PAYDAY Crime & Heist Hub
Everything worth stealing across PAYDAY 3, PAYDAY 2 and the series that turned bank robbery into a team-building exercise with assault rifles.
PAYDAY has spent more than fifteen years asking one beautifully uncomplicated question:
What if we robbed the place?
Banks, jewellery stores, armoured transports, warehouses, nightclubs and considerably less sensible targets have all been subjected to the same basic procedure. Case the location. Find a way inside. Defeat the security. Steal everything that isn't structurally important. Leave before the police turn the pavement outside into an arms convention.
This is CRIMENET's home for the entire PAYDAY franchise, with PAYDAY 3 as our main focus in 2026.
You'll find heist rankings, solo recommendations, builds, stealth and loud strategies, complete walkthroughs and ongoing coverage of PAYDAY 3, alongside PAYDAY 2, the original PAYDAY: The Heist and whatever Starbreeze decides criminals should steal next.
If it involves masks, vaults and somebody shouting about a drill, it probably lives here.
Jump to What You Need
PAYDAY 3
PAYDAY 3 is the current centre of the franchise and the game receiving most of CRIMENET's PAYDAY coverage.
Its 2023 launch was disastrous enough that the getaway vehicle effectively reversed through the bank, caught fire and asked everyone to create another account before they were allowed to escape. But the PAYDAY 3 of 2026 is considerably different from the game that earned that reputation.
At its best, PAYDAY 3 understands why this series works.
A location isn't merely somewhere to shoot enemies. It's something to solve. Cameras watch useful corridors. Guards create moving problems. Employees have access you don't. Keycards open possibilities. Civilians can become leverage. Somewhere behind several layers of entirely reasonable security is a pile of money whose ownership you fundamentally disagree with.
And when stealth collapses, the same location becomes another game entirely.
That's the PAYDAY trick. The plan matters, but so does surviving the moment when the plan becomes historical documentation.
CRIMENET's PAYDAY 3 coverage is built around that actual criminal fantasy: which heists do it best, how they work solo, how to approach stealth and loud, which builds are worth using and how to get through the robberies that keep kicking your criminal operation in the bollocks.
START HERE → PAYDAY 3 in 2026: Is It Worth Playing Now?
The Best PAYDAY 3 Heists
A great PAYDAY heist needs more than a vault and several gentlemen arriving later with shields.
The best robberies give you choices.
Different ways inside. Security systems worth understanding. Objectives that change how you move through the location. Enough uncertainty that learning the map helps without turning every subsequent run into commuting.
Most importantly, the best heists survive failure.
When stealth breaks, you shouldn't feel as though the interesting game has ended and somebody has loaded Horde Mode by mistake. A genuinely great PAYDAY robbery lets everything go catastrophically wrong and somehow becomes exciting for entirely different reasons.
We've ranked every current PAYDAY 3 heist on exactly that basis.
Shopping Spree currently takes our top spot, with First World Bank and Fear & Greed close behind. At the bottom lives Road Rage, contemplating what it has done.
Playing PAYDAY 3 Solo
You absolutely can play PAYDAY 3 alone, and some heists are arguably better when nobody else is present to develop an unexpected fascination with the alarm button.
Solo stealth is where the game particularly shines.
Without another player wandering into restricted areas dressed like a heavily armed children's television villain, you control the pace. You can learn guard routes, manipulate cameras, move civilians and gradually dismantle the building's security without wondering what TrevorFromOhio92 has just done upstairs.
Not every robbery works equally well alone, though.
Some locations give a solo player enormous control. Others make objectives, bag movement or loud combat substantially more awkward without human backup.
Our current solo favourite is Shopping Spree because it combines freedom, multiple approaches and strong replayability. Delivery Charge is our stealth pick, Dirty Ice is excellent for beginners, and First World Bank remains the obvious choice when you want the classic fantasy of walking into a bank with criminal intentions and leaving considerably wealthier.
PAYDAY 3 Heist Walkthroughs
Knowing that a heist is good becomes considerably less comforting when you're standing beside a locked door wondering which bastard has the QR code.
CRIMENET's PAYDAY 3 walkthroughs focus on the parts that actually decide runs: routes, security, objectives, RNG, keycards, codes, stealth complications, loud alternatives and solo strategy.
We're not interested in writing 1,800 words explaining that doors occasionally open.
If a robbery deserves a walkthrough, we'll show you how the bloody thing works.
More Heists Coming
We're expanding the walkthrough library robbery by robbery, concentrating on heists where routes, RNG and different approaches actually justify deeper coverage.
PAYDAY 3 Builds & Skills
A PAYDAY build should have a job.
Not seventeen tiny bonuses assembled because somebody on the internet produced a spreadsheet with conditional formatting.
If you're playing stealth, your build should help you manipulate the environment and remain undetected. If you're going loud, it should keep you effective when half the metropolitan police force has apparently cancelled its afternoon appointments. If you're playing solo, it needs to work without assuming three competent humans are standing nearby.
CRIMENET's builds are therefore organised around what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Solo Stealth Build
For controlling heists alone, handling security and making mistakes slightly less terminal.
→ PAYDAY 3 Solo Stealth Build
Loud Build
For when negotiations have concluded and the building now contains substantially more ammunition than architecture.
→ PAYDAY 3 Loud Build
General / Hybrid Build
For players who would quite like stealth to work but have met themselves before.
→ PAYDAY 3 General Build
Stealth or Loud?
PAYDAY essentially contains two games sharing one criminal record.
Stealth is about information and control.
You learn the building before trying to defeat it. Cameras become sightlines. Guards become moving clocks. Employees become access opportunities. Doors matter. Private areas matter. One civilian deciding to wander somewhere inconvenient can suddenly become the most important person in North America.
It's slow, deliberate and enormously satisfying when everything works.
Loud is what happens when Gary sees you carrying a body bag.
Suddenly the architecture changes meaning. Cover matters more than cameras. Resources disappear. Objectives that were simple become dangerous. Police arrive in quantities suggesting the robbery has somehow become the nation's leading domestic policy issue.
The best PAYDAY heists make both approaches worthwhile.
CRIMENET covers both because restarting every time stealth fails means deliberately refusing to experience one of PAYDAY's greatest pleasures:
Watching a beautiful plan die horribly and somehow escaping with the money anyway.
PAYDAY 2
PAYDAY 2 is less a videogame at this point and more an archaeological layer.
Released in 2013, it grew for years into an absurd criminal buffet of heists, weapons, characters, builds, DLC and scenarios. What began as a cooperative robbery shooter eventually developed the criminal ambitions of someone who has been banned from every country with an extradition treaty.
Banks became merely Tuesday.
Over its enormous lifespan, PAYDAY 2 sent players after jewellery, casinos, armoured transports, drugs, election machines, nuclear warheads and eventually the White House, because apparently federal burglary was the only remaining unchecked box on the crew's LinkedIn profile.
That scale remains its enormous advantage.
PAYDAY 3 is the current game, but PAYDAY 2 represents the gigantic accumulated sandbox the series became.
CRIMENET will expand its PAYDAY 2 coverage selectively. We're interested in the heists, builds and criminal systems that are still genuinely worth discovering, not cataloguing every artefact simply because Bain once touched it.
→ Payday 2 2026 Review
PAYDAY: The Heist
Before the DLC mountain, skill trees, years of updates and increasingly deranged target selection, PAYDAY was wonderfully simple.
There was a place.
It contained something valuable.
You were going to take it.
Released in 2011, PAYDAY: The Heist established the formula that everything else would spend years expanding: cooperative robberies, objective-driven missions, escalating police response and a crew trying to maintain control while the situation rapidly develops several hundred new problems.
It's smaller and rougher than what followed, but the PAYDAY DNA is already there.
Plan. Control. Steal. Escape.
Preferably in that order.
→ Payday The Heist 2026 Review
The Future of PAYDAY
PAYDAY 3 isn't intended to be the end of this criminal enterprise.
The wider franchise is expanding beyond the three main games, including other PAYDAY projects and experiments built around the heisting fantasy.
CRIMENET will keep this hub updated as that universe grows.
But we're applying one important rule:
Putting a PAYDAY mask on something doesn't automatically make it interesting.
We'll cover future PAYDAY projects when there's enough actual game underneath the logo to warrant your time.
The vault may be enormous.
Our editorial patience isn't.
PAYDAY FAQ
Is PAYDAY 3 worth playing in 2026?
PAYDAY 3 is in a substantially different state from its troubled 2023 launch, with years of updates and further major changes arriving throughout 2026. Whether it's worth returning to depends heavily on what you want from PAYDAY, which is why we're maintaining a dedicated current verdict rather than pretending a three-year-old launch review remains holy scripture.
Can you play PAYDAY 3 solo?
Yes. PAYDAY 3 can be played solo, and several heists work particularly well alone. Stealth especially benefits from having complete control over the pace of the robbery.
What is the best PAYDAY 3 heist?
Our current overall pick is Shopping Spree, followed by First World Bank and Fear & Greed.
That's based on the quality of the robbery itself, route variety, stealth and loud play, replayability and how much freedom the heist gives you when everything inevitably goes to hell.
Should I play PAYDAY 2 or PAYDAY 3?
Play PAYDAY 3 if you want the current game, newer mechanics and the version Starbreeze is actively building forward.
Play PAYDAY 2 if sheer quantity is your priority. More than a decade of expansion left it with an enormous amount of heists, equipment and systems.
Or play both and discover that apparently your leisure time now requires offshore accounts.
Do I need to play PAYDAY 2 before PAYDAY 3?
No. PAYDAY has recurring characters and continuity, but you don't need to complete PAYDAY 2 before playing PAYDAY 3.
The essential narrative premise remains refreshingly accessible:
Those people have money.
You would prefer to have the money.
Why PAYDAY Is Still the Heist Game
There are plenty of games about criminals.
There are considerably fewer games about crime.
That's the distinction that keeps PAYDAY interesting.
The robbery isn't scenery wrapped around a shooter. The building matters. Security matters. Access matters. Cameras, guards, civilians, keycards, vaults, loot and escape routes become pieces of the game because the crime itself is what you're solving.
A good PAYDAY heist makes you look at an ordinary building differently.
That employee isn't an NPC. He has access.
That camera isn't decoration. It's covering the corridor you need.
That locked door isn't scenery. It's currently standing between you and enough money to make doors feel philosophically objectionable.
Then somebody gets spotted.
The alarms start.
The police arrive.
Your elegant criminal operation becomes four masked idiots throwing bags through a window while being shot at by increasingly specialised government employees.
And somehow, that's part of the fantasy too.
PAYDAY doesn't merely let you play a criminal. It lets you plan the crime, commit the crime, completely fuck up the crime and still desperately try to get away with it.
That's why we're building this hub.
And that's why, more than fifteen years after the first crew put on their masks, we're still arguing about who forgot the fucking drill.
→ Explore more of CRIMENET's Best Heist Games