How OSRS GE Tax Works: The 2% Grand Exchange Sale Tax

Since December 2021, selling an item on the Grand Exchange costs you 2% of the sale price. The coins are not paid to anyone — they are destroyed. This is the single most important mechanic to understand before you start trading seriously, because it sets the floor on how thin a margin can be before a trade stops making money.

The rules

The rate is 2%, charged to the seller. The buyer pays exactly what their offer says. When the trade completes, 2% of the sale price is deducted from the seller's proceeds.

It is calculated per item, then rounded down. Selling 1,000 items at 1,000 GP each is taxed 20 GP per item — 20,000 GP total. The rounding always favours the game, but on cheap items in bulk it works slightly in your favour: an item sold at 149 GP is taxed 2 GP rather than 2.98.

Sales below 50 GP are not taxed at all. This keeps very cheap bulk trading viable.

The tax is capped at 5,000,000 GP per item. The cap is reached at a sale price of 250,000,000 GP. Above that point, the effective tax rate falls: a 500M sale is taxed 5M, which is 1%, not 2%.

Why it exists

Gold enters Old School RuneScape constantly. Every monster killed, every item alched, every shop sale adds coins that did not previously exist. Without something removing gold at a comparable rate, the currency slowly loses value and prices drift upward forever.

The Grand Exchange tax is the main mechanism doing that removal. Trading is one of the highest-throughput activities in the game, so taxing it removes gold in proportion to economic activity rather than through a flat charge that would hit low-level players hardest.

Whether you think that is a good design is beside the point for a trader. It is the environment you operate in.

Which items are exempt

A short list of items is not taxed at all:

• Old school bond
• Chisel
• Gardening trowel
• Glassblowing pipe
• Hammer
• Needle
• Pestle and mortar
• Rake
• Saw
• Secateurs
• Seed dibber
• Shears
• Spade
• Watering can

Most of these are cheap tools where a 2% charge would be more irritating than meaningful. The bond is exempt because it functions as a currency instrument rather than an item.

Exemptions are set by Jagex and can change with a game update. If you are planning a large trade around one, confirm it in game first.

What it means for flipping

You need more than a 2% spread to break even

This is the part that catches people out. Recovering a 2% deduction requires slightly more than a 2% price increase, because the deduction is taken from the larger number.

break-even sell price = buy price ÷ 0.98

Buy at 1,000,000 and you need to sell at 1,020,409 just to get your money back. A spread of exactly 2% loses money.

In practice, aim for a margin comfortably above break-even. A trade that clears 0.1% after tax is not worth an offer slot when something else is available at 3%.

It changes which items are worth trading

Before the tax, very thin margins on extremely high-volume items were viable — you made almost nothing per unit but moved enormous quantities. The tax removed most of that strategy at the low end.

What it did not remove is high-volume trading generally. It just raised the bar for how wide a spread needs to be. Our high volume screen shows current margins after tax, so what you see there is already adjusted.

It makes expensive items relatively cheaper to trade

Because of the 5M cap, items above 250M are taxed at less than 2%. At 1B, the effective rate is 0.5%.

This does not make high-value items good flips — their volume is usually terrible, and the capital tied up is enormous — but it is a genuine quirk worth knowing if you trade at that level.

Working out a specific trade

The GE tax calculator shows the tax on any sale, including the cap and the exemptions. For a full flip with buy price, sell price and quantity, the GE profit calculator gives net profit, ROI and the capital required.

Every margin figure elsewhere on OSRS Helper is already calculated after tax. When you see a margin on an item page or in a market screen, that is what would actually land in your bank.

The short version

• 2% of the sale price, paid by the seller
• Rounded down, calculated per item
• Nothing under 50 GP
• Capped at 5M per item, reached at a 250M sale price
• A handful of tools and the bond are exempt
• You need a spread above roughly 2.04% before a flip makes any money

What the tax costs at each price point

The rate is flat, so the interesting question is not the percentage but what it does to a margin you were counting on.

The rightmost column is the number worth internalising. To keep 1% after tax you need roughly 3% of gross movement, because the tax takes 2% of the whole sale price rather than 2% of your profit.

The three rules that are easy to get wrong

1. Under 50 gp is exempt entirely

   Items selling below 50 gp pay nothing. This is why very cheap high-volume items behave differently from everything else: there is no tax drag at all, so a 2 gp spread on a 30 gp item is genuinely 2 gp.

2. It rounds down, per item, not per trade

   The tax is calculated on the price of a single item and rounded down, then multiplied by quantity. On a 74 gp item the tax is 1 gp, not 1.48 — a rounding gain of about 0.6% in your favour. On cheap items this is worth more than it sounds.

3. It caps at 5,000,000 gp per item

   Above 250,000,000 gp the tax stops growing. It is a flat 5M whether the item sells for 250M or 2B, which quietly makes the very top of the market cheaper to trade in percentage terms than the middle.

Worked example: a trade that looks profitable and is not

You spot an item with an insta-buy of 512,000 and an insta-sell of 500,000. That is a 12,000 gp spread — over 2%, which sounds healthy.

Eighty-five percent of the apparent profit was tax. This is the single most common reason a flip that looked worth doing returns almost nothing, and it is why every margin figure on this site is calculated after tax rather than shown as a raw spread.

What the tax is actually for

It is a gold sink. Every coin taken in tax is destroyed rather than redistributed, which is Jagex's counterweight to the gold that enters the economy through drops and shops. Understanding that explains the design: the exemption protects low-value trading, the cap stops it being punitive at the top, and the flat rate in the middle is where the sink actually does its work.

It also explains why the rate is unlikely to be reversed. Complaining about it is a fixed cost of trading; the useful response is to price it in.