Baccarat commission
Baccarat commission is the fee, normally 5% of the winnings, that a casino deducts from a winning Banker bet, so a €10 Banker win pays €9.50 rather than €10. It exists because the Banker hand wins slightly more often than the Player hand under the fixed drawing rules. Without the deduction, Banker would carry an edge in the player’s favour. The commission turns that advantage back into a small margin for the house, and it is the reason the two main bets end up priced so closely.
How the 5% commission is calculated
The calculation is applied to the profit on a winning Banker bet, never to the stake itself. A €20 Banker bet that wins earns €20 in profit, the casino keeps 5% of that, which is €1, and the player collects €39 including the returned stake.
Losing Banker bets pay no commission, and neither do ties, because a tie returns Banker and Player stakes untouched in standard punto banco. The fee only appears when Banker actually wins.
Why charge it at all? Under the standard third-card rules with eight decks, Banker wins roughly 45.9% of hands and Player about 44.6%, with ties making up the remaining 9.5% or so. At even money that gap would hand the bettor a positive expectation on Banker, and the 5% deduction is set just high enough to reverse it. The result is a house edge of about 1.06% on Banker against roughly 1.24% on Player, which is why Banker remains the cheaper bet even after the fee.
Those edges are long-run averages across many thousands of hands, not a forecast for any one session.
Commission and no-commission tables compared
Operators recover the Banker advantage in different ways, and the table below sets out the common methods with approximate eight-deck house edges from published baccarat probability tables. Exact rules vary between providers, so the game’s own help screen is the place to confirm which version is running.
| Variant | Banker win rule | Banker house edge |
|---|---|---|
| Standard punto banco | Pays 1:1 minus 5% | About 1.06% |
| Reduced commission | Pays 1:1 minus a lower fee | Below 1.06%, varies by fee |
| No-commission (Banker 6 rule) | Win on six pays 1:2 | About 1.46% |
| EZ Baccarat | Three-card seven pushes | About 1.02% |
| Player bet (any variant) | Pays 1:1, no fee | About 1.24% |
Where players meet the commission
In online and live casino baccarat the deduction happens automatically, and the balance simply credits 0.95 times the stake as profit on a Banker win. Land-based tables have traditionally tracked it differently, with dealers marking the commission owed in small boxes and collecting it when the player leaves or the shoe ends.
The label “no commission” is where most readers get caught. It does not mean the house has given up its margin; it means the margin has been moved into an altered payout, usually a half-paid Banker win on a total of six. On paper that version costs the Banker bettor more over time, not less, even though no fee ever appears on screen.
Read the paytable before the first hand.
What baccarat commission is not
Commission is sometimes mistaken for the house edge, but the two are different measures. The commission is a fixed rate taken from a winning bet, while the house edge is the average share of every stake the casino expects to keep across all outcomes, wins and losses alike. A 5% fee therefore produces an edge of about 1.06%, not 5%.
It is also separate from rake, the cut a poker room takes from pots between players, since baccarat is played against the house. And it has nothing to do with wagering contribution under bonus terms, where some operators count baccarat at a reduced rate or exclude it entirely; those rules come from the bonus conditions, not from the game.
One myth deserves a plain correction: a run of Banker wins does not make Player “due”, and the commission does not change from hand to hand.
