n this paper new and existing approaches are developed to compute the bit-error rate for chaos-based communication systems. The multi-user coherent antipodal chaos shift keying system is studied and evaluated in its coherent form, in the sense of perfect synchronisation between transmitted and received chaotic sequences. Transmission is through an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Four methods are interrelated in the paper, three approximate ones and an exact one. The least accurate but most well known is based on simple Gaussian approximation; this is generalised to better reveal its structure. Two accurate and computationally efficient approximate methods are based on conditional Gaussian approximation and the statistical distribution of the typically non-constant bit energy. The most insightful but computationally expensive one is based on exact theory and rests on explicit mathematical results for particular chaotic maps used to spread binary messages. Both upper and lower bounds to the bit-error rate are suggested. The relative advantages of the different approaches are illustrated with plots of bit-error rate against signal to noise ratio.