D&D 5e · Free DM tool

Encounter Difficulty Calculator

Drop in your party and the monsters they’re about to meet. See instantly whether the fight lands as a warm-up or a funeral.

Rules set

The Party4 adventurers

Set all to

PC1

PC2

PC3

PC4

The Adversariesby challenge rating

400 XP

VerdictTrivial

Below the lowest budget: little threat. Spend it on flavor, not stakes.

Monsters: 2
Base monster XP: 400
Party size: 4
Encounter XP: 400

Low600

Moderate900

High1,600

Stop math-ing mid-combat.

You have the verdict. What this page cannot do is the three hours after it: the turn order, the hit points, and which goblin is still prone.

Run it in the app

The method

How encounter difficulty works

D&D 5e uses experience points as the common currency for “how hard is this fight.” The calculator follows the official math of whichever rules set you pick, 2024 or 2014. Here’s what it’s doing under the hood.

Party budget

Sum each hero’s XP budget

Every character gets an XP allowance based on their level. Add them up and you have the party’s budget lines: three on the 2024 rules (Low, Moderate, High), four on 2014 (Easy, Medium, Hard, Deadly). Those lines are what the scale under the verdict draws.

Monster XP

Total the monsters

This step is a plain D&D XP calculator: each monster’s Challenge Rating maps to a fixed XP value, and it sums those across every group you add. Price is set by CR alone, so one boss and six mooks worth the same total start from the same number. The next step is what turns that total into a verdict.

Compare

Read the verdict

Stack the monster XP against the party’s budget. Below the lowest line the verdict reads Trivial; above it the fight takes the name of the highest budget it has cleared. There is one more rung over all of them, Brutal, and it starts half again past the High budget rather than the moment you cross it. On the 2014 rules Deadly is the top rung and a printed line, and what gets compared is the monster XP after the group-size multiplier, which the questions below work through.

Reference

XP budget per character (2024 rules)

The per-character XP budget from the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide. One row per level. The calculator above reads it for you, and it is printed here for the DM who would rather work it out on paper.

Values are per single character · 2024 DMG

Level	Low	Moderate	High
1	50	75	100
2	100	150	200
3	150	225	400
4	250	375	500
5	500	750	1,100
6	600	1,000	1,400
7	750	1,300	1,700
8	1,000	1,700	2,100
9	1,300	2,000	2,600
10	1,600	2,300	3,100
11	1,900	2,900	4,100
12	2,200	3,700	4,700
13	2,600	4,200	5,400
14	2,900	4,900	6,200
15	3,300	5,400	7,800
16	3,800	6,100	9,800
17	4,500	7,200	11,700
18	5,000	8,700	14,200
19	5,500	10,700	17,200
20	6,400	13,200	22,000

Questions

About the difficulty math

How is D&D encounter difficulty calculated?

Two totals, compared. What the party can afford against what the monsters cost. The three steps under How it works are the long version, and the calculator above runs them as you type. What no edition’s encounter math counts is what the party already spent that day, so this rates one fight cold. A group two encounters deep reads exactly the same here as a rested one.

What changed between the 2014 and 2024 rules?

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide replaced the four Easy / Medium / Hard / Deadly thresholds with three budgets, Low, Moderate, and High, and it dropped the group-size multiplier. Monster XP is compared at face value now. This calculator does both: pick your rules set above the party and every number on the page follows it.

How does the 2014 math work?

The party half works the way the steps above describe, only the tally comes out as four lines instead of three. The monster half is where the editions part. You total the monster XP, then apply the group-size multiplier, a factor that grows with how many monsters there are, because a crowd is more dangerous than its XP suggests. A party smaller than three shifts it up, a party of six or more shifts it down. The multiplied total is what meets the thresholds, and the calculator prints the multiplier it used beside the base XP so you can reproduce the number yourself.

What makes an encounter “deadly”?

It depends which rules set you are on. On the 2014 rules Deadly is a printed threshold: once the multiplied monster XP reaches the party’s combined Deadly line, the fight is rated Deadly. The 2024 rules stop naming tiers above High, so this page draws a line of its own half again above the High budget, and a fight that reaches it reads Brutal. That line is ours and not the book’s, which is why the scale under the verdict stops at High: it marks only numbers you can look up.

Does the number of monsters matter?

Yes, and the two editions disagree about how much. The 2024 rules have no group-size multiplier at all. Ten of something is ten times its XP and nothing more. The 2014 rules run theirs over the whole monster total first, so the same pile can climb a band or two on head count alone. The practical effect is that a 2024 budget buys a lot more bodies than a 2014 threshold did.

Is the encounter difficulty calculator free?

Yes, and no account is needed. The math here is the same math the full app uses while you play.