Phasmophobia: the 2026 Challenge Mode guide — the 26 challenges, the rotation, and the weekly $5,000

Every Monday at midnight UTC, Phasmophobia changes its weekly challenge. Until Monday, August 10, 2026, the assigned contract is Frostbitten, on Camp Woodwind: player and entity slowed to 75%, permanent snow, broken breaker and, above all, no Incense in the truck.

The stakes aren't the contract itself. Challenge mode pays out with a x1 reward multiplier, the same as Amateur: the money comes from the weekly task tied to it. "Complete the challenge mode on [map name]" pays out $5,000 and 5,000 XP, when every other weekly task caps at 500. That's by far the best regular income in the game, and this task is present every week.

Challenge mode has existed since version 0.8.1.0 and now includes 26 configurations running on a loop, each tied to an assigned map. Here's exactly how it works, the steps for this week's challenge, the schedule for the upcoming ones, and the full table of all 26.

How Challenge mode actually works

A challenge is a locked custom difficulty, built most of the time on the basis of Professional (no setup time, x2 sanity loss, rare paranormal activity, most hiding spots blocked off). Kinetic Games then applies a series of modifiers and a fixed loadout, provided for free in the truck.

• You bring nothing from your personal inventory. Dying therefore doesn't cost a single dollar in equipment: it's the only mode in the game where experimentation is truly free.
• Surviving isn't necessary. Correctly identifying the right entity type is enough to validate the round, even if you die right after.
• Three correct identifications on the intended map validate the weekly task. Challenge mode can be launched on any map, but only the designated map counts toward the task's progress.
• Classic trap on Sunny Meadows: a challenge intended for the full version doesn't count on Sunny Meadows (Restricted), and vice versa.
• Challenge mode is explicitly excluded from the daily task "Survive using only starting equipment."

Weekly tasks reset on Monday at midnight UTC, at the same time as the challenge. So if you start the week on a Thursday evening, you still have three days to line up your three successful investigations — easily doable, since most challenges wrap up in five to ten minutes once the evidence is found.

Frostbitten, the active challenge until August 10, 2026

"It's so cold that everyone is slowed down, including the entity!" The briefing checks out. The exact parameters of Frostbitten, on Camp Woodwind:

• Player and entity speed: 75%
• Forced weather: snow
• Broken breaker from the start of the contract
• Activity level and hunt duration: medium, so shorter than on Professional
• Many doors open at the start, no cursed possessions
• Sanity Medication restores 100% instead of 30%
• Missing equipment: Igniters, Fire Lights, and Incense

Two constraints dictate the entire game. First, without Incense, no hunt can be interrupted: your only preventive countermeasure is the Crucifix, which is provided, and which only works on the ground, placed in the haunted room, never held in hand. Second, without a Firelighter or Candle and with a broken fuse box, there is no fixed light source: everything relies on flashlights and the map's ambient lighting.

The 75% slowdown doesn't change the balance of power, since it applies to both sides: the entity goes from around 1.7 to 1.275 m/s, your sprint from 3 to 2.25 m/s, your walk from 1.6 to 1.2 m/s. However, it does change the distance covered: a hunt always lasts the same number of seconds, and you cover a quarter less ground. On a map as spread out as Camp Woodwind, a poorly chosen fallback point simply becomes out of reach.

Three habits that make the difference:

• Don't hunt for the haunted room with the thermometer. With snow, the cold is everywhere outdoors and Freezing Temperatures become unreadable. Locate the area using the EMF Reader and sound interactions, then only confirm the temperature inside an enclosed structure.
• Empty the pills without hesitation. A Sanity Medication restores 100% here: head back to the truck as soon as you hit 50% instead of hoarding them, and you'll barely suffer a single hunt for the whole contract.
• Choose your shelter before unpacking. Since the base is Professional, most hiding spots are blocked off; identify the building where you can circle around an obstacle before even setting up the first camera.

The upcoming challenge schedule

The rotation follows the ISO week number: the displayed challenge corresponds to the week number modulo 26. This formula is a community reconstruction, not data published by Kinetic Games, but it matches the current week (week 32 → challenge No. 6, Frozen). It gives the following sequence:

Two caveats. The sequence doesn't loop cleanly from one year to the next, since the counter resets to week 1 every January and week 53, when it exists, points to Speedrun!. And during seasonal events, a special challenge may replace the standard one: this has already happened with Recorded (Bleasdale Farmhouse, June 2025) and Open for Business (Nell's Diner, November 2025), the only occasion so far to play a challenge on the diner map.

The 26 standard challenges, map by map

Which ones to farm calmly, which ones to endure

The weeks are not all created equal. Hide and Seek: Seeker is the gift of the rotation: the entity is set to "friendly", the sanity drain rate is at 0%, and favorite room changing is disabled. You simply aren't hunted, and all that's left is to find the haunted room in a high school. The Tortoise and the Hare: Hare holds second place right behind it, with a half-speed entity and a 125% player.

At the opposite end, The Apocalypse Is Approaching stacks zero evidence, zero sanity, a 150% entity, no hiding spots, and no grace period on the game's largest map. Hide and Seek: Extreme, The Cat and Mouse Game, and Go Fast! fall into the same category.

On those weeks, the right approach is counterintuitive: since survival isn't required, play for information rather than for the exit. Go in, place the bare minimum, note the evidence, get out or die, and restart. On zero-evidence challenges, identification relies entirely on behaviors — hunt speed, reaction to the Crucifix, the sanity threshold that triggers a hunt, Spirit Box responses — and a lost contract that still gave you a useful observation is never wasted, since the equipment is provided.

One last profitable detail: a contract in Challenge mode retains a x1 multiplier and therefore counts toward the progress of other tasks (only x0 multiplier contracts are ignored). Running the weekly challenge repeatedly advances tasks like "Find the correct entity type" or "Complete objectives" in parallel.

The Apocalypse Challenge was eased in July

Not to be confused with weekly challenge No. 20: the Apocalypse Challenge is a permanent objective, independent of the rotation. It requires, solo, on Sunny Meadows, a high-multiplier difficulty, all three optional objectives completed, an entity media capture, correct identification, and survival.

The v0.18.0.0 update from July 21, 2026 significantly softened it: any entity media is now accepted, whereas previously only a photo counted. A video of a ghost hunting, a recording of a paranormal moan, or a filmed D.O.T.S. trace now satisfy the condition, which removes the exercise's main breaking point.

The tiers themselves haven't changed since 0.8.1.0: bronze trophy and Apocalypse Adept badge starting at a x6 multiplier, silver and Apocalypse Master at x10, gold and Apocalypse Legend at x15. Since Insanity difficulty caps at x6, the two upper tiers require building a custom difficulty, unlocked at level 50. A successful contract at x15 unlocks all three badges at once, and the trophy displayed in the lobby upgrades automatically.

What awaits Challenge mode by the end of 2026

Kinetic Games has published a roadmap for the year. A second quality-of-life update is planned for August 2026, continuing on from v0.18.0.0 (inventory shortcuts on keys 1 through 4, a watch inspection shortcut, on-screen photo capture indicators). The move to Unity 6, with a new lighting system and additional accessibility options, is announced for October; a player character update will follow in November.

Above all, the studio announces an additional content update later this year, which will explicitly bring changes to the weekly challenges, new voice recognition features, the return of the seasonal events Crimson Eye and Winter's Jest, and a third map rework, that of 42 Edgefield Road. However, 1.0 and the next new map have been pushed back to 2027, at the same time as the release on Nintendo Switch 2.

Until then, the most profitable routine remains the same: three runs of the weekly challenge on the imposed map, without worrying about surviving. Five thousand dollars and five thousand experience points per week, without spending a single cent on equipment, is what funds all the Nightmare and Insanity contracts you'll play on the side.