GE tax explained: the 2% rule, the cap and exempt items

Every sale on the Grand Exchange pays a tax. The seller pays it, it comes out of the coins you collect, and it is the single biggest cost in most flips. Here is exactly how it is worked out.

The rule

• The tax is 2% of the sale price, for each item sold.
• It rounds down to the nearest gp.
• It stops at 5,000,000 gp per item, however expensive the item is.
• A list of 48 items pays none at all.

Rounding down has a useful side effect: anything that sells for under 50 gp pays nothing, because 2% of 49 gp is 0.98 gp, which rounds to 0. The 2% rate has applied since 29 May 2025; before that it was 1%.

Three examples

The cap starts to matter at 250,000,000 gp: from there up, the tax is a flat 5,000,000 gp per item.

It is charged per item

Selling 10,000 of something at 101 gp does not pay 2% of the 1,010,000 gp total. It pays 2 gp on each of the 10,000, which is 20,000 gp. For cheap items the rounding can make the real rate a little under 2%, which is why some low-priced flips work better than the headline rate suggests.

Which items are exempt

Bonds pay no tax. Nor does a short list of low-level tools, food, teleports and potions the game wants new players to be able to buy cheaply, such as energy potions. The full list, with live prices, is on the tax-exempt items page. Exempt items are worth a look for flipping because the whole spread is yours.

What it means for a flip

A spread only makes money once it is bigger than the tax on the sell side. Offerbook takes the tax off every margin it shows, so the margin you see is what you keep. The example below is live: the most traded item on the GE right now, with its tax taken off.

If you want to check a number yourself, the tax calculator gives the tax, what you keep and the break-even sell price for any buy price. The GE tax glossary entry has the short version.