Bills Must Be Paid Achievements Guide: All 27 + Global Unlock Rates

Quick Answer: Bills Must Be Paid has 27 achievements, all public since July 31 with descriptions and global stats. The whole set is a 3-5 hour, one-sitting 100% — nothing needs a second playthrough. The natural arc plus three deliberate systems covers everything: the gambling trio (50/50, All or Nothing, Eyes on the Piggy), the loan pair (Take a Loan / Pay Back a Loan), and the completion trio (Bought It All, Prestige Jewelry, Maxed Out). The rarest is Maxed Out at 26.9%, and it has a trap: beat the final boss first and you must keep playing the same cycle to finish the tree, because bankruptcy resets it.

Version note: Global rates below were captured July 31, 2026, two days after release, and early numbers skew toward dedicated buyers. Updated August 18 against Patch 1.1 (August 16), which removed the Piggy Shuffle tell, added a coin-side choice to Double or Nothing, and fixed Family Sharing accounts popping each other's achievements. Assembled from the official patch notes, the Steam achievement list and global stats, official screenshots, developer forum replies and the first community achievement guide, linked inline.

Piggy Shuffle: pick the right piggy after the shuffle to double your stake — and to unlock Eyes on the Piggy. (Screenshot: Rike Games)

All 27 Achievements, in Unlock-Rate Order

Sorted by global rate, the table doubles as a rough completion order.

Ignore any list that names a 28th achievement. Steam exposed only 13 of these on day one, and a launch-day forum thread floated an extra name that doesn't exist in the official set.

Maxed Out (26.9%) — Keep Playing After the Boss

Beat the final boss without a full skill tree and it looks like you've locked yourself out. You haven't. The developer's answer in the forum thread: "You can just keep playing. If you've not declared bankruptcy you'll be able to purchase all the missing upgrades" — and the player confirmed it worked.

The flip side matters more. Declaring bankruptcy resets that cycle's skill upgrades, so if you reset after the boss you must refill the tree in a later cycle.

Expect the tree to keep growing at the end. Beating the boss unlocks around a dozen extra nodes, and paying off the final bill unlocks more still — two players independently hit Maxed Out only after buying those late arrivals. If the tree looks fully bought early on and the achievement hasn't popped, it isn't bugged. Keep paying bills and keep buying until the checkmark actually lands.

Prestige Jewelry (30.6%) — The Case Is Bigger Than It Looks

You need every ring and both bracelets. Early "100%" posts claiming completion while missing rings predate the full achievement list and don't hold up.

There's a second layer. A player who bought everything visible in the jewelry case saw nothing pop — until they declared bankruptcy, returned to the case, and found a hidden piece priced at 1,000,000 waiting (single report, self-answered, and it matches the skill tree pattern exactly). Buying it landed the achievement.

Prestige Points only come from new bill records, which is why completionists run cycles 3-5. The Bankruptcy & Prestige Guide covers how to farm PP efficiently.

Eyes on the Piggy (48.3%) — Film It

The shuffle is faster than most players can eye-track, which is why this one lags the achievements around it.

The community cheese, from the first player-written guide, was to record the shuffle with your phone and scrub the video in slow motion — and a second, easier tell circulated: the piggies' idle wobble before the shuffle gave away which one held the money.

Patch 1.1 removed the wobble tell deliberately, with the developers explaining that "once you got it the minigame became really unfunny to play." The phone-recording method is untouched by the patch and is now the only reported way to beat it on purpose. One player who had noticed the wobble himself describes the honest state of it otherwise: the cups move faster than the eye can track, so he had never won it "naturally." Minimum bet, and expect to retry.

The Gambling Trio and the Loan Pair

Do the gambling three — 50/50, All or Nothing, Eyes on the Piggy — early, when your stake is pocket change. The mini-games are optional for beating the game, so there's no reason to bet real progress on them.

On the coinflip: the developers state in Patch 1.1's notes that it "is NOT rigged" — a genuine 50/50 physics simulation — and that making it feel fairer is impossible by design. What 1.1 added is the ability to turn the coin before the toss and pick which side it starts on (right-click, or R1 on controller). That does not change the odds, but it does end the "I never get to choose" complaint. Flip small and retry.

For the loan pair, call Big Toni, borrow, then repay through the entry beside your bills in the bill menu. The cut Toni skims off your earnings does not count toward repayment (community report), so repay fast — the skim is pure loss.

The Rest of the Late List

• Super Jackpot (39.1%): jackpot multipliers proc while smashing. Invest in the skill tree's luck branch if it's being stubborn; no proc rate is documented.
• Piggy Bank Collector (37.1%) / Coin Collector (35.1%): both fill passively across a full arc. Check the collection tabs before your final cycle so you're not hunting one last coin after Freedom.
• Bought It All (34.8%): the shop ladder runs $4,000 → $50,000 → $250,000 → $1,000,000 → $10,000,000 for hammers, plus décor up to $210,000. The $10M ceiling lands late, once per-run earnings go exponential. The Richest Broke Person ($1M on hand, 52.8%) falls on the way.

Freedom (34.0%) — You Have Not Finished When You Think You Have

This is the most-reported "broken achievement" in the game, and it is not broken. The report that kept coming back: no bills left to pay, Freedom never fires, and it does not fire on a fresh run either.

The answer, from the thread where the reporter confirmed it worked:

"After you pay the last bill, you have to continue one more time, it will unlock some more skills on the skill tree and spawn a 'boss' pig to break, before giving you your final bill, the last bill that we ALL have to pay."

So paying what looks like the last bill is not the end of the game. There is one more cycle after it, with new skill tree nodes and a boss piggy, and only then does the real final bill appear. Freedom fires on that one.

This also explains why the reporter's fresh run behaved identically — a new run reaches the same false ending in the same place.

And it pairs with Maxed Out: both achievements live on the far side of that boss fight, and both are lost by declaring bankruptcy once the bills look cleared. Break the boss, take the final bill, then decide what to do with the run.

If Achievements Still Are Not Unlocking

Two causes are now known, and they are worth ruling out in this order.

First, Steam Family Sharing. Before Patch 1.1, shared accounts saw each other's saves and popped each other's achievements — the developers fixed it by giving every account its own save folder. If your list looks wrong, update to 1.1 and recheck before reporting anything: the underlying fault is gone, but already-granted achievements are not retracted by a patch.

Second, Linux and Proton. Two players report nothing unlocking at all on Linux, which is a different failure from a single stubborn achievement:

• One on Arch with sway fixed it by installing Proton 11 and adding the launch option PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%.
• The other tried Proton 8.0-5 and 9.0-4 — the only versions that would load the game for them — beat the game, bought everything, and had not a single achievement fire, including on a fresh save created purely to test it.

Rule: on Linux, the Proton version is the variable. If you are on 8.x or 9.x and your list is completely empty rather than missing one entry, change Proton before you assume the achievement conditions are wrong.

If they still will not fire on the current build, post in the Steam discussions with your platform. This two-person team answers in hours.

FAQ

How long does 100% take? Roughly 3-5 hours. Around ten players who posted completions in the first two days report 2.9 to 4.7 hours, finishing on prestige cycles 3 to 5. The developer's pre-release estimate of "around 2-5 hours" agrees.

Are any achievements missable or luck-gated? Nothing is permanently missable — the game is cycle-based and every system stays available. Two soft traps: Maxed Out (don't bankrupt after the final boss) and Eyes on the Piggy (cheese it with a slow-motion recording). Super Jackpot is the only pure-luck gate, and it retries indefinitely.

Do the hidden achievements need a second playthrough? There are no hidden achievements. All 27 are public as of July 31, and the full set falls inside one 3-5 hour sitting across a few prestige cycles.