhere in the mid-30s per score, 2,000 pp around 80, and 5,000 pp around 230. Each milestone therefore demands a heavier standard from every score in the list, which is why the gaps between them widen rather than stay constant.
What a pp milestone actually measures
A pp milestone is a threshold on profile pp, and profile pp is not a running total of everything you have ever earned. The osu! servers assign each ranked score its own pp value, sort your scores by that value, and sum the best 100 with a decaying weight of 0.95n−1: the best counts in full, the second at 95%, the third at 90.25%, the tenth at about 63%, the hundredth at about 0.62%. A separate bonus term, derived from the number of distinct ranked beatmaps you hold a score on, is added to that sum.
Two consequences follow. A milestone describes the shape of your entire top 100, not the size of your single best play. And because the weight decays geometrically, scores near the bottom of the list barely register — on a top 100 of identical scores, ranks 51 to 100 together supply only about 7% of the weighted total. Milestones are won in the top half of the list.
The 19.9x rule and what each milestone demands per play
Add the hundred weights together and they come to 19.88. If every score in your top 100 were worth exactly the same amount, your weighted total would be roughly twenty times one score's value. That gives a quick sanity check on any milestone: subtract bonus pp, divide by twenty, and you have the average per-score strength the target implies. The bonus figures below assume a plausible number of ranked maps cleared at each stage, since bonus pp is not earned by playing well.
| Milestone | Assumed bonus pp | Weighted total from scores | Flat-equivalent value per score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 pp | ~298 (250 ranked maps cleared) | ~700 | ~35 pp |
| 2,000 pp | ~383 (500 cleared) | ~1,620 | ~81 pp |
| 5,000 pp | ~414 (1,000 or more cleared) | ~4,590 | ~231 pp |
Real profiles slope downward rather than sitting flat, so your best score will sit above the flat-equivalent figure and your hundredth below it. Treat the number as the centre of gravity the list has to move to, not as a requirement for every individual score.
Bonus pp, and why the first milestone is partly a clear count
Bonus pp is calculated as 416.6667 × (1 − 0.995min(N, 1000)), where N is the number of distinct ranked beatmaps you have set a score on. It saturates: about half the total arrives by roughly 137 maps, and the maximum of about 413.9 pp is reached at 1,000 maps, after which further clears add nothing at all.
| Ranked maps with a score (N) | Bonus pp |
|---|---|
| 50 | ~92 |
| 100 | ~164 |
| 200 | ~264 |
| 500 | ~383 |
| 1,000 and above | ~414 (capped) |
Bonus pp is therefore a large slice of a small profile and a rounding error on a large one. Near 1,000 pp it can approach a third of your total, so simply playing a wide spread of ranked maps genuinely moves the number. By 5,000 pp the same term is under a tenth of the profile and fully capped for anyone with a substantial play count. Everything past that has to come from the weighted scores themselves.
Reaching 1,000 pp
The first milestone is unusual because many players cross it before their top 100 is even full. If you hold fewer than 100 ranked scores, a new score does not have to displace anything — it simply joins the list and adds its weighted value. Combine that with a bonus term still climbing steeply and early progress feels fast in a way it never will again.
What changes on the way there is mostly completion. Players below this line typically fail more maps than they finish, and the largest single source of pp is converting near-misses into finished plays with a respectable combo. Mod use tends to be incidental. The most efficient behaviour is breadth: play many different ranked maps rather than grinding one, because both the empty slots in the top 100 and the unsaturated bonus term reward variety. Accuracy discipline matters, but not yet as much as simply getting a hundred real scores onto the board.
Reaching 2,000 pp
By 2,000 pp the free slots are gone and the bonus term has largely flattened, so essentially every point now has to displace a point. A new best score at this level needs to be worth roughly 80 pp before it changes your profile at all — and that is break-even, not gain.
This is usually where mods enter properly. The osu! wiki describes a score's pp as driven by aim, speed, accuracy and strain. Double Time raises the rate at which objects arrive and so loads the speed and strain terms; Hard Rock tightens circle size and approach and mostly loads aim; difficulty-reducing mods such as Easy and Half Time lower a map's star rating and with it the pp a clean play can return. Because the algorithm weights accuracy heavily, the same map played at 97% and at 99% can be meaningfully far apart in pp. Most players who stall just below this milestone are playing maps hard enough that their accuracy no longer supports them.
Reaching 5,000 pp
At 5,000 pp the arithmetic turns hostile. Break-even for a new best score is roughly 230 pp, and your hundredth score is no longer a weak play you can casually beat. Sessions that produce no measurable pp become routine rather than a sign of a bad day, and progress is better read as top-100 turnover than as a number moving.
What changes about how you play is mostly selection and depth. Players at this level know which map archetypes their skill set converts into pp — a stream-focused player and a jump-focused player at identical pp will have almost disjoint top 100s — and improvement comes either from pushing that specialism further or from opening a second one. The second route is slower and often costs pp in the short term, because a new skill starts producing scores far below your break-even and none of them enter the list. That short-term cost is the main reason profiles tend to narrow rather than broaden at this level.
The break-even rule behind every plateau
The weighting produces a rule worth memorising. When a score becomes your new best, every score below it shifts down one place and loses 5% of its weight, and your hundredth score falls off the list entirely. The net effect is close to:
pp gained ≈ (value of the new score) − 5% of your current weighted total
This holds regardless of curve shape, because the 5% loss applies to the whole list rather than to any particular score. It is accurate to within about a point on flat, steep and outlier-heavy profiles alike.
| Weighted total from scores | A new best score must exceed |
|---|---|
| ~700 | ~35 pp |
| ~1,600 | ~80 pp |
| ~3,000 | ~150 pp |
| ~4,600 | ~230 pp |
| ~8,000 | ~400 pp |
The threshold rises in direct proportion to your pp. Doubling your profile doubles the size of the play needed to move it, which is why identical effort returns visibly less each year.
Where players commonly plateau
Three quite different situations all present as a pp number that has stopped moving, and they call for opposite responses.
- An unfinished list. Below roughly a hundred ranked scores, flat pp usually means you are not playing enough different maps rather than that you have stopped improving. Volume resolves it.
- A ceiling plateau. Your best score sits close to the hardest thing you can currently do and the list beneath it is thin, so nothing in reach clears break-even. The fix is skill work rather than map selection — usually accuracy on maps you already handle, because that lifts many potential scores at once instead of one.
- A pool plateau. You have already set strong scores on every map that suits you. Further pp needs a mod you do not use or a pattern type you avoid, and both start well below break-even before they pay.
From the outside these look identical. Distinguishing them is the point of reading your own top 100 rather than only your global rank.
Reading progress when the number stops moving
Because break-even rises with your total, pp becomes a slower and slower signal the further you go. Top-100 turnover does not. A session in which two scores entered your top 100 and pushed two out was a productive session even if profile pp moved by four points, because the list itself is stronger than it was that morning.
That is the measurement TrackMyOsu is built around. Starting a session snapshots your pp, global rank, country rank, accuracy and full top 100; the page refreshes every 60 seconds while you play and flags each new top play and each new medal as it lands. Stopping saves the whole comparison permanently. Over months, the record of which scores entered and which were displaced says far more about which milestone you are approaching than the headline figure does.
By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-12.