What Is a Good CS Per Minute? Benchmark It Against Yourself

Ask ten players how their game went and most will tell you about kills. Ask their match history and it will tell you about farm. CS per minute (creep score divided by minutes played) is the stat that quietly separates players who climb from players who stall, and it is almost entirely within your own control.

What counts as a good CS per minute

There is no single right answer, because the number depends heavily on your role. For a solo laner in ranked, 7 to 8 CS per minute is a healthy target, and sustaining 9 or more puts you comfortably ahead of most opponents you will meet on the way up. Junglers score differently because their income comes from camps, and supports lower still because they intentionally give up farm. Comparing a support's CS to a mid laner's is meaningless.

That is exactly why a generic benchmark only gets you so far. Your role, your champion, and your typical game length all move the target. The useful question is not "what is good in the abstract" but "is this game better than my normal."

Why CS is worth more than it looks

Minions are not glamorous, but they are gold, and gold is items. As a rough rule of thumb, every 14 or so minions is worth about as much gold as a kill. Sit with that for a second: a player who calmly out-farms their lane by 30 CS is roughly two kills up in gold, and they got there without ever risking a fight.

That is the trap of judging your game by the scoreboard. A 3/0 line feels great, but if you missed 40 CS chasing those kills, you may not actually be ahead. The recap in the LoL Brain Companion grades each game's farm against your own average precisely so you can see that gap instead of guessing.

The three habits that quietly cost you CS

Most low-CS games trace back to the same handful of mistakes:

• Backing at bad times. Recall with the wave crashing into your tower and you lose the minions that die while you shop and walk back. Time your backs around a slow push or a just-cleared wave.
• Shoving with no follow-up. Pushing the wave and then standing in the river accomplishes nothing. Only fast-push when you have a reason: a roam, a recall, or an objective.
• Dying. A death costs the CS you miss while dead and the wave that crashes under your tower while you walk back. It is a double farm hit on top of the gold you handed over.

Benchmark against yourself, not a leaderboard

The fastest way to improve farm is to make it visible. Pull up your own CS per minute across recent games, find your baseline, and then try to beat it by half a point. Half a CS per minute over a 30 minute game is 15 extra minions, which is real gold you can feel.

Your dashboard tracks CS per minute alongside your other core stats, and every post-game recap flags whether this game's farm was above or below your personal average. When you play with a live game plan from the draft page or the Companion, keep one eye on that number. Farm is the lever you can pull in every single game, win or lose, and it never depends on anyone else on your team.

If you want to pair better farm with better timing, look at when you actually win too. A rested session and clean CS are a stronger combination than either one alone.