Quests

Grand Theft Auto V never puts its side content on a menu. Activities appear on the map when a story mission clears them, a Strangers and Freaks question mark shows up when a character reaches the right chapter, and in GTA Online the same job is gated by a rank, an apartment or a piece of property costing seven figures. Our 33 quest pages cover all of it, and the most useful way to read them is in the order the game itself hands them over: what is open the moment you can drive, what each story mission adds, and what each Online purchase buys you.

Payouts sit in the table as a column rather than a ranking, because they are not what decides the order. A $500 off-road race and a $1 million heist are both locked behind a single mission you have to finish first. If you want money sorted by return, our mechanics guide does that; this page is about access.

The unlock order at a glance

Open on day one

Five of our pages need nothing but a character who can walk into a shop. Store robberies are the purest: point a gun at any of the 19 clerks, wait for the bag, shoot the second register if there is one, and leave with a two-star wanted level. The page tables every location and take, from Rob's Liquor on the Great Ocean Highway at $100 to the Limited LTD on Tongva Drive at $1,200, which adds up to $12,310 if you hit all of them, and suggests a silenced weapon and a waiting car. Random events are the blue dots that appear as you drive, and the page catalogues dozens with rewards from $80 for a drunk's lift to $25,000 for the deal gone wrong in the Chiliad wilderness and a repeatable weed farm shootout worth far more. Several matter beyond cash: the Senora Freeway crash recruits Taliana Martinez as a getaway driver, the Strawberry pharmacy robbery recruits Packie, and the Wild Oats Drive domestic adds a golf partner.

The gun range charges $14 to enter and nothing for ammo, scores hits at 10, 25, 50 or 100 points with a multiplier up to 3x, and pays out in weapon unlocks and a 25 percent Ammu-Nation discount for gold across the board; heavy weapon challenges open only after bronze in everything else. Tennis is playable at the court behind Michael's house and seven public courts, with the page covering serve timing, topspin and backspin and the fact that every court must be visited for 100 percent. Taxi missions start the moment you steal a cab, but the page's real content is the set of Downtown Cab Co. jobs Franklin gets after buying the company, which run from a $500 tailor bonus to a $10,000 tip for playing getaway driver from a jewellery store.

What the early story missions unlock

From here on the map fills in one mission at a time. Repossession, Franklin's first job for Simeon, puts Tonya's question mark across the street from his house and starts the Strangers and Freaks chain; the page walks every strand for all three characters, from Barry's alien and clown hallucinations to Nigel and Mrs. Thornhill's souvenir thefts, and it is also where our Duke O'Death becomes available. Complications opens golf at $100 a round, nine holes against five opponents from Todd Rosenweig (easy) to Castro Lagano (hard). Fame or Shame opens two things at once: the triathlon, three escalating swim-cycle-run courses ending in the 119-checkpoint Coyote Cross Country, and Lester's call to Franklin about assassinations, five hits worth $5,000 to $10,000 each whose real value is the stock moves covered on our stock market exploits page. Crystal Maze, Trevor's meth-lab mission, unlocks the single dartboard at the Yellow Jack Inn, where darts is a 301-down game with one steadied aim per round.

Mr. Philips is the busiest gate on the list. It sends Trevor to Maude for the four bail bond targets, Ralph Ostrowski in the quarry through Curtis Weaver in the hobo camp, each worth more alive than dead and one requiring a parachute chase off Mount Chiliad. It opens the six off-road races at $500 a win, Canyon Cliffs to the jeep-only Eco Friendly at the wind farm, with Mineward Spiral restricted to 8 PM to 3 AM. And on newer consoles and PC it triggers Ron's text about the five stock car races in the Grand Senora Desert, each win handing over a branded car, the Burger Shot Stallion first and the Cheval Marshall monster truck fifth, parked afterwards at Trevor's airstrip.

Mid-game: Trevor comes to town

Friends Reunited, the mission that brings Trevor to Los Santos, opens flight school at the airport, a 12-lesson course from Training Take Off through knife flights, helicopter runs, skydives and the stunt-checkpoint finale, each medalled on time or landing accuracy; Trevor barely needs it, Michael and Franklin do, and one heist approach later asks Michael to have done it. The same mission puts a drunk couple around the corner from Floyd's, and driving them to the cannibal camp instead of home earns Altruist Acolyte, worth five Gamerscore and only possible as Trevor. Cletus's Target Practice and Fair Game strands then unlock free-roam hunting from the trailer in the Chiliad wilderness, scored by animal, shot placement (a heart shot is 10 points and $100) and weapon, with fifteen challenges split across Weapon Master, Nature Photographer and Master Hunter tracks.

Franklin's strands mature at the same time. Hao's Shift Work, itself gated by Pulling Favors, opens the five street races between 8 PM and 5 AM, Franklin only, with entry fees from $100 to $1,500 and prizes from $450 for South Los Santos to $6,750 for the sports-bike Vespucci Canals race. The first Paparazzo mission triggers Beverly's text about the wildlife photography challenge on PS4 and Xbox One, 20 animals from Chop the rottweiler to a Banham Canyon mountain lion, sent to LS Tourist Info for the Kraken submarine. Minor Turbulence unlocks Dom's Risk Assessment and with it the 13 parachute jumps, from a boat landing off La Puerta to a moving truck below a Pillbox Hill crane, paying up to $540 with checkpoint bonuses; all 13 are needed before Dom's last mission at the spillway.

Michael's own strand is the Epsilon program, unlocked once Father/Son and Pulling Favors are done and the online identity test is passed. It is the one quest line that costs money to progress, $500, then $5,000, then $10,000 in donations, five luxury cars to source, ten days in the robes and a five-mile desert run, before the final mission hands you a van of cult money that the page recommends keeping by killing the escort. Finishing it also unlocks the ten Epsilon tracts on our items guide.

The story heist chain and the ending

Three pages follow the campaign's own heist order. The Merryweather heist comes after the Jewelry Store job with Trevor leading, and the page gives the gold requirements for both routes: the freighter approach (12 headshots, 12 stealth kills, 80 percent accuracy, the container found in under a minute) and the offshore approach, which first needs Trevor to steal a Cargobob from Fort Zancudo in under 5:30 and then wants every pursuer, four boats and six helicopters, destroyed. The Paleto Bay heist follows directly, with a setup that times the police response and a Paleto Score that demands 4,000 rounds fired and $1 million of damage for gold, before the escape by train. Finishing that chain also switches on the 30 nuclear waste barrels and submarine pieces once the Sonar Collections Dock is bought.

The endings page is the last story unlock and carries a spoiler warning. Devin's visit to Franklin's house presents three phone options: Something Sensible kills Trevor at the oil fields, The Time Has Come kills Michael at the Palmer-Taylor power station whether or not you try to pull him up, and The Third Way sends all three into a foundry ambush and out the other side to deal with Stretch, the Triad boss, the FIB agent on the Ferris wheel and Devin in his trunk. Whichever you pick, the mission replay menu lets you see the others later, but a killed protagonist is gone from the map in that save.

GTA Online: gated by rank

Online swaps story missions for ranks and property. The two achievement pages sit at the bottom of that ladder. Un-natural Selection needs Rank 15, when Ron's Survival missions appear as a skull icon; clear all ten waves on Boneyard, Sandy Survival or Industrial Plant, ideally with two or three friends and the Boneyard fence as cover, for 20 Gamerscore. Clean Sweep needs Rank 18, when Martin's Gang Attacks start showing as red circles; finish one with at least ten kills and no deaths for 10 Gamerscore. Our level up fast page covers reaching those ranks.

GTA Online: gated by an apartment

The original heist chain runs through Lester and a high-end apartment. The Fleeca Job is the two-player introduction: scope the bank through a hacked feed, learn Lester's hacking minigame, steal an armoured Kuruma from a Del Perro car park, then split into Driller and Driver for the vault and a getaway under a helicopter's magnet. Prison Break scales to four players and a $40,000 setup fee across Plane, Bus, Station and Wet Work before the Bolingbroke finale, where Prisoner, Officer, Pilot and Demolition each have a role and a five-star escape. Pacific Standard closes the chain at $1 million for four players, with five setups (Vans, Signal, Hack, Convoy, Bikes) and a finale that gives you about two minutes in the vault before the city's police arrive and a Lectro ride to a cliff-edge parachute jump. Completing Fleeca and Prison Break is also what unlocks the Hydra and Valkyrie on our items guide.

GTA Online: gated by property

The later jobs each hide behind a purchase, and the price of admission climbs with every update. Gunrunning Mobile Operations need a bunker and then a $1,225,000 Mobile Operations Center from Warstock; the eight missions inside it are unlocked by resupply counts from two (Severe Weather Patterns, Half-Track Bully) to sixteen (Work Dispute), pay roughly $14,000 to $16,500, and each one discounts the weaponized vehicle it featured, the APC, Dune FAV, Half-Track, Oppressor and Weaponized Tampa among them. The Diamond Casino heist starts with buying a retro arcade from Lester's list and ends with a $2.1 million vault, minus Lester's $60,000, after scoping six access points, photographing Agatha's blueprints and drilling two locks before the nerve agent releases; destroying the 50 signal jammers on our items guide recruits Avi Schwartzman as its hacker.

The Cayo Perico heist raises the buy-in to the $2.2 million Kosatka on our submarine page, then runs three phases: gathering intel through the compound's camera tower to find the Madrazo files, a prep checklist of five approach vehicles, three pieces of equipment, a loadout and optional disruptions, and a two-player infiltration that checkpoints on death. Finishing it and registering as CEO or VIP triggers English Dave's Keinemusik missions, a skate van, a pizza scooter and five Chakra Stones on eight-hour cooldowns, rewarded with a BF Weevil the page values at $850,000. The Moodymann missions need a Diamond Casino penthouse, $1.5 million at base, and pay 25,000 chips for a scooter delivery and another 25,000 plus DJ booth access for recovering his Itali RSX. Where those properties are and what they cost is the subject of our locations guide.

Frequently asked questions

Which side activities are available from the very start?

Store robberies, random events, the gun range, tennis and ordinary taxi fares. Everything else on this page waits for a named story mission, an Online rank or a purchase.

Which single mission unlocks the most?

Mr. Philips. It opens Maude's bail bonds, the off-road races and, on current platforms, the stock car races, and it is the prerequisite for two more Strangers and Freaks strands.

What do I need before the first GTA Online heist?

A high-end apartment with a planning room and Lester's introduction; the Fleeca Job then needs one other player. The collectibles those heists unlock are on our items guide, and the GTA 5 hub separates the story and Online content this page mixes.