How to Score Canasta: Melds, Bonuses & Going Out
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How Canasta Scoring Works
Canasta rewards the team that builds big melds and goes out clean, not the team that simply empties its hand first. Every card carries a fixed point value, every canasta carries a bonus on top of that, and a couple of bonuses only pay off if your team has earned them properly. If you have not covered the basics of play yet, start with how to play Canasta and come back here once you know what a meld looks like.
You score once, at the end of each hand, not as you go. Add up what you melded, add your bonuses, then subtract whatever is still sitting in your hand. The game is played to 5,000 points, usually across several hands. For the rules on what actually counts as a meld versus a canasta, see Melds and Canastas: What Counts and What Scores.
How Canasta Points Add Up
Every card carries a fixed point value whether it sits in a plain meld or inside a canasta. Add up your melded cards and you already have most of your score before a single bonus applies.
| Card | Point Value |
|---|---|
| Joker | 50 |
| Ace | 20 |
| 2 (deuce) | 20 |
| King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8 | 10 |
| 7, 6, 5, 4 | 5 |
| Black 3 | 5 |
Jokers and deuces are wild, which is why they carry high values. They can slot into almost any meld, so a team hoards them early and spends them only when a meld needs finishing.
Black threes break the normal rhythm of the game. You cannot meld them at all in ordinary play. You may meld them only on the turn in which you go out. Track your running totals with something built for it rather than doing the subtraction in your head at the end of a long night. A plain score sheet keeps both teams’ numbers in one place, hand after hand.
Red threes do not follow the table above. They work on their own rules entirely.
Canasta Bonuses: Natural, Mixed, and Going Out
A canasta is seven or more cards of the same rank melded together, and the bonus for completing one is worth more than the cards inside it.
| Bonus | Points |
|---|---|
| Natural canasta (no wild cards) | 500 |
| Mixed canasta (one or more wild cards) | 300 |
| Going out | 100 |
| Going out concealed, extra | 100 |
| Red three, each, team has melded | 100 |
| All four red threes, team has melded | 800 |
| Red three, each, team has not melded | -100 |
| All four red threes, team has not melded | -800 |
A natural canasta pays nearly double a mixed one, so if you are sitting on seven matching cards, think about whether adding a joker is worth giving up 200 points. Going out concealed means you lay down your whole hand in one turn, having melded nothing earlier and added nothing to your partner’s melds. The cards must include at least one complete canasta, and a final discard is optional. It pays double the ordinary going-out bonus because it is much harder to pull off.
Red threes are the one card you never want to hold. Draw a red three and you place it face up immediately, then draw a replacement from the stock. At the end of the hand, each red three on your side pays 100 points, but only if your team melded at least once. If your team never melds anything at all, every red three flips from a 100-point bonus to a 100-point penalty.
The Minimum Count You Need to Open
Your side’s first meld of a hand, or the melds laid down together on that turn, must clear a minimum point total, and that minimum rises as your team’s cumulative score climbs across the game. After that initial meld, the minimum no longer applies to your side.
| Team’s score so far | Minimum to open |
|---|---|
| Below zero | 15 |
| 0 to 1,495 | 50 |
| 1,500 to 2,995 | 90 |
| 3,000 or higher | 120 |
This is why a team that looks comfortably ahead can stall at the start of a later hand. If your team sits at 3,200 points, you need 120 points before you can lay anything down, which usually means combining two or three melds in one turn instead of melding the first three cards of one rank you draw.
A Worked Example: Scoring a Hand Start to Finish
Suppose a team ends a hand with two natural canastas of seven kings and seven sevens, one mixed canasta of five jacks and two twos, and a concealed hand, having safely laid down three red threes along the way.
The canasta bonuses are 500 plus 500 plus 300, for 1,300 points. The cards inside those canastas still count their own values on top: 70 for the kings, 35 for the sevens, and 90 for the jacks and twos, adding 195. Going out concealed adds 200. The three red threes add another 300, since the team melded elsewhere in the hand. Add the loose cards melded outside any canasta: four eights for 40, three queens for 30, and three fives for 15. The team’s total for the hand comes to 2,080.
Their opponents did not fare as badly as that gap suggests. They completed one mixed canasta of five nines and two twos for a 300 bonus plus 90 points in the cards, and melded a scattering of other cards worth 50 more, earning 440. But one player was left holding three cards worth 15 points, and the other was left holding two cards worth 10 points, and both amounts come off the team’s total. Their hand nets 415.
Write both lines down before the cards get mixed back into the deck. A plain score sheet is built for exactly this: two columns, a running total, and enough room to carry a full game across several hands.
Where Scoring Goes Wrong at the Table
The red three penalty is the mistake almost every new table makes once. A player draws a red three, the side melds nothing all hand, and assumes the card still pays 100. It pays -100 instead, because the bonus is conditional on the side having melded, not on having drawn the card.
The second common error is scoring a mixed canasta as if it matched a natural one. A canasta with even one wild card inside pays 300, not 500, no matter how many of the other seven cards are natural. Count the wild cards before anyone celebrates.
The third is forgetting to subtract what is left in your hand. Your team can complete two canastas and still fall behind on points if both players are sitting on a fistful of kings and aces when the other side goes out. Score the cards in your hand the same way you score a meld, then subtract, every time, before you compare totals.
Scoring gets automatic after a dozen hands or so. Until then, keep the two point tables above within reach, and when you want to drill the full sequence of a hand rather than just the scoring reference, how to practice walks through it. For strategy and the rest of the game beyond scoring, visit the Canasta hub.