OSRS Grand Exchange Tax, Explained (2% cap & exemptions)
The Grand Exchange tax is the single most misunderstood thing in flipping — and getting it wrong is why other tools quote margins you can't actually hit. Here's exactly how it works.
The rule, in one line
When you sell an item on the Grand Exchange, the game takes a 2% tax on the sale price (rounded down), paid by the seller. The buyer pays nothing extra. That's it — but the details below are where the money is.
The three things people miss
- It's capped at 5,000,000 gp per item. 2% of a 1B item would be 20M, but the tax never exceeds 5M on a single item. So on ultra-expensive items the effective tax rate is well under 2%.
- Cheap items are exempt. Items that sell for 49 gp or less are not taxed at all. (This is why "sell it for 50 gp to dodge tax" is a meme, not a strategy — you'd be giving away far more than the tax to save it.)
- Some items are exempt entirely, regardless of price — most notably the Old School Bond, plus a set of basic tools (chisel, hammer, knife, needle, pestle and mortar, saw, spade, rake, secateurs, seed dibber, shears, watering can, glassblowing pipe, gardening trowel). Flipping bonds is genuinely tax-free.
What it does to a flip
Your real margin is sell − buy − tax, where tax is 2% of the sell price (capped/exempt as
above). A flip that looks like a 60 gp margin on a 3,000 gp item really nets about 0 after the ~60 gp tax —
that's a wash. The tax doesn't just shave profit; it can turn a "profitable" flip negative, which is
the #1 reason beginners lose money trusting raw margins.
Quick reference
| Situation | Tax |
|---|---|
| Item sells for ≤ 49 gp | None |
| Bond / exempt tool | None |
| Normal item, sells for P gp | floor(P × 0.02) |
| Item sells for ≥ 250M gp | Flat 5,000,000 (the cap) |
Tax rates and rules can change with game updates — always sanity-check against the current in-game Grand Exchange. This is a guide to game mechanics, not financial advice, and it has nothing to do with real-world money.