How to Last Hit in League of Legends: CS Guide

To last hit in League of Legends, start your attack before the minion is low enough to die, so your damage lands the moment its health drops into your kill range. That means knowing your attack windup, your projectile travel time and the damage other minions are dealing, then switching to a fixed pattern under tower, where the tower’s shots set the rhythm. CS is the most reliable gold in the game, and you can train it with a 10-minute practice tool drill.

CS beats kills for gold because minions are guaranteed and kills are not. A wave arrives on a fixed schedule whether you are ahead or behind, and every minion you finish pays you without a fight. A kill is a bigger single payout, but most lanes trade only a handful of them across the laning phase, while a full wave meets yours every time.

Small misses compound. Dropping a couple of minions per wave looks harmless, but across the laning phase those misses add up to more than the gold of a kill you handed away without a fight. The opponent who farms cleanly while you trade evenly ends lane with the item lead.

Not every minion is worth the same. The cannon (siege) minion is the most valuable minion in a wave, so it is the one you protect first when two minions drop low together. Caster minions are fragile and die fast, which makes them the easiest to miss; melee minions are slow and forgiving.

Missed CS costs gold, not experience. You earn experience from enemy minions dying near you whether or not you land the final hit, so staying in lane and missing a few is far better than leaving lane, which costs both. That is why a bad back or a long walk hurts more than a fumbled last hit.

This matters most for top, mid and bot laners. Junglers’ camps count toward their CS score, so the same timing habits apply to clearing, while supports deliberately leave minions to their laner. Gold becomes items, and items decide when your champion gets stronger; our guide to power spikes shows which purchases change how your lane plays.

The right CS per minute benchmark is one you can actually measure against: your lane opponent, your own recent games and strong players on your champion. CS/min appears on the post-game screen and live CS sits on the scoreboard, so you can check yourself at any moment without outside tools. A single universal target is less useful than these comparisons, because champion, role and game length all move the number.

Mid and bot laners usually post the highest CS/min, because mid is short and safe and the bot laner’s support leaves the wave to them. Top laners farm similarly during lane but lose more minions to Teleport plays, long walks back and side-lane fights. Junglers are measured in camps plus any waves they pick up, and supports sit at the bottom by design.

The gap between low elo and high elo is smaller in lane than most players think and much larger after it. From Iron to Gold, CS/min often collapses once the first turret falls, because everyone groups mid and side waves crash into towers with nobody there. From Diamond up, laners keep catching side waves between objectives, so their CS/min holds up all game. If your number drops sharply after laning, that is your biggest gain, ahead of any mechanical fix.

Farming tools differ by champion: a champion with a cheap ranged area ability clears differently from a melee champion who needs every auto. Champion-specific CS tips live on each champion’s page in our champion database.

Set two benchmarks. First, compare your CS with your lane opponent’s on the scoreboard at the end of laning; matching or beating them is the floor. Second, track your own CS/min across your last games and aim to push it up, rather than chasing a number someone posted on a different champion in a different role. Run this check whenever there is a quiet moment after laning:

Consistent last hits come from starting the attack early by a fixed amount: the time your attack takes to land. That delay has two parts, the windup of your attack animation and, for ranged champions, the flight of the projectile to the minion. Learn both for your champion and you stop losing minions you could see were low.

Every basic attack has a windup before the damage happens. If you click when the minion is already low enough to die, it keeps taking damage from other minions during your windup and often dies to them first. Click when the minion will be low enough at the moment your attack lands.

Attack speed shortens this delay, so your rhythm changes as you level up and buy items. Re-learn your timing after each attack speed purchase; the first wave after a Zeal-type item is where most players miss caster minions they used to take.

Ranged champions add travel time on top of the windup, and the farther you stand, the longer that delay. Champions with slow projectiles are punished more for late clicks. For a tight last hit, step closer so the projectile has less ground to cover; for slow, easy melee minions, you can stay at max range and stay safe.

Melee champions have no projectile, so the windup is the only delay to time. The cost is position: a melee champion has to walk into the wave to farm, which puts them in range of enemy minions and enemy trades every time they go for a hit.

The health bar is only half the information. Look at what is hitting the minion: a caster focused by several of your melee minions drops in big chunks, while a melee minion hit by a single caster loses health slowly. Predict the next incoming hit and time your attack to land right after it.

When two minions drop low together, take the more valuable one with an auto and the other with an ability, or let the cheaper one go. Abilities are backup, not your main farming tool, unless your champion is built around them; spending mana on every last hit leaves you empty when a trade or gank comes.

Last hitting under tower is easiest when you stop treating it as reaction and follow a pattern: let the tower do most of the damage, then finish the minion. The diagram below shows the baseline: melee minions take two tower shots and then your hit, while caster minions take one tower shot and then your hit.

Treat the pattern as a starting point, not a law. Very early, when your attack damage is low, a caster may need a hit from you before the tower shot so your follow-up finishes it. As your attack damage grows with levels and items, minions die sooner and you can sometimes skip the setup. Your own minions also chip the same targets, so watch whether a minion has taken extra damage before the tower picks it.

Cannon minions take several tower shots. Do not hit them early; wait until they are low and finish with an auto or an ability. If you can only save part of the wave, save the cannon first, then the casters, because melee minions are the easiest to recover with the pattern.

You farm under tower because the wave pushed into you, either because your opponent shoved or because you came back at a bad moment. Arriving as the wave crashes into your tower gives you a harder pattern and less room to trade. Good recall timing and wave management keep you out of this spot more often than any under-tower trick.

Melee champions with weak waveclear find towers hardest, because every hit means walking into the enemy wave next to the tower’s target. Champions with an area-damage ability can let the tower soften several minions and then clear them together, saving autos for the cannon. Ranged champions can farm from behind their tower’s range and take fewer hits from the enemy wave, so they should lose almost nothing under tower once the pattern is automatic.

The best time to trade is when your opponent commits to a last hit, and the worst time to last hit is when they are waiting to punish you. A last hit locks a champion into an attack animation at a predictable spot next to a low minion, so both players know where the other will be.

Watch the low minions on their side of the wave. When one drops into their kill range, your opponent has to step toward it and attack; move forward and hit them during that windup. Ranged laners do this best because they can reach the champion without walking into the enemy wave, but melee champions can do it with a gap closer when the minion sits on the near side of the wave.

Attacking an enemy champion near their minions pulls those minions onto you. Short trades are fine; long trades inside a full enemy wave cost more health than they win. Trade when their wave is smaller than yours, and step back before minion damage stacks up. For the full decision tree, read our guide to trading in lane.

Gold from a minion is permanent; health lost in a trade comes back when you recall. If a trade costs you a cannon, it usually needs to force a recall or set up a kill to be worth it. Against a lane bully, give up melee minions before casters or the cannon, and use a ranged ability to take minions you cannot reach safely with an auto.

The three high-elo games below are good review material for this skill. Pause before each last hit, predict which player gets the better end of the exchange, then play it out and check yourself. More Challenger and Grandmaster games are on our streamer and pro player pages.

This practice tool CS drill fits a 10-minute timer before your first ranked game and trains the skills in this guide in order. Pick the champion you play most, buy your usual starting item, and use the CS counter to keep score. Each step has a goal you can check yourself against.

Under-tower practice works better in a real game, because the pattern depends on minions reaching your tower. In a normal or Co-op vs. AI game, let the first wave that pushes into you sit under tower and farm it with the two-shot melee, one-shot caster pattern. Goal: secure every cannon that reaches your tower in that game.

Most CS loss comes from a few habits, not from bad hands.

Pick one skill per session. Run the drill before your first game, then spend that game on a single habit, such as the tower pattern or punishing your opponent’s last hits, and check your CS against your lane opponent at the end of laning.

When your drill score stops rising, shift your focus to farming after lane, because that is where the gap to high elo lives. When that habit sticks, pick your next fundamental from all guides.