The best way to grind PokéCoins in Pokémon Go (2024)

Pokémon Go is a free experience at heart, but there are a few things that only money can buy—PokéCoin money, to be exact.

While you can buy PokéCoins in the store with actual currency, trainers who want to play the game entirely for free have ways to circumvent the store and unlock Pokécoins a different way—even if the methods can be a bit of a grind.

Pokémon Pokécoin best farming methods (2024)

The primary method to get PokéCoins for free in Pokémon Go is via Gyms.

When you defeat a Gym of a rival team—or come across an empty Gym—or a team Gym with a space, you can place any of your Pokémon onto that Gym to defend it. So long as your Pokémon remains in that Gym, it’ll slowly start to gain PokéCoins for you. There is a major catch to this, though.

You can only place a single Pokémon in every Gym, and your Pokémon won’t give you PokéCoins until it has been knocked out and returned to you. So, if your Pokémon is in a gym for several weeks, you won’t get any PokéCoins until another trainer knocks it out and it returns to you.

That Pokémon also becomes unusable in raids and other features, so there’s a chance your Pokémon can be abandoned with no way to retrieve it, as there is no manual way to get your Pokémon back from a Gym to stop isolated Gym PokéCoin farms.

Equally, you can only earn 50 PokéCoins a day from Gyms, so if multiple Pokémon return to you at once, it doesn’t matter how long they have been in the Gym; the maximum amount of PokéCoins you’ll get back is 50. There is no real way to control anything, and it’s all a bit of a mess.

Originally, when the game first launched in 2016, you would get PokéCoins through tasks, or you would get PokéCoins per day when Pokémon were in Gyms even if they didn’t get knocked up, which gave certain rural players a free PokéCoin monopoly. This was eventually scrapped in favor of the current system.

Best PokéCoins grinding strategies (2024)

If you live in a city or a place with a lot of Pokémon Go activity, chances are you won’t have a Pokémon in a gym for too long before it gets knocked out.

As a Pokémon earns a coin every 10 minutes, some strategies you can employ is placing a Pokémon down early in the morning before most trainers are awake or at work to soak up PokéCoins until it is eventually defeated later in the day and replaced by another team’s Pokémon.

Equally, there are sometimes free events throughout the year that offer free PokéCoins, but these have become a lot rarer in recent years and seem only to be provided during event screwups by Niantic. And even then, the PokéCoins you get is a small amount, like 50 to 100.

There are no other ways to get free PokéCoins besides Gyms, so if you want to buy an item from the store or get an Upgrade, only one last option is available.

How much do PokéCoins cost to buy?

If you want to buy PokéCoins as the grind is too much (we don’t blame you), you can buy PokéCoins from the in-game store at these prices.

You can also buy PokeCoins at a discounted price through the Pokemon GO Web Store. The store offers more Coins for the same price and even has offers on event passes to circumvent in-app purchase fees on the iOS and Android stores.