The Grand Exchange tax explained
Updated July 23, 2026 - 6 minute read
Every time you sell an item on the Grand Exchange, the game takes a cut. The Grand Exchange tax is small enough that casual players barely notice it and large enough that it decides whether a flip makes or loses money. This article explains the exact rules, the reasoning behind the tax, and the arithmetic you should do (or let this site do for you) before committing gp to a trade.
The rules in one place
- The seller pays. When your sell offer fills, 2% of the sale price is deducted from the coins you receive. Buyers pay the listed price.
- 2% per item, rounded down. Sell at 999 gp and the tax is 19 gp per item, not 19.98.
- Items under 50 gp are exempt. Below 50 gp a 2% cut would round toward nothing; these sales are simply untaxed.
- The tax is capped at 5m per item. Above that point the effective rate on the most expensive items in the game falls below 2%.
- A few items are exempt, most notably Old school bonds, which trade tax-free.
The tax was introduced in December 2021 at 1% and later raised to 2%. The gp collected leaves the game entirely, and part of it funds an item sink that buys and permanently deletes high-end gear, supporting prices of endgame items over the long run.
Why the tax exists
Old School RuneScape has a persistent inflation problem: bosses, minigames and skilling print new gp and new items into the economy every day, and very little of either ever leaves. Left alone, that makes prices of everything drift upward and erodes the value of a cash stack. The GE tax is a gold sink at the single busiest point of the economy. Enormous amounts of gp flow through the Exchange daily, so even 2% removes serious money from circulation, and the item sink attacks the other half of the problem by deleting supply of items that would otherwise only ever accumulate.
For traders the tax has a second-order effect worth understanding: it widens the minimum viable spread. A flip that was worth doing for a 1 gp margin before 2021 now needs the spread to clear the tax first, which thinned out zero-effort micro-flipping and pushed profit toward players who actually read the market.
The break-even math
The real profit on a flip is:
profit per item = sell price − tax − buy price, where tax = 2% of the sell price (rounded down, 0 under 50 gp, capped at 5m).
A useful rule of thumb falls out of this: to break even, the raw spread must exceed 2% of the sell price. On a 100k item that means the gap between instant-sell and instant-buy must be more than 2,000 gp before you earn a single coin. Two worked examples:
- Looks profitable, is not: buy at 59,000, sell at 60,000. Tax is 1,200, so you clear a 200 gp loss per item.
- Looks thin, is fine: buy at 620 gp, sell at 660 gp. Tax is 13 gp, so you clear 27 gp per item, and on a high-limit consumable that compounds into real money per cycle.
Every margin, ROI and profit-per-hour figure on GrandExchange.com is calculated after tax, including the Flip Finder rankings, the stats panel on each item page and the Discord bot's flip suggestions, so if a number on this site is green, the tax is already paid in the math.
Habits that keep the tax cheap
- Think in after-tax margins always. If you compare items by raw spread you will systematically overrate expensive items, where the tax bite is largest in absolute terms.
- Remember the cap on the very top end. Once the 5m cap kicks in, the marginal tax rate falls, which slightly favours flipping ultra-high-value gear relative to items just below the cap.
- Use the sub-50 gp lane deliberately. Bulk consumables under 50 gp trade tax-free, so tight spreads there are fully yours. This is one reason low-price, high-volume items remain excellent for small bankrolls.
Related reading: buy limits, the other hard constraint on flip profit, and the full flipping guide.