Why high alching is the one flip with no GE tax
Every other flip on this site ends with a Grand Exchange sale, so 2% of the sale price disappears to the
GE tax.
High Level Alchemy doesn't: the spell
converts the item directly into coins, and Jagex takes nothing. That's why an alch margin that looks thinner
than a flip margin can still be the better trade — the number in the Profit / alch column is what you
actually keep, not a pre-tax headline. The trade-off is that alching is an active method: you have to
sit there and cast, where a flip earns while you're logged out. See
the GE tax explained for where the 2% does and doesn't apply.
How to read the board
Profit / alch = the item's fixed High Alchemy value, minus its current instant-buy price, minus one
nature rune at its own live price. The alch value
never changes; the other two do, which is why this board reorders through the day. Buy price is the
instant-buy price — what you'd pay to fill immediately — so it's the pessimistic side of the spread. A patient
buy offer placed nearer the instant-sell price beats it, and every gp you save there is a gp of profit. The
4h limit and 24h volume columns are the ones most people skip and shouldn't: they decide whether
the margin at the top of the table is reachable at all.
What actually caps your gp per hour
High Level Alchemy needs 55 Magic and casts roughly 1,200 times an hour, so a naive ceiling is
1,200 × the profit column. In practice the
4-hour buy limit binds first: to
feed 1,200 casts an hour from a single item you would need a 4-hour limit of 4,800, and almost nothing
alchable has one that large. So the real method is to buy several items from this table at once and rotate
through them, treating the limit column as your per-item budget. The second cap is nature runes — you burn one
per cast, about 1,200 an hour, and a rise in the nature rune price shaves every row on the board at the same
time. That's also why an item can drop off this list without its own price moving at all. Thin rows are
filtered out (see below), but volume still matters: an item with barely over the volume floor will not let you
buy thousands of units quickly no matter what its limit says.
What this board filters out
Three filters run before anything is shown. Items priced under 20 gp are dropped — at that level the
listed price is usually stale or there's no real market, and the resulting "profit" is an artefact. Items with
fewer than 100 combined trades in 24 hours are dropped, because an alch you can't buy stock for isn't a
money-maker. And only positive-profit rows survive, ranked by profit, top 80. Prices refresh continuously and
the board itself is cached for two minutes, so what you see is at most a couple of minutes old. Nothing here is
a prediction — it's arithmetic on live prices, and margins can close while your buy offer sits.
FAQ
- Do I pay the GE tax when I alch? No. Alching converts the item to coins directly rather than selling
it on the Grand Exchange, so the 2% never applies. It does apply if you buy an item and resell it instead.
- Is the nature rune cost already subtracted? Yes — every row is High Alchemy value minus the item's
instant-buy price minus one nature rune at its current price. No further deductions are needed.
- Why is my real profit lower than the column says? Almost always the buy side. The board uses the
instant-buy price; if you bought above it, or bought into a rising price, your margin is thinner. The fix is a
patient buy offer rather than an instant fill.
- What level do I need? 55 Magic for High Level Alchemy, plus nature runes and a fire rune source. The
F2P filter above restricts the table to free-to-play items — see the
F2P flipping guide.
- Why are the margins smaller than on other alch lists? Because sub-20 gp items and items with almost
no trade volume are excluded here. Those produce big headline numbers you cannot actually buy into.
More depth: the high alch profit guide covers item selection and
realistic gp/hr, GE buy limits explained covers working around the 4-hour
cap, and volume vs margin explains why the top row is rarely the best
row. Other conversion boards: decanting and processing recipes.
Track open buys on the tracker or get a Discord alert on a price.
Start flipping — free live board → Read the guides