osu! Ranks & pp Explained: Global Rank, Level & What's a Good pp

Almost every osu! beginner ties themselves in knots over the word "rank," because the game uses it for three unrelated things at once. There is your global and country rank, which orders every player by how many performance points (pp) they have. There is your level, a number next to your avatar that comes purely from how much total score you have accumulated. And there are the letter grades — SS, S, A, B, C, D — that osu! stamps on each individual play. This guide pulls those three apart, explains exactly how pp builds into a global rank, and tells you what counts as "good" at each skill tier — with the honest caveat that every one of these numbers shifts over time.

Performance Points (pp): the skill currency

Performance points, universally shortened to pp, are awarded for individual scores set on ranked beatmaps. Every ranked play you set is assigned a pp value based on the map's difficulty, the mods you used, your accuracy, your combo, and your miss count. A clean play on a hard map is worth a lot of pp; a sloppy play on an easy map is worth almost none. Crucially, pp is only earned on Ranked and Approved maps — Loved, Qualified, pending, and graveyard maps have leaderboards or play counts but award zero pp.

Your profile's headline pp figure is not a simple sum of every play you have ever set. If it were, the leaderboard would reward grinding thousands of mediocre scores. Instead, osu! takes your best plays and applies a weighting system so that only sustained, high-level performance moves the number meaningfully.

How the weighted total works

osu! ranks all of your scores by their pp value, then weights them on a decaying curve. Your single best play counts at 100%. Your second-best counts at 95%. Your third at 95% of that again (about 90.25%), and so on — each successive play is worth 0.95 times the previous weight. Formally, your total is pp[1] x 0.95^0 + pp[2] x 0.95^1 + pp[3] x 0.95^2 + ... + pp[n] x 0.95^(n-1), using your top 100 scores.

A worked example makes the decay obvious. Suppose your top five raw plays are 110, 100, 100, 90, and 80 pp. After weighting they contribute roughly 110, 95, 90, 77, and 65 pp respectively. The 95th-ranked play in your list is weighted at about 0.95^94, which is a fraction of a percent — effectively meaningless. This is why the only way to gain real pp is to beat one of your existing top plays, not to repeat ones you have already logged.

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If you want more pp, you cannot farm your way there with volume. You have to play better than your past self on something near the top of your list.

Bonus pp

On top of your weighted plays sits a smaller, separate amount called bonus pp, awarded for the sheer number of distinct ranked scores you have set. It rewards breadth — passing many different maps — rather than peak skill. Bonus pp is capped: a player who has set a huge number of ranked scores can earn up to roughly 416 bonus pp (the exact ceiling has been tuned across pp reworks). For most players it is a modest top-up of a few dozen pp, and because it is capped it never becomes a grinding shortcut to a high rank.

Global rank and country rank

Your global rank is simply your position when every active player in the world is sorted by total weighted pp (plus bonus). Rank #1 is the player with the most pp; the millions of casual players trail off below. Country rank is the identical ordering restricted to players who share your flag. Both are derived numbers — you never set them directly. You raise pp, and your rank follows automatically as you pass the players above you.

Approximate pp-to-rank reference points

The table below gives rough thresholds for the osu! (standard) mode. Treat every number as a moving target: the playerbase grows, pp reworks recalculate scores, and the curve steepens dramatically near the top. These figures are illustrative, not precise — use them to orient yourself, not to set exact goals.

Level: total score, not skill

The level number beside your avatar has nothing to do with pp or skill. It is driven entirely by total score — the running sum of the score from every play you have ever submitted, including failed attempts and repeated plays of the same map. Because failed and farmed runs all count, level mostly measures time invested rather than ability. A casual player who has clicked through thousands of easy maps can out-level a far more skilled player who plays selectively.

The score required per level climbs on a cubic curve early on, then becomes a flat, very large constant past level 100: each level beyond 100 needs roughly 100 billion additional total score. This is why you see dedicated players sitting at level 100-plus while the leap between, say, level 30 and 40 takes comparatively little play.

Grades: the per-play letters

Grades rank a single score, not your account. After every play osu! awards a letter based mainly on the percentage of 300s (perfect hits) you landed, with miss count as a gate. From highest to lowest: SS (also written X), S, A, B, C, D.

• SS / X — 100% accuracy (every note hit for the maximum 300).
• S — over 90% 300s, fewer than 1% 50s, and no misses.
• A — over 80% 300s with no misses, or over 90% 300s overall.
• B — over 70% 300s with no misses, or over 80% 300s overall.
• C — over 60% 300s.
• D — anything below the above.
• Silver SS/S (written SSH/X H and SH) — the same grade earned while using a visibility-reducing mod such as Hidden or Flashlight; the silver tint signals the harder conditions.

A grade is just a quality badge on one play. It feeds pp only indirectly: a higher grade usually means cleaner accuracy and combo, which usually means more pp — but a B on a brutal map can still be worth far more pp than an SS on a trivial one.

How to actually raise your rank

Since rank is downstream of weighted pp, every climbing strategy reduces to the same goal: replace the weakest entries in your top 100 with better plays. Here is the practical order of operations.

• Push your top plays, not your volume. Repeating maps you have already topped does nothing — only beating an existing top-100 entry adds pp.
• Chase accuracy and full combos on maps just above your current best. A clean S on a slightly harder map almost always beats a sloppy pass on something much harder.
• Use mods that fit your strength. Hidden and Hard Rock add a pp multiplier on many maps; Double Time rewards players with fast, accurate tapping. Pick the mod that suits the skill you actually have.
• Learn what your weakest top plays are worth, then deliberately farm maps that beat them. Tools like osudaily and pp calculators show exactly which scores are dragging.
• Collect bonus pp passively by passing lots of different ranked maps — but never treat it as a main strategy; it is capped at a few hundred pp.
• Be patient with rank drift. Holding your pp while others improve will slowly lower your rank, so steady improvement is the real baseline.

Keep the three systems straight and your progress stops feeling random. pp and rank track skill, level tracks hours, and grades track single plays. Aim your practice at the pp curve, and the global and country numbers will follow.