D&D 5e · Free DM tool

Challenge Rating Calculator

Can your party handle that CR? Enter their levels and the monsters they’ll face to get the party’s XP budget, the XP to award, the Challenge Rating the whole fight amounts to, and a straight answer before anyone rolls initiative.

Rules set

The Party4 adventurers

Set all to

PC1

PC2

PC3

PC4

XP budget
Low: 600
Moderate: 900
High: 1,600

The Monstersby challenge rating

1,100 XP

The fight
XP to award: 1,100 · 275 each
Encounter XP: 1,100
Fights like: CR 4

VerdictModerate

Yes, but they’ll feel it. Spells and hit points will be spent.

Low600

Moderate900

High1,600

A CR is a price tag until someone rolls it.

Priced, the fight is a row of numbers. In the app it is a creature that takes a turn and hits back.

Run it in the app

The method

How the CR math works

A Challenge Rating is shorthand for an XP price tag. Everything on this page falls out of that one number: what your party can afford, what the monsters in front of them cost, whether the bill is one they can pay, and what single rating it comes to.

Party budget

How much fight they can afford

Their levels decide what they can spend, before a single monster is on the table, and that total is the wallet every price on this page is read against. Overspend it on purpose and you have a hard night. Overspend it by accident and you have a dead cleric.

CR to XP

What one CR costs

Every Challenge Rating carries a printed XP price, from 10 XP at CR 0 to 155,000 XP at CR 30. The calculator sums that price across every monster you add, and on the 2014 rules it then marks the bill up for head count and prints the factor it used, because a price you cannot reproduce is not a price. The listed XP is still what you award the party, split per character.

Compare

The CR the whole fight adds up to

Weigh the fight’s total against the party’s lines and the answer comes back as one word: Trivial, Low, Moderate, High or Brutal on the 2024 rules, Trivial, Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly on 2014. Brutal is the one word with no line under it, because 2024 prints no budget above High and that rung is the app’s own. You also get the single Challenge Rating the whole bill would buy on its own: the word tells you whether to run the fight, the rating what to call it.

Reference

XP value by Challenge Rating

The full CR-to-XP mapping the calculator prices monsters with. Both rules sets use the same values; only the budgets they are compared against differ.

Values are per single monster · 5e SRD

CR	XP	CR	XP
0	10	14	11,500
1/8	25	15	13,000
1/4	50	16	15,000
1/2	100	17	18,000
1	200	18	20,000
2	450	19	22,000
3	700	20	25,000
4	1,100	21	33,000
5	1,800	22	41,000
6	2,300	23	50,000
7	2,900	24	62,000
8	3,900	25	75,000
9	5,000	26	90,000
10	5,900	27	105,000
11	7,200	28	120,000
12	8,400	29	135,000
13	10,000	30	155,000

Questions

About Challenge Ratings

What is a Challenge Rating in D&D 5e?

Challenge Rating (CR) is the game’s difficulty number for a single monster. It runs from 0 up to 30, and as a rule of thumb one monster of CR X is meant to be a fair day’s-work fight for four characters of level X. Every CR also carries an XP price, and that price is what the encounter math actually uses.

What CR can my party handle?

Roughly their own average level, if it’s one monster against four of them; past that it climbs fast. The calculator does the precise version: it prices your exact roster against the party’s budget, and the verdict words tell you when a bigger CR crosses from a real fight into a possible death.

Did Challenge Rating change in the 2024 rules?

The ratings themselves work the same way, and a monster’s CR still maps to the same XP. What changed is the budget you compare that XP against: the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide rates fights as Low, Moderate, or High against per-character budgets, while the 2014 rules used Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly thresholds with a group-size multiplier. Set the rules above the party and the verdict, budgets, and award all re-price.

Can a party fight a monster above its own CR?

Often, yes. A single big monster takes one turn a round while the whole party takes theirs, so action economy favors the players. That is why a CR a few steps above the party’s level can still read Moderate or High rather than a guaranteed wipe. The verdict here follows the printed math; your table’s tactics, terrain, and luck do the rest.

What CR is a group of monsters, together?

Add every monster and the calculator reads the answer back as “fights like CR X”: it totals the group’s XP, applies the 2014 group-size multiplier when that rules set is on, and finds the single Challenge Rating with the same price. Handy when an adventure asks for one big monster and you want to field three smaller ones instead. To build the group from real statblocks, the encounter builder in the header runs the same engine.

Does the CR calculator cost anything?

No. Nothing to pay and nothing to sign up for. The CR-to-XP prices it works from are the SRD’s own, printed in the table above, so you can check any row of it against your book.