The payout percentage of a slot machine is the amount of cash you play through it that will be returned to you as winning payouts.
You will often find that the payout percentage is referred to as the RTP of a slot machine which simply means Return to Player.
That information can sometimes be displayed on the screen or pay table of a slot, but it will be dependent on where you are playing them that will ultimately determine whether you have access to such valuable information or not!
Keep in mind though that due to the completely random way slot machines play and pay, the payout percentage is based on long term play. As such if you play off $100 for example on a slot which has a payout percentage of 96% that doesn’t mean on that one single session you will get $96.00 paid back out to you!
You can and will notice when playing slot machines that have been set with a much higher payout percentage, over the long term you get much longer slot playing sessions on those slots, due to the frequency at which such better paying slots payout.
Brick and mortar casinos often keep the payout percentages of their slot machines a closely guarded secret, however they will at the very least be set to return to players the minimum RTP required by law.
In places such as Las Vegas it is an open secret that casinos that are based in the heart of the Strip are going to be offering lower payout percentages than casinos located off-Strip, so keep that in mind if you ever do visit Vegas and are an avid slot player!
Online and mobile slot machines however are a completely different kettle of fish so to speak! Many Gaming Commissions that license and regulated such sites require the operators of those casinos to make available somewhere on the pay tables, help files or of the websites of each casino the long term expected payout percentages of each slot machine they offer players.
As such you will have a much easier time of being able to look up the RTP’s of slot machines when playing at online or mobile casino sites, and will have the added advantage of being able to select the better paying ones to play.
Working out the payout percentage a slot machine has paid out to you on any one single session is not as complicated as you may have first thought.
You simply need to add up the entire stakes you played through a slot and keep track of the winning payouts credited to you when playing any slot machine and then divide the payouts by the stakes.
So if when playing a slot you won for example $920 on any one session and placed a total of $720 in stakes when playing much a slot, $920 divided by $720 equals 1.25, remove the decimal point and that session RTP was 125%.
If your winnings were lower than your stakes, for example if you won in total $520 and wagered $650 then dividing $520 by $650 equals 0.80, in such instances you should remove the zero from your answer and the decimal point and the first two digits left will be your payout percentage, and in our example that is 80%!