GTA 5 Heists: The Gold Medal Guide for Every Job and Approach

Story mode in GTA 5 has five heists, and each one hides a Gold Medal behind a list of extra conditions the base mission never asks for. Miss the medal and you still finish the job and get paid - but you leave 100% completion, and the achievement tied to it, on the table.

The essentials:

• GTA 5's story has five heists: The Jewel Store Job, The Merryweather Heist, The Paleto Score, The Bureau Raid and The Big Score.
• Most heists offer two approaches (Smart/Loud, Offshore/Rural, Subtle/Obvious), and each approach carries its own separate Gold Medal objectives.
• Objectives fall into four buckets: a time limit, a headshot count, a minimum accuracy percentage, and one or two mission-specific bonus tasks.
• You do not need to nail every objective in a single run - once you clear one, the game remembers it across replays of the same mission and approach.
• The setup missions that lead into each heist have their own Gold Medals too, and clearing them first makes the finale much less stressful.

How Gold Medals Actually Work

After every story mission, GTA 5 shows a Bronze, Silver or Gold rating based on a checklist of objectives specific to that mission. Reaching Gold on a heist finale (and its setups) counts toward the game's 100% Completion checklist, alongside collectibles, side content and story progress - see our GTA 5 100% Completion Checklist for the full picture of everything else that's tracked.

The one thing most players miss: individual objectives are saved once you hit them, even if the overall run fails or falls short of Gold elsewhere. If you nail the headshot count on one attempt but blow the time limit, replay the mission from the pause menu (Story > Replay Mission) and focus only on the objective you're missing. You can build a Gold Medal run across several attempts instead of chasing a perfect single playthrough.

A few habits make every heist easier to grind:

• Skip cutscenes and dialogue with the button prompt shown on screen - time limits start the moment the mission loads, not when the action starts.
• Pick your crew based on skill level, not cut percentage. A cheaper crew member with a low stat can blow a stealth approach or tank your accuracy score; the extra cash from a smaller cut isn't worth losing the medal.
• Warm up on the shooting range or with a few free-roam gunfights before any heist that needs a high accuracy percentage - misses early in a mission are hard to recover from.

The Jewel Store Job

The opening heist offers a Smart approach (chloroform gas, sedated staff, no gunfire) and a Loud approach (smash the windows and grab what you can before the police show up). Smart is the easier route for a clean Gold Medal since there's no combat to manage.

Typical Gold Medal objectives on the Smart approach include grabbing the jewelry within roughly 50 seconds of gassing the store, looting all of the display cabinets rather than just the fastest ones, and keeping Franklin safe during the getaway chase through the Los Santos River channel. The setup mission, Casing the Jewel Store, has its own medal tied to how thoroughly you scout the store and armored car route beforehand - do that scouting fully rather than rushing it.

The Merryweather Heist

This one splits into an Offshore approach (Franklin dives to a sunken cargo ship to retrieve stolen files) and a Rural approach (Trevor and the crew hit a Merryweather compound by land). The Offshore run rewards stealth: expect objectives built around headshots on guards, a high overall accuracy percentage, a set number of silent takedowns, and finding the target shipping container within a tight time window after entering the water. Go in with a suppressed weapon and take the stealth kills whenever the game offers them instead of shooting on sight.

The Paleto Score

The Merryweather compound heist's cousin further north, The Paleto Score sends the crew after a bank vault in Paleto Bay - by asking politely with a hostage situation (Subtle) or by blasting straight into the vault (Obvious). Regardless of approach, expect the Gold Medal to hinge on a strict time limit (around sixteen minutes total), a minimum accuracy percentage, and a large amount of collateral damage caused around Paleto Bay during the shootout with police and Merryweather reinforcements on the way out. Keep firing at pursuing vehicles on the escape rather than just outrunning them - the damage objective adds up fast that way.

The Bureau Raid

The Bureau Raid has arguably the widest gap between its two approaches. Roof Entry drops the crew in by helicopter for a loud fight through the building, while the Air Duct approach has the team pose as a fire crew to sneak in from below. Roof Entry's medal leans on combat stats: a headshot count in the twenties, a minimum accuracy percentage, and a strict rule against killing any of the civilian office workers caught in the crossfire - stick to federal agents and avoid free-firing into rooms you haven't cleared visually. If you'd rather avoid the shootout entirely, the Air Duct approach trades those combat objectives for stealth-based ones and is the more forgiving choice for players who struggle with the gunfight.

The Big Score

The finale offers a Subtle approach (a longer, more expensive plan through the sewers with a required bribe and three upgraded vehicles) and an Obvious approach (a straightforward train robbery and firefight that needs no bribe and only one prepped vehicle). Obvious is both the cheaper setup and the easier Gold Medal: objectives typically include a headshot count around twenty, finishing the whole heist within sixteen minutes, dropping the stolen gold onto the train within thirty seconds of the prompt appearing, and hitting a minimum accuracy percentage. Practicing the gold drop timing on a lower difficulty run first is worth it, since missing that window alone can cost the medal even if every other objective is clean.

Whichever approach you take on the finale, remember which protagonist you end up controlling matters for the epilogue and which of GTA 5's three endings become available - it's worth deciding on your ending before you commit to a Big Score approach.

Setups Matter Too

Every heist finale is preceded by two or three setup missions, and Rockstar gave most of them their own Gold Medal conditions - usually a time limit and an accuracy or stealth requirement, sometimes tied to a vehicle chase or a specific kill count. Treat them as practice runs for the finale's demands: a setup that asks for 70% accuracy is training you for the finale's combat, and a setup built around stealth is training you for the finale's detection rules. Clearing setups on Gold first, before attempting the finale, is the single best way to avoid discovering a hard requirement mid-heist with no way to recover.

If you're chasing every checklist item GTA 5 has to offer beyond the heists, our guides on Michael, Franklin and Trevor's special abilities, the full Strangers and Freaks roster, and how to reach North Yankton cover the rest of what feeds into 100% completion. And if you're curious whether GTA 6 will bring heists back in a similar form, we've broken down how GTA 6 heists could work based on everything shown in the trailers so far.