How to flip items on the Grand Exchange
A plain guide to flipping in Old School RuneScape: instant-buy and instant-sell prices, the 2% GE tax, buy limits, volume, and how to tell a real margin from a fake one.
Offerbook · · 6 min read
Flipping means buying an item on the Grand Exchange and selling it again for more. You place a buy offer a little under what sellers are asking, wait for it to fill, then place a sell offer a little over what buyers are paying. The gap between the two, minus the GE tax, is what you keep.
Every item has two prices
At any moment there are people who want to sell right now and people who want to buy right now. That gives each item two prices:
- Instant-sell price (low). What someone got when they sold straight into an existing buy offer. This is roughly where you can buy if you are patient.
- Instant-buy price (high). What someone paid when they bought straight from an existing sell offer. This is roughly where you can sell if you are patient.
A flipper sits in the middle: buying near the low, selling near the high. Offerbook shows both prices on every item page, with how many minutes ago each one traded. An old price is a guess, so check the age before you trust it.
The GE tax comes out of every sale
When you sell, the Grand Exchange keeps 2% of the sale price. It rounds down to the nearest gp and stops at 5,000,000 gp per item, so anything selling under 50 gp pays nothing. A short list of items, including bonds and some low-level tools and food, is exempt; the full list is on the exempt items page.
- Sell price
- 1,100 gp
- Buy price
- − 1,000 gp
- GE tax (2% of 1,100 gp, rounded down)
- − 22 gp
- Kept per item
- 78 gp
The tax is why a 100 gp spread is not a 100 gp profit. On cheap items the tax is small; on expensive ones it is the biggest cost you have. An item selling for 300,000,000 gp would owe 6,000,000 gp at 2%, but the cap brings that down to 5,000,000 gp. If you want to check a price yourself, the tax calculator does the same sum.
Buy limits and volume decide the size
A margin only matters as much as the quantity you can trade at it. Two things cap that quantity.
- The buy limit. Each item has a most you can buy every 4 hours. Our buy limit guide covers how it resets.
- Volume. If only a few hundred trade an hour, a buy offer for thousands will sit there for a long time. Your offer only fills when someone sells to it.
- Kept per item
- 78 gp
- Buy limit per 4 hours
- × 10,000
- Most you can make in one 4-hour window
- 780,000 gp
That is the best case, where every item fills. Offerbook's potential profit figure takes the smallest of the buy limit, a fair share of what actually trades in 4 hours, and what your bankroll can afford, so it does not promise fills that will not happen.
How to spot a margin that is not real
A big spread on its own is not a flip. Before you buy, check:
- How old the prices are. If one side last traded hours ago, the market may have moved.
- How much trades. One odd sale can show a huge gap on an item almost nobody buys.
- How often the margin holds. A spread that beat the tax for most of the day is steadier than one that showed up five minutes ago. Item pages show this as "margin held".
- Whether the price is falling. If the item is dropping fast, you can end up selling below what you paid.
Start small and spread out
Prices move while your offers wait. Putting your whole bankroll into one item means one bad move hurts a lot. Splitting it over a few items with steady margins is slower to fill but much less likely to go wrong. Keep a record of what you paid, so you know your real profit after tax and not just what the margin promised.
Doing it on Offerbook
These are the top flips on Offerbook right now, with the margin after tax and what one 4-hour window can make.
| Item | Buy | Margin | Per 4h |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chasm teleport scroll | 26,001 gp | 9,542 gp | 3.26m gp |
| Crushed infernal shale | 2,360 gp | 237 gp | 1m gp |
| Seeking amethyst arrow | 549 gp | 38 gp | 692k gp |
| Sapphire dragon bolts | 2,412 gp | 381 gp | 527k gp |
| Burning amulet(5) | 2,315 gp | 233 gp | 413k gp |
Margins are after the 2% GE tax. Per 4h is margin times the quantity one buy-limit window can fill, sized to a 10m bankroll.
- Today's flips lists items with a margin after tax right now, ranked by what one 4-hour window can make.
- The Economy page sizes each flip to your bankroll and tells you what to buy, at what price, and how many.
- Alerts send you a message when an item reaches a price or margin you choose, so you do not have to keep watching.
- The glossary explains every term on the site in plain words.
Offerbook only shows prices and the sums behind them. It never places offers or touches your account: every trade is one you make yourself in game.
Offerbook is gp only and has nothing to do with real-world trading. Prices move, so nothing here is a promise of profit. Every trade is one you make yourself in game.