If you’ve ever stood in front of a Minecraft villager watching that little XP bar inch forward at a glacial pace, you already know the frustration. To level up villagers in Minecraft definitely feels slow when you don’t know what you’re doing, but once you understand the system, you can take a villager from Novice to Master in just a few in-game days. Let me walk you through exactly how to do that.
Understanding Villager XP & the Leveling System
Before you can level up villagers fast on Minecraft, you need to understand the system driving their progression. Each villager has five career levels: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, and Master. Every successful trade you complete gives the villager experience points (XP), and as they accumulate enough XP, they level up — unlocking new trades at each tier.
The 5 Villager Career Levels
- Novice (Level 1) — Starting level; 2 basic trade slots. Requires 10 XP to advance.
- Apprentice (Level 2) — Unlocks 2 more trades. Requires 70 XP to advance.
- Journeyman (Level 3) — Midpoint; 2 additional trades unlock. Requires 150 XP to advance.
- Expert (Level 4) — High-value trades appear here. Requires 250 XP to advance.
- Master (Level 5) — Maximum level; badge of honor ribbon appears. Final tier.
Each trade completed gives 3–5 XP to the villager, depending on the item traded. Importantly, villagers need to sleep and access their workstation to restock their trades — so design around this biological cycle.
Villager Professions & Workstations
A villager’s profession determines what they trade. To lock in a profession, place the corresponding workstation near an unemployed villager. Key professions for fast leveling include Librarians (lecterns), Weaponsmiths (grindstones), Armorers (blast furnaces), and Farmers (composters). Unemployed villagers will claim the nearest unclaimed workstation, so keep your trading hall organized.
Pro Tip: Always cure a zombie villager before leveling it up. Cured villagers give massive discounts, making every trade far cheaper — and you’ll hit max level in a fraction of the time.
Step 1: Build a Trading Hall
You can level villagers one at a time out in the world, but a proper trading hall changes everything. The idea is simple: a row of small cells, each containing a bed, a workstation, and enough space for one villager. A corridor connects them, so you can walk down the line trading with multiple villagers in quick succession.
The reason this matters for fast leveling is logistics. Villagers restock their trades only when they can physically reach and interact with their workstations during daylight hours. If a villager can’t get to their station, their trades stay locked no matter how long you wait. A well-designed trading hall fixes that problem for good.
Step 2: Lock In the Right Professions and Trades
With your trading hall set up, bring in unemployed villagers and let them claim workstations. A lectern makes a Librarian, a fletching table makes a Fletcher, a composter makes a Farmer, and so on. Once a villager claims a station and you can see their trade menu, here’s where the rerolling magic happens.
Before you trade even once, you can break and replace the workstation to reroll that villager’s trades. Keep doing this until their first trade slot shows something cheap and farmable. For a Librarian, you’re looking for something like “24 paper for 1 emerald.” For a Fletcher, “32 sticks for 1 emerald” is ideal. The moment you see a trade you like, do exactly one trade to lock it in, and you’re set.
Step 3: Use the Fastest Villager Trading Strategies
Now for the meat of it. The Minecraft community has extensively tested Villagers’ level-up speeds, and the results are clear: not all trades are created equal. Here’s what the data shows about leveling villagers as quickly as possible.
XP Per Trade – Best Trades to Spam
Community testing on the Minecraft wiki and popular servers has established clear XP values per trade completion. Low-cost trades like paper (Librarian), sticks (Fletcher), and coal (various) are the fastest to complete repeatedly, giving 3–5 XP per transaction. Higher-value trades like enchanted books give more XP but cost more, slowing your per-minute leveling rate. Here’s how the best trades stack up:
- Paper > Emerald (Librarian): 3 XP per trade, restocks quickly — ideal for bulk cycling
- Stick > Emerald (Fletcher): 3 XP per trade, sticks are virtually free — fastest raw throughput
- Coal > Emerald (Weaponsmith): 3 XP per trade, easy to farm in bulk
- Wheat > Emerald (Farmer): 4 XP per trade, excellent with a wheat farm nearby
- Enchanted Book (Librarian): 5 XP but costly — best for XP when you also need the books
How Many Trades Does It Take to Reach Master?
To reach Master level from Novice, a villager needs a total of 480 XP. At an average of 4 XP per trade, that’s 120 total trade completions. With 2 daily restocks of up to 12 trades per slot, a single-slot villager doing 2 restocks per day hits Master level in roughly 5 in-game days. Using low-cost bulk trades like Fletcher and sticks, skilled players report reaching Master in under 3 in-game days.
Stat to Know: A cured zombie villager with discounts can cost as little as 1 emerald per book, making each XP point essentially free. Community speedruns of Librarian leveling use this method exclusively.
Why Zombie Curing Is a Leveling Multiplier
This is non-negotiable for fast leveling. When you cure a zombie villager, the resulting villager gets a permanent discount applied to all their trades — often reducing costs by 50–90%. This means you burn through far fewer resources per trade, allowing you to complete the 120 total trades needed for Master level much faster. Always cure before you level.
Step 4: Run the Leveling Loop
Once you’ve got everything ready, the process is pretty simple. Fill your inventory with whatever the villager’s cheapest trade needs. Then walk up and trade with them over and over until their XP bar fills up and they level, or until the trade greys out because they’re out of stock for now.
When a trade gets locked, that’s your sign to take a break and let the villager restock. During the day, they’ll walk over to their workstation and restock — usually twice a day. Once they’re ready, go back and repeat the process. With plenty of supplies, you’ll see them level up way faster than you’d expect.
A big tip: focus on leveling one villager at a time. It might be tempting to split your trades between lots of villagers, but pouring all your resources into one until they level up, then moving on, is way more efficient.
Step 5: The Zombification Trick (Advanced)
If you want to take things even further, you can zombify your villagers and then cure them. That means letting a zombie attack a villager, then using a golden apple and a splash potion of weakness to cure them. When they recover, their trade prices drop a lot — sometimes as low as 1 item per trade.
With these lower prices, you can do way more trades before running out of stock, which means you’ll get a lot more XP from each session. It takes some setup, but if you plan to use your trading hall long-term, it’s totally worth it.
Common Mistakes That Slow You Down
The biggest mistake is using expensive trades to level up villagers in Minecraft. If your only available trade costs coal or iron early on, you’ll burn through resources and barely move the XP bar. Always reroll until you find a cheap trade first.
The next most common problem is pathing issues. If a villager can’t get to their workstation, they just won’t restock. If you notice a villager’s trades aren’t unlocking after you’ve waited, check to make sure nothing is blocking their way — even a single slab or random block can mess up their pathfinding.
Finally, don’t waste time leveling up a villager if their best trades aren’t useful for you. If a Toolsmith’s Master-level offer isn’t something you want, it’s probably better to swap them out instead of grinding XP just for the sake of it.
Once you’ve set up a good trading hall, a couple of farms, and locked in some good starter trades, level-up villagers in Minecraft start feeling genuinely satisfying. The more prepared you are, the faster you’ll see results. Before you know it, you’ll have a Master-level trading hall up and running both for Java and Bedrock editions.
