Smart Calculators SmartCalculators

Mahjong Score Calculator

Turn a hand you have already agreed on into what each of the three opponents pays — Hong Kong faan, Japanese han and fu, Chinese Official points, or the value printed on your NMJL card.

Ruleset

Your hand

Count the faan your table gives the hand. Most tables need at least 3 to win.

How you won

How the hand was won

Table rules

Conversion table
On a discard

A multiplier, not a currency. Leave it at 1 to read the answer in table points.

What the winner collects (points or chips)

8

The player who discarded pays all 8.

Each opponent pays

8 / 0 / 0

In the order of the table below.

Table points before the split

8

Who pays what

Player Pays
The player who discarded 8
Another opponent 0
Another opponent 0

Which system is yours?

Ruleset Where it is played Unit What you enter
Hong Kong (faan) Hong Kong, Macau, southern China, and most family sets sold in the West points or chips Faan
American — NMJL card (points) The United States, on the National Mah Jongg League card points, cents at most tables The value printed on your card
Japanese riichi (han and fu) Japan, and online rooms everywhere points Han and fu, or the hand's structure
Chinese Official / MCR (points) International tournaments and mainland competition play points The hand's point total

Pick the one your table plays. Everything above changes with it.

Hong Kong: faan to points
Faan Full spicy Half spicy Self-draw, each pays On a discard
0 faan 1 1 0.5 1
1 faan 2 2 1 2
2 faan 4 4 2 4
3 faan 8 8 4 8
4 faan 16 16 8 16
5 faan 32 24 12 24
6 faan 64 32 16 32
7 faan 128 48 24 48
8 faan 256 64 32 64
9 faan 512 96 48 96
10 faan 1,024 128 64 128
11 faan 2,048 192 64 128
12 faan 4,096 256 64 128
13 faan 8,192 384 64 128

The last two columns use the conversion table, the cap and the point value you set above. Any faan above the cap pays the cap's figure.

Half spicy, a 10-faan cap, discarder pays all, kazoe yakuman on and kiriage off are this page's starting points, not universal rules. Every one of them is a control above.

Every payment rule on this page comes from the documents named under Sources.

Share
WhatsApp Telegram X Facebook Reddit

Mahjong score calculator. What each of the three opponents pays the winner.

A mahjong score calculator turns a hand value you already agreed on — faan, han and fu, Chinese points, or a card value — into three payments. Pick Hong Kong, Japanese riichi, Chinese Official or American, say whether the hand was won on a discard or a self-draw, and it returns what the winner collects and what each opponent hands over.

What is mahjong scoring?

Mahjong scoring happens in two stages: the table agrees what the winning hand is worth, and then that value turns into three payments. Rulebooks and wikis are generous about the first stage — the patterns, the faan, the yaku — and brief about the second, which is the one that stops play while four people do arithmetic over a discarded tile.
Four systems dominate English-speaking tables, and they do not share a currency. Hong Kong counts faan and converts them through a doubling table. Japanese riichi counts han and fu and runs them through a formula. Chinese Official, usually abbreviated MCR, counts points against a fixed pattern list. American mahjong reads a value printed beside the hand on that year's National Mah Jongg League card. A five in one system means nothing in another: five faan is 24 points at a half-spicy Hong Kong table, five han is a mangan worth 8,000 to a non-dealer in riichi, and five points is not even a legal win under MCR's eight-point minimum.
In English, the American game is the one most people are looking up — the English Wikipedia article on American mahjong runs roughly 6,000 views a month against about 3,300 for the Japanese scoring-rules article — and it is also the system with the least arithmetic help online, because the card that carries the hand values is a copyrighted compilation reissued every year. This page solves that by never touching the card. You read the value beside your own hand, type the number, and the calculator applies the payment rules, which are not copyrightable: the discarder pays double, a self-pick makes all three pay double, a jokerless hand doubles again, and a bettor is paid by everyone except the winner.
What separates this from a printed scoring chart is that the chart moves. Hong Kong tables agree on very little — half spicy or full, a cap at 8, 10 or 13 faan, the discarder paying the whole thing or half of it, and a point value that is one chip at one table and ten at another. All of those are switches here, and the faan reference table under the calculator recomputes its payment columns as you move them.

How to use the mahjong score calculator

The calculator asks for a hand value, not for tiles. If your table has agreed the hand is worth three faan, thirty points, or three han and thirty fu, you already have everything it needs.
1. Pick your system under Which rules are you playing? The four options are Hong Kong (faan), American — NMJL card (points), Japanese riichi (han and fu), and Chinese Official / MCR (points). In English the page opens on Hong Kong, because it is the only one that gives a complete answer before you type anything.
2. Fill in Your hand. Hong Kong wants a Faan figure from 0 to 13. American wants the Hand value from your card (10 to 100) plus the Jokerless hand and Someone bet on me toggles. MCR wants Hand points, flowers excluded and a separate count of Flowers and seasons. Riichi either takes Han and Fu directly or, if you leave How do you want fu counted? on "Count my fu for me", builds the fu from a Hand shape, four Sets, a Pair and a Wait.
3. Set How the hand was won, which offers "Won on a discard" and "Won on a self-draw". One pair of words covers ron and tsumo, 出銃 and 自摸, discard and self-pick, so the same control serves all four systems.
4. Open Table rules if your table is not on the defaults. It sits folded shut, and it is where Hong Kong's Conversion table (Full spicy or Half spicy), Faan maximum (8, 10 or 13), the "On a discard" split and the Point value at your table live, alongside riichi's Honba counters, Riichi sticks on the table, Kiriage mangan and the 13+ han switch. MCR has no house-rule switches, so the panel does not appear at all in that mode.
5. Read the cards. What the winner collects (points or chips) is the headline figure, with a sentence under it naming who pays what, and a copy button beside it. Each opponent pays breaks that into three numbers, in the order of the payment table. The third card shows the value the split was made from, and it is renamed per ruleset — Table points before the split in Hong Kong, Hand value after multipliers in American, Hand points plus flowers plus 8 in MCR, Base points in riichi. Riichi adds a Limit class card and, when the page is counting for you, a Fu card.
6. Scroll to the tables. "Who pays what" and "Which system is yours?" stay on screen throughout; the four reference charts open behind a fold, one for each system. The Hong Kong chart's first two payment columns are the fixed conversion tables, and the two after them recompute with the cap, the table, the discard rule and the point value you set. The riichi chart badges the row matching your current hand with "your hand".
How much of the form you see depends on the system: Hong Kong shows three controls plus the fold, American and MCR four each, and riichi with automatic fu counting shows thirteen. On a phone they stack one per row.

How each system decides who pays

The four systems disagree about almost everything except that somebody owes somebody money. Here is what each one actually does once the hand value is settled.
Hong Kong. The faan count is capped first, then converted. Full spicy doubles at every step, so the ladder is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and onward. Half spicy tracks it up to 4 faan and then grows every second step instead of every one, which is why 5 faan is 24 rather than 32 and 7 faan is 48 rather than 128. The result is multiplied by your table's point value. On a self-draw, each of the three opponents pays half of that figure and the winner collects one and a half times it. On a discard the split depends on the table: under "Discarder pays all" the discarder pays the whole thing and the other two pay nothing, while under "Discarder pays half, the others split the rest" the discarder pays half and the other two a quarter each. Both discard splits produce the same total for the winner — they only move the burden around. Most tables also require 3 faan to declare a win at all; the calculator will still compute a smaller hand and say so, because that minimum is a table agreement rather than arithmetic.
American (NMJL). The card value doubles first if the hand was jokerless. On a discard, the discarder pays twice the resulting value and the other two pay it once each. On a self-pick, all three pay twice. If someone bet on you, everyone except you also pays the bettor exactly what they paid you. That gives four payment shapes from a single number, which is why a 25-point hand can be worth 100, 150, 200 or 300 depending only on how it finished.
Chinese Official (MCR). Flowers and seasons are worth one point each and are added to the hand total. On a discard, the discarder pays that total plus 8 and the other two pay 8 each. On a self-pick, all three pay the total plus 8. The fixed 8 from every opponent is why even the smallest legal hand collects 32 on a discard. The eight-point minimum is counted before flowers, so a six-point hand with two flowers has not reached it — flowers never carry you over the line.
Japanese riichi. Fu start at 20, plus 10 for a closed hand won on a discard or 2 for a self-draw, plus whatever the sets, the pair and the wait are worth, rounded up to the next 10. Three shapes bypass that: seven pairs is a flat 25 and is never rounded, pinfu is 20 on a self-draw and 30 on a discard, and an open hand with nothing else to count is a flat 30 — the 食い平和 rule, which is why 20 fu only ever happens on a pinfu self-draw. Those fu feed the base-points formula below. From 5 han a fixed limit ladder takes over and fu stop mattering. Finally, 300 per honba counter goes to the winner (100 from each payer on a self-draw) and 1,000 per riichi stick comes off the table, paid by nobody.

The riichi formula: base points from han and fu

base=min⁡ ⁣(fu×2 han+2, 2000)\text{base} = \min\!\left(\text{fu} \times 2^{\,\text{han}+2},\ 2000\right)
  • base\text{base} = Base points (基本点). Never paid directly — every payment is a multiple of it. The calculator shows it on the "Base points" card.
  • fu\text{fu} = Minipoints from the hand's structure: 20 to start, plus the win method, the sets, the pair and the wait, rounded up to the next 10. Seven pairs is a fixed 25 and pinfu a fixed 20 or 30.
  • han\text{han} = Doubles from yaku and dora. Each han doubles the base, which is why one extra dora can be worth more than the whole fu count.
  • 2,0002{,}000 = The ceiling. Any combination that would exceed it is paid as a mangan instead, so 40 fu and 4 han computes 2,560 and is paid as 2,000.
  • 4× or 6×4\times \text{ or } 6\times = A non-dealer winning on a discard is owed 4 times the base; a dealer is owed 6 times. On a self-draw a non-dealer takes 1 base from each non-dealer and 2 from the dealer; a dealer takes 2 from everyone.
Worked on the riichi state the page opens with in Japanese — a closed hand, 3 han, 30 fu, non-dealer. The base is 30 × 2⁵ = 960. Won on a discard, the winner is owed 4 × 960 = 3,840, which rounds up to 3,900 paid entirely by the discarder. The same hand from a dealer is owed 6 × 960 = 5,760, rounding to 5,800.
The detail that trips people up is where the rounding happens. Each payer's share is rounded up to the next 100 on its own — you never round the total and divide it. Take a pinfu hand at 3 han, base 640, won on a self-draw by a non-dealer. The two non-dealers owe 640 each, rounding to 700; the dealer owes 1,280, rounding to 1,300. The winner collects 700 + 700 + 1,300 = 2,700. Round the total first and you get 640 × 4 = 2,560 → 2,600, which is 100 short and will not balance against three opponents' sticks.

Hong Kong faan chart — both conversion tables

FaanFull spicyHalf spicy
011
122
244
388
41616
53224
66432
712848
825664
951296
101,024128
112,048192
124,096256
138,192384

Worked examples: four systems, one question — who pays what

Hong Kong, 3 faan — the same hand under all three payment conventions

Three faan on a half-spicy table converts to 8 points, and the table's point value is 1. That single figure produces three different payment splits depending on how the hand finished and which discard rule the table uses.
How it finishedWinner collectsThe three payers
Discard, discarder pays all88 / 0 / 0
Discard, discarder pays half84 / 2 / 2
Self-draw124 / 4 / 4
Notice that the two discard rows collect the same 8 — the rule only decides who carries it. The self-draw row is the one that pays more, because the winner takes one and a half times the table value rather than one times it. The zeros in the first row are part of the answer rather than an error: when the discarder pays all, two opponents genuinely pay nothing.

Hong Kong, 13 faan — why the cap is the most important switch on the page

A thirteen-faan hand on a half-spicy table converts to 384 points if the table allows it. Most club tables cap lower — Wikipedia's Hong Kong scoring article puts the common cap at 10 — and with the Faan maximum set to 10 the count is capped before conversion, so the hand pays 128 instead — the same as a plain ten-faan hand — and the calculator flags that the cap is what limited it. Raise the maximum to 13 and the same hand pays 384, three times as much.
The conversion table matters almost as much. Five faan is 24 on half spicy and 32 on full spicy; by 7 faan the gap is 48 against 128, and by 10 faan it is 128 against 1,024. Two tables that both call themselves "Hong Kong rules" can differ by a factor of eight on the same hand, which is why the page exposes both tables side by side rather than picking one.

American NMJL — one 25-point hand, four different payouts

The card value is the only thing you type. The multipliers do the rest, and there are exactly three of them: the discarder pays double, a self-pick makes all three pay double, and a jokerless hand doubles again.
Hand valueOn a discardDiscard, jokerlessSelf-pickSelf-pick, jokerless
25100200150300
30120240180360
35140280210420
40160320240480
45180360270540
50200400300600
Read the 25 row across: a 25-point hand won on a discard collects 100, split 50 from the discarder and 25 from each of the other two. Jokerless, that becomes 200, split 100 / 50 / 50. Self-picked it is 150, with all three paying 50. Jokerless and self-picked, it is 300 — twelve times the printed value, from a single number on the card. A 50-point jokerless hand won on a discard collects 400, split 200 / 100 / 100. The jokerless double does not apply to hands in the Singles and Pairs section, which are jokerless by definition, nor to quints.

Chinese Official (MCR) — the fixed 8 that everybody forgets

MCR's payment is the hand total plus a flat 8 from every opponent, which makes small hands worth far more than their point count suggests.
Hand pointsDiscarder paysEach other paysCollect on a discardEach pays on a self-pickCollect on a self-pick
8168321648
12208362060
16248402472
24328483296
324085640120
485687256168
647288872216
8896811296288
The minimum legal hand, 8 points, collects 32 on a discard — four times its point count — and 48 on a self-pick. Flowers are added on top: a 24-point hand with two flowers becomes 26, and on a discard the winner collects 50, split 34 from the discarder and 8 from each of the others. Those same two flowers would not have helped a six-point hand reach the minimum, because the eight-point test runs before they are counted.

Riichi — 30 fu and 3 han, from three seats

A closed hand of four runs, a simple pair and an open wait, worth 3 han: the fu come to 20 base + 10 for the closed discard win + 0 for the runs and pair = 30, and the base points to 960.
Won on a discard by a non-dealer, the discarder alone pays 3,900. Won on a discard by the dealer, the discarder alone pays 5,800. Self-drawn by a non-dealer, the total is 4,000: 2,000 from the dealer and 1,000 from each of the other two. Open the same hand up so it loses the closed-discard bonus and it still lands on 30 fu through the 食い平和 rule, so the payment is unchanged at 3,900.
Change one thing — swap a run for a concealed triplet of terminals and take a closed wait — and the fu rise to 40, the base to 1,280, and the discarder now pays 5,200. That is a third more money from a hand that looks nearly identical across the table, which is why the fu breakdown table on the page walks all ten lines of the derivation rather than just printing a total.

Riichi limits, honba and sticks — where the big numbers come from

From 5 han the fu stop mattering and a fixed ladder takes over. A mangan pays a non-dealer 8,000 on a discard; a haneman pays a dealer 18,000; a baiman self-drawn by a non-dealer collects 16,000, split 8,000 from the dealer and 4,000 from each of the others.
At 13 han the table has to choose. With the 13+ han counts as a yakuman switch on, the hand is a counted yakuman and the discarder pays 32,000. Turn it off — which is what European Mahjong Association tournament rules call for — and it is a sanbaiman at 24,000. The same thirteen han are 8,000 points apart, and a house rule decides which figure you are paid. Kiriage mangan works the same way at the other end: 4 han and 30 fu normally pays 7,700, but with kiriage on it rounds up to a full mangan, 8,000.
Honba and sticks ride on top and are easy to forget. That 3 han 30 fu non-dealer discard win, played on the second honba with one riichi stick on the table, collects 5,500 — 3,900 for the hand, 600 for the two honba counters, and 1,000 from the stick, which nobody pays because it was already on the table. The discarder therefore hands over 4,500, not 5,500. Self-drawn on the same two honba, the total is 4,600: 2,200 from the dealer and 1,200 from each of the others, because the 300 comes in as 100 from each payer.

Six scoring mistakes that restart the argument

  • "In American mahjong you collect the hand value from each player, so 25 is 75." No shape of NMJL win pays a flat triple. Wikipedia's American mahjong article states that a discarder "must pay twice the number of points" and that "in a self-draw, the other three players pay twice as the points" — so a 25-point hand is 100 on a discard (50 / 25 / 25) and 150 on a self-pick (50 each), never 75. The 75 figure comes from describing the base value three times and dropping both doubles.
  • Applying a "concealed hand doubles" multiplier in NMJL. There is no such rule. Tom Sloper's Mah-Jongg FAQ 19, which sets out the League's payment mechanics, lists the discard double, the jokerless double and the bettor — and nothing for concealment. Concealed hands are already worth more because the card prints a higher value beside them; doubling again pays the winner twice for the same thing.
  • Letting flowers push an MCR hand over the eight-point minimum. They cannot. PlayMahjong.io's Chinese Official page puts it plainly: "Points from flowers do not contribute to the requirement of 8 points." A six-point hand with two flowers is not a legal win, even though the calculator will show you what it would have paid, because the arithmetic and the legality are separate questions.
  • Rounding the riichi total and then dividing it. Each payer's share rounds up to the next 100 on its own. A pinfu self-draw at 3 han is 700 + 700 + 1,300 = 2,700, not 2,600. Rounding the total first can never overshoot, only come up short, and the discrepancy surfaces later, when someone counts sticks at the end of the hanchan.
  • Treating faan and han as one unit. They are related ideas with different arithmetic, and in Japanese they are not even the same character: Hong Kong faan is 番, riichi han is 飜. Five faan on a half-spicy table converts to 24 points through a lookup; five han is a mangan and short-circuits the fu entirely. Reading a faan count into a riichi table, or the reverse, gives an answer that is wrong by an order of magnitude.
  • Adding honba counters to a Hong Kong or Chinese Official hand. Honba are a riichi mechanic. They have no equivalent in the other three systems, and a tool that offers them everywhere is inventing a bonus. If your Hong Kong table pays something extra for consecutive dealer wins, that is a local agreement to settle by hand — set the point value to reflect it rather than looking for a counter that should not be there.

What this calculator does not do

It does not look at your tiles. There is no tile entry, no yaku detection and no pattern recognition, so it cannot tell you whether your hand is worth three faan or five — it settles the payment from a value you and the table have already agreed on. Tools that read tiles exist, and they are the right choice when what you need is identification rather than settlement. What they cannot know is your table's cap, your conversion table or your point value, which is the half of the problem this page takes seriously.
The NMJL card is never reproduced here. No hand, no hand name, no value presented as coming from a card, no card year. The card is a copyrighted compilation republished annually; the payment rules it is played under are not copyrightable, and those are what this page implements. The American reference table is a generic value ladder — 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 — keyed on nothing but the number you supply.
Two real Hong Kong conventions are deliberately outside the model. Hong Kong Old Style self-draw, where each opponent pays the full hand value rather than half, is not a switch: on that convention the page's self-draw figure is low. The workaround is to read the "Table points before the split" card and have each opponent pay that in full — for a 3-faan half-spicy hand, 8 each rather than 4. A Hong Kong dealer multiplier is not modeled either: the page treats the dealer's hand exactly like anyone else's, so if your table pays the dealer extra you are settling that part by hand.
Also absent by design: Taiwanese 台数 and Sichuan bloody-battle scoring, MCR's full pattern list (you supply the total, the page splits it), shanten and ukeire counts, three-player mahjong, seating and session tracking, and the penalty rules — furiten, chombo, noten payments — which are about who is disqualified rather than who pays what.

Mahjong scoring vocabulary, across all four systems

Faan

The Hong Kong scoring unit, written 番. Each faan roughly doubles the payout at the low end of the ladder. Counted from the hand's patterns and then converted through a table rather than a formula. Most tables require 3 faan before a win may be declared.

Han

The Japanese riichi doubling unit, written 飜 — a different character from Hong Kong faan and a different system. Han come from yaku and dora, and each one doubles the base points. From 5 han the fu stop mattering and a fixed limit ladder takes over.

Fu

Riichi minipoints from the hand's physical structure: 20 to start, plus the win method, the sets, the pair and the wait, rounded up to the next 10. The values that appear in practice are 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and 110.

Full spicy / half spicy

The two Hong Kong conversion tables. Full spicy doubles at every faan; half spicy matches it to 4 faan and then grows every second step, so 5 faan is 24 rather than 32. Neither is more correct — it is whichever your table has agreed on.

Faan maximum

The Hong Kong cap. The page offers 8, 10 and 13; Wikipedia's Hong Kong mahjong scoring article describes 10 as the cap most club tables use. The count is capped before conversion, so a 13-faan hand at a 10-faan table pays exactly what a 10-faan hand pays.

Mangan, haneman, baiman, sanbaiman

The riichi limit classes at 5, 6-7, 8-10 and 11-12 han. A non-dealer winning on a discard collects 8,000, 12,000, 16,000 and 24,000 respectively; a dealer collects 12,000, 18,000, 24,000 and 36,000.

Counted yakuman (kazoe)

A riichi hand reaching 13 or more han, paid as a yakuman: 32,000 to a non-dealer on a discard. Not universal — European Mahjong Association competition rules pay a sanbaiman (24,000) instead, which is what the 13+ han switch on this page toggles between.

Honba and riichi sticks

Riichi-only extras that ride on top of the hand. Each honba counter adds 300 to the winner's collection (100 from each payer on a self-draw), and each 1,000-point riichi stick on the table goes to the winner without anyone paying it — it was staked earlier.

Jokerless

An American mahjong hand completed without using any joker. It doubles the payout, on top of the discard or self-pick double. The bonus does not apply to hands in the Singles and Pairs section, which must be played jokerless anyway, nor to quints.

Bettor

In American mahjong, a player sitting out who wagers on which player will win. If the bet comes in, everyone except the winner pays the bettor exactly what they paid the winner — so a correct bet doubles the losses at the table.

MCR

Chinese Official rules, also called Chinese Mahjong Competition Rules. Hands are scored against a fixed pattern list and need 8 points to be legal, counted before flowers. Every opponent pays a flat 8 on top of the hand total, which is why the smallest legal hand still collects 32 on a discard.

Kiriage mangan

A riichi house rule that rounds a hand falling just short of a mangan up to one. With it off, 4 han and 30 fu pays a non-dealer 7,700 on a discard; with it on, 8,000. It is a table agreement rather than a default, and the switch on this page ships turned off.

Mahjong scoring — frequently asked questions

How does mahjong scoring work?
In two stages. First the table puts a value on the winning hand — faan in Hong Kong, han and fu in Japanese riichi, points in Chinese Official, a printed card value in American mahjong. Then that value becomes three payments, decided by who discarded the winning tile or whether the winner drew it themselves.

How much does each player pay when someone wins?
It depends on the system and on how the hand finished. In Hong Kong, a discard can put the whole bill on the discarder or split it half and two quarters, while a self-draw has all three pay half the table value each. In American mahjong the discarder pays double and the others single, and a self-pick has all three pay double. In Chinese Official everyone pays a flat 8 and the discarder adds the hand total on top. In riichi a discard is paid entirely by the discarder, while a self-draw is split with the dealer paying a double share. The calculator prints the three figures in the "Each opponent pays" card so nobody has to reconstruct them at the table.

In American mahjong, do I collect the hand value from each player?
No. A 25-point hand collects 100 on a discard — 50 from the discarder, 25 from each of the other two — and 150 on a self-pick, with all three paying 50. Counting the printed value once from each player gives 75 and drops both doubles. Jokerless doubles it again, to 200 and 300.

What is the Hong Kong faan to points conversion?
Two tables are in common use. Full spicy doubles at every faan: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on to 8,192 at 13 faan. Half spicy follows it to 4 faan and then grows every second step instead: 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, 192, 256, 384. Whichever your table uses, the figure is then multiplied by the point value the table plays for, and capped at 8, 10 or 13 faan first. The chart above prints both columns; the calculator's own chart adds two more that recompute with your cap, your discard rule and your point value.

What is the difference between faan and han?
Faan is the Hong Kong unit (番) and han the Japanese riichi unit (飜). Faan are looked up in a conversion table; han are multiplied into a formula alongside fu. Five faan is 24 points on a half-spicy table; five han is a mangan, worth 8,000 to a non-dealer.

Do flowers count toward the 8-point minimum in Chinese Official mahjong?
No. Each flower or season is worth one point and is added to the hand total, but the eight-point test runs before they are counted. A six-point hand with two flowers scores eight and is still not a legal win.

How do I work out riichi points from han and fu?
Base points are fu multiplied by 2 raised to the power of han plus 2, capped at 2,000. A non-dealer winning on a discard is owed four times the base, a dealer six times. On a self-draw, a non-dealer takes one base from each non-dealer and two from the dealer, while a dealer takes two from everyone. Every individual share is then rounded up to the next 100 separately. At 30 fu and 3 han that gives a base of 960, so a non-dealer discard win pays 3,900 and a dealer's pays 5,800.

What does a mangan pay?
A mangan is 5 han. Four han reaches the same 2,000 base from 40 fu upwards, and at tables playing kiriage, 4 han 30 fu and 3 han 60 fu round up to it as well. A non-dealer collects 8,000 on a discard, or 8,000 on a self-draw split 2,000 / 2,000 / 4,000. A dealer collects 12,000 on a discard, or 12,000 self-drawn as 4,000 from each opponent.

Does the calculator read my tiles or know what is on the NMJL card?
Neither, on purpose. You supply the hand value and it supplies the payment split. The card is a copyrighted compilation reissued every year, so no hand, hand name or card value from it appears anywhere on this page — you read the number beside your own hand and type it in. That also means the tool keeps working when next year's card ships, because nothing here is tied to a particular edition.

Can I use this if my table plays a 3-faan minimum?
Yes. The minimum is a table agreement about which hands may be declared, not about arithmetic, so the calculator computes a 2-faan hand anyway and tells you it falls below the usual 3-faan threshold. The same applies to Chinese Official: a six-point hand is shown with a note that it has not reached the eight-point minimum.

Is this mahjong score calculator free to use?
Yes, and it runs entirely in the browser with no account. Change any input and the cards and reference tables update immediately.

How accurate are these numbers?
Every formula is cross-checked against two independent sources, and the engine ships with 184 unit tests covering all four systems. The sources are listed under the calculator: Wikipedia and the Hong Kong Mahjong Association for the faan tables, Tom Sloper's FAQ 22 quoting the 1998 Chinese Mahjong Competition Rules for the MCR split, FAQ 19 for the NMJL payment mechanics, and the European Mahjong Association's 2016 competition rules alongside the Japanese Wikipedia scoring article for riichi. Where rulesets genuinely disagree — the 13-han ruling, kiriage, the conversion table, the cap — the disagreement is a switch rather than a silent choice.

My table pays differently on a self-draw. What do I do?
Some Hong Kong tables play the Old Style convention, where each opponent pays the full hand value on a self-draw rather than half. That is not one of the switches here, so read the "Table points before the split" card and have each player pay that figure in full — 8 each on a 3-faan half-spicy hand, where the page shows 4. Everything else about the hand, including the cap and the conversion table, still applies.

Sources & References

  1. Wikipedia — Hong Kong mahjong scoring rules. The full-spicy and half-spicy conversion tables, the 1.5× the winner collects on a self-draw, the discarder-pays-all and discarder-pays-half splits, and the 10-faan cap most club tables use
  2. Hong Kong Mahjong Association — Rules. The institutional Hong Kong ruleset in English, used here to check the faan ladder and the minimum against a body that runs tournaments rather than against club custom
  3. Tom Sloper, Mah-Jongg FAQ 17 — Hong Kong Old Style. The 3-faan minimum as a table rule rather than arithmetic, and the self-draw convention under which everyone pays double
  4. Tom Sloper, Mah-Jongg FAQ 22, quoting Chinese Mahjong Competition Rules (People's Sports Publishing House, 1998, ISBN 7-5009-1630-2, pp. 29-30). The 8-point minimum excluding flowers; on a discard the discarder pays the hand total plus 8 and the other two pay 8; on a self-pick all three pay the total plus 8
  5. Tom Sloper, Mah-Jongg FAQ 19 — National Mah Jongg League rules. The four payment mechanics this page implements: the discarder pays double, a self-pick makes all three pay double, a jokerless hand doubles again except on Singles and Pairs hands and quints, and the bettor is paid by everyone but the winner
  6. Wikipedia — American mahjong. The 25-point minimum a winning hand carries, and the fact that the card is reissued every year with a different hand list, which is why this page asks for the value and never reproduces the card
  7. National Mah Jongg League — The game. Negative evidence, cited as such: the League publishes no open scoring rulebook on its site, so the payment rules above are taken from third-party sources that can be checked, and no hand or hand value from the card appears anywhere on this page
  8. European Mahjong Association — Riichi Competition Rules 2016, archived copy. The limit ladder and the fu-by-han payment tables, and the tournament ruling this page lets you switch to: under EMA rules 13 or more han pays a sanbaiman, not a counted yakuman
  9. Wikipedia (Japanese) — 麻雀の得点計算. The base-points formula this engine runs, 基本点 = 符 × 2^(飜+2), with the 2,000 mangan ceiling, the rounding of each payer's share up to the next 100, and the fu catalogue for sets, pair and wait
  10. Wikipedia — Japanese mahjong scoring rules. The English-language cross-check on the same tables: the 20-fu base, the 10 fu for a closed hand won on a discard, the 2 fu for a self-draw, and the fixed 25 fu of seven pairs that is never rounded
  11. Wikipedia — Scoring in Mahjong. The cross-variant framing behind the Which system is yours? table: what each region counts, in what unit, and why a number from one ruleset means nothing in another

Content verified by the Smart Calculators Team