Blackjack House Edge Calculator
Set the rules of the table in front of you and get the house edge for that exact game — solved on the spot, not looked up. It turns the percentage into money at your stake and speed, and ranks what every rule is costing you.
This calculator needs JavaScript — it solves every rule set from scratch rather than reading a stored table, so the work happens in your browser. The short version, for the game you are most likely to be looking at: six decks, dealer stands on soft 17, blackjack pays 3 to 2, and the house edge is about 0.46% if you play every hand correctly. Move that payout to 6 to 5 and it costs another 1.36% — more than every other rule on the board put together.
One rule costs more than all the others put together
The payout on a natural is the whole game. Every other rule you can see from where you are standing — soft 17, what you may double, double after split, surrender, the number of decks — moves the edge by a tenth or two of a percent each. Dropping the payout from 3 to 2 down to 6 to 5 costs 1.36% on its own, which is three times the entire house edge of the game you were looking at a second earlier.
Nothing you do with the cards gets it back. There is no adjustment to basic strategy, no bet sizing, no run of good cards that makes a 6-to-5 table into a fair one, and this is the one number a casino can change without changing anything you can see happening at the table. It is printed on the felt. Read it before you sit down.
The edge is not what you are going to lose tonight
A half-percent house edge means the table keeps half a cent of every dollar you put across it, averaged over an enormous number of hands. Over one evening that is almost invisible. The swing across a few hundred hands is many times larger than the expectation, which is precisely why a bad table does not feel bad while you are sitting at it and a good one does not feel good.
So the calculator gives you both: the average, and the range two sessions in three actually finish inside. The first number tells you which table to choose. The second one tells you what to bring, and it is usually the more useful of the two.
How to read a table in about ten seconds
In the order the ledger above puts them. The payout first — 3 to 2, never 6 to 5. Then whether the dealer hits soft 17, which is printed on the layout and worth about 0.22%. Then double after split and surrender, a bit over a tenth of a percent each. Deck count comes last: the whole distance from two decks to eight is about a quarter of a percent, roughly what the soft-17 rule costs on its own and a fifth of what the payout costs.
Which makes the usual order of shopping exactly backwards. People hunt for a single-deck game and then sit down at one paying 6 to 5, having traded a fifth of a percent for well over a full one.
The edge on this page is the floor — what a game costs when every hand is played correctly. Guessing costs considerably more than any rule on the board, so the table you picked matters less than whether you know what to do at it. Our blackjack strategy calculator solves individual hands for these same rules. And if you are playing through a bonus, read the blackjack bonuses guide first: blackjack typically counts 10% toward wagering, which makes the low house edge here beside the point.
The model, and where it stops
Each figure is produced by playing out every possible opening deal — your two cards against every dealer upcard — choosing the best of stand, hit, double, split and surrender at every point, and weighting the result by how often that deal comes up. The dealer peek is modelled, so an ace or ten upcard is handled the way a real table handles it. Change one control and the whole thing is solved again.
Two things are deliberately left out. The shoe is not depleted as the hand is dealt, and pairs are not resplit. At four decks or more neither is worth more than a few hundredths of a percent, and neither touches the rule-to-rule differences, which is what the ledger is for. At a single deck the first one bites: our figure there comes out roughly 0.15 points friendlier than published single-deck figures, enough to flip the sign, so the tool says so on screen when you select it.
Everything else is computed live in your browser. Nothing on this page is a stored number, which is why you can set a rule combination nobody publishes a chart for and still get an answer.