Five-payline slots are classic fruit machines with every line always in play. Burning Hot has the top default return among the familiar titles, 96.45%, and the five-reel games pay on fewer spins than ten-line slots, while three-reel ones keep pace.
Five-payline slots are the fruit machine in its plainest form: three or five reels, five fixed lines, and sevens, bells and fruit where newer games put their bonus menus. Most of the well-known ones come from studios with arcade roots, Amusnet (EGT), Greentube (Novomatic) and Play’n GO. Burning Hot has the highest default return of the group at 96.45%, and the two in our own catalogue, Fire Joker and Mega Joker, fit the whole game on three reels.
The Five-Line Classics Side by Side
| Game | Studio | Grid | RTP | Top win | On top of the lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burning Hot | Amusnet (EGT) | 5×3 | 96.45% | 3,000x the line bet for five sevens | Jackpot Cards progressive |
| Fire Joker 100 | Play’n GO | 3×3 | 96.21% | 5,000x | Wheel of Fire, up to 100x |
| Fire Joker | Play’n GO | 3×3 | 96.15% | 800x | Respin of Fire and a multiplier wheel, up to 10x |
| 5 Dazzling Hot | Amusnet (EGT) | 5×3 | 95.74% | About 1,000x the line bet for five sevens | Jackpot Cards progressive |
| Sizzling Hot Deluxe | Greentube (Novomatic) | 5×3 | 95.66% | 5,000x for a screen of sevens | Gamble double-up |
Each RTP is the setting the studio ships by default, and casinos can run lower ones, as the cost table further down shows. The five lines say nothing about volatility either: Sizzling Hot Deluxe is listed as medium to high, Burning Hot and 5 Dazzling Hot as low to medium, and both Fire Jokers as medium.
Mega Joker from NetEnt sits outside the table because its return depends on the mode. Its 99% belongs to the Supermeter, the upper game that base-game wins can be sent into, so a player who never uses it gets noticeably less back.
Three Reels or Five: Two Ways to Use Five Lines
On a 3×3 grid, five lines are the three rows and the two diagonals, so every symbol on the screen counts towards something. This is the layout of Fire Joker from 2016, which adds a wild, the Respin of Fire and a wheel of multipliers worth up to 10x to a top win of 800x. Fire Joker 100 kept the grid in 2025, swapped the wheel for a Wheel of Fire worth up to 100x and lifted the ceiling to 5,000x. Mega Joker and Microgaming’s original Break da Bank are three-reel, five-line games too, and more of the type sit on our 3-reel slots page.
On five reels the same five lines run across fifteen positions, and the big pay needs five matching symbols along one line, starting from the left. Burning Hot and 5 Dazzling Hot both keep their top line win for five red sevens, and Burning Hot adds a clover wild that can expand on the middle reels. Sizzling Hot Deluxe has no wild and no free spins at all; its 5,000x comes from filling the screen with sevens, and with the big pay held back for that, a game this plain is still listed as medium to high volatility.
How Often Five-Line Slots Pay
That depends on the game more than on the line count. The reported figures put the five-reel classics well below a ten-line game such as Starburst, while the two three-reel Jokers pay about as often as it does:
| Game | Lines | Spins that pay something |
|---|---|---|
| Sizzling Hot Deluxe | 5 | About 13% |
| Mega Joker | 5 | 17% |
| Fire Joker 100 | 5 | About 21% |
| Fire Joker | 5 | About 1 in 4 |
| Starburst | 10, paying both ways | About 22.6% |
Neither layout changes the return. The classics in the first table run from 95.66% to 96.45% by default and ten-line games from about 95% to 96%, so neither format pays back more because of its line count. Nor are ten lines a promise of a calmer ride: Novomatic’s Book of Ra Deluxe has ten lines, high volatility and a top win of about 5,000x. The next step up is on our 10 payline slots page, and the far end of the scale, where cabinet games such as 50 Lions split each stake across ten times as many lines, is covered under 50 payline slots.
How Much the Casino’s Setting Changes the Cost
Classic studios let each casino pick the return from a set of versions, and with these games the spread is wide. Each pair below is one game at its default and at a lower version it has been listed at; the cost columns are long-run averages.
| Game and version | RTP | Kept from each £100 staked | 500 spins at £1, on average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fire Joker 100, default | 96.21% | £3.79 | £18.95 |
| Fire Joker 100, lowest listed | 84.21% | £15.79 | £78.95 |
| Fire Joker, default | 96.15% | £3.85 | £19.25 |
| Fire Joker, lower version | 94.23% | £5.77 | £28.85 |
| Sizzling Hot Deluxe, default | 95.66% | £4.34 | £21.70 |
| Sizzling Hot Deluxe, lower version | 90.02% | £9.98 | £49.90 |
Fire Joker 100 at its lowest listed version keeps about four times as much of every stake as at its default, with the same reels, symbols and features. The version a casino runs is printed in the game’s info or paytable screen, which makes it the one number worth reading before a session.
Stakes work simply here, because every line is always in play. At UK-licensed casinos a spin is capped at £5 for anyone 25 or older and at £2 under that age, so the five lines carry at most £1 each, or 40p at the lower limit.
Gamble Buttons and Jackpot Cards
Many Amusnet and Novomatic classics, Sizzling Hot Deluxe among them, offer a Gamble button after a win: name the colour of the next card and the win doubles, name it wrong and the win is gone. That makes it a coin flip on money already won, adding swing to that win while the game’s long-run return stays where it was.
Burning Hot and 5 Dazzling Hot carry Jackpot Cards, a four-level progressive that is drawn at random on top of the base game. No line combination reaches it, so the 3,000x and 1,000x line tops in the table are the most the reels themselves pay. Mega Joker has a progressive jackpot and a Mystery Win of its own.
Who Five-Line Games Are For
These are games for people who like the arcade fruit machine as it was: a paytable that fits on one screen, spins that can be read at a glance, and no feature menu to learn. Quick sessions suit them, and UK rules keep every spin to at least 2.5 seconds however fast the game looks. The wider set of fruit and retro designs is grouped under our fruit and classic and retro themes.
They suit players less well who want regular bonus rounds, cascades or a big feature buy-in, since almost none of these games have one. On the five-reel games in particular, with wins on so few spins, a balance can fall steadily for a long stretch before anything lands.
