Cheapest Skills to 99 in OSRS

The honest headline is that more than a third of the skills in Old School RuneScape cost nothing to max, and several pay you. The expensive ones are expensive for a specific structural reason, and once you understand it you can usually reduce the bill considerably.

The skills that cost nothing

These are free or profitable to 99. The only cost is time.

If your constraint is GP rather than time, this is where your hours should go. Several of these appear on our money-making methods list precisely because the training is the income.

The skills that cost money

Four skills genuinely cost GP, and they divide into two very different cases.

Construction — the only one with no resale

Construction is the most expensive skill in the game because everything you build stays in your house. There is no product to sell, so every GP is gone.

The range is enormous. Mahogany tables reach 99 fastest and cost hundreds of millions. Oak methods cost roughly a tenth as much and take three or four times longer. Making your own planks with the Plank Make spell instead of buying them cuts the bill further.

Our Construction calculator prices every method per experience point at current plank prices, which is the only number that matters here.

Prayer, Herblore and Crafting — cheaper than they look

These three look expensive and are much less so, because the products are worth something.

• Prayer is bought outright — bones have no resale after use. But you rarely need 99. Level 43 for protection prayers and 70 for Piety are the milestones that matter, and stopping there costs a fraction. The Prayer calculator prices every bone and altar route live.
• Herblore produces potions that sell for most of what the ingredients cost. The real cost per experience point is the gap, not the purchase price — and which potion has the smallest gap changes weekly. Cleaning grimy herbs is often outright profitable.
• Crafting produces dragonhide bodies and battlestaves that hold most of their value on resale.

Every production skill calculator prices methods this way, which is why the rankings here differ from figures quoted elsewhere.

The cheapest method is not always the usable one

There is a catch worth understanding before you commit to a plan.

The cheapest method per experience point is frequently one you cannot buy enough of. Cleaning grimy herbs is often the cheapest Herblore training on the board — and buy limits cap you at a few thousand herbs every four hours, so supplying a full 99 that way would take weeks of consistent purchasing.

Our skill calculators show this directly as a "per 4h" column. When the cheapest route is also slow to supply, the page says so rather than letting the ranking mislead you. In practice most people mix two or three methods rather than committing to one.

Working out your own number

Prices move, so any fixed figure in a guide is out of date within weeks. The calculators do it live:

• Herblore · Crafting · Smithing
• Cooking · Fletching · Construction
• Prayer — bones and altars compared

Enter your current and target level and each ranks every method by cost per experience point at today's prices, including what the output sells back for.

A practical order

If you want to max without spending much:

1. Do the free ones first. Woodcutting, Fishing, Mining, Agility, Thieving and Hunter cost nothing and several fund the rest.
2. Take Firemaking through Wintertodt. It pays you and supplies other skills.
3. Farm herbs continuously from Farming 32. This funds Herblore directly and is the best value in the game per minute played.
4. Do Prayer to 43, then 70, and stop until you have a reason to go further.
5. Leave Construction until last, and use oak methods unless money is genuinely no object.

See fastest skills to 99 for the opposite trade-off, and best skills to train first if you are still deciding what to train at all.

Where the money actually goes

Cost to 99 is dominated by a handful of skills. Grouping them by rough order of magnitude is more useful than a precise table that ages badly.

The pattern is straightforward: skills where the output can be sold cost little, and skills where the input is destroyed cost a lot. Prayer burns bones, Construction burns planks, Herblore turns two items into one.

The cost lever nobody uses

1. Buy inputs when the skill is unfashionable

   Herb and bone prices move with what content people are doing. Buying secondaries in bulk during a quiet period and training later is a genuine discount, and it costs nothing but patience.

2. Train the profitable skills first

   Gathering skills fund the expensive ones. Reaching 99 in a gathering skill before starting Herblore means the Herblore is paid for by the process.

3. Prefer methods with resale value

   Where two methods give similar experience, the one producing a sellable item can cost a fraction as much overall, even if its headline gp-per-experience looks worse.

What "cheap" costs in hours

The trade-off nobody mentions when quoting cheap 99s is time. The cheapest method for a skill is usually not the fastest, often by a wide margin.

Which is correct depends entirely on which you have more of. A player with a large bank and little time should never take the cheap route; a player with plenty of time and no bank should never take the fast one. Most advice fails because it assumes everyone is in the same position.

Before you commit

Prices move. Before starting a long grind, check the current cost of the inputs rather than a figure you read somewhere — a Herblore route that was cheap six months ago may not be now, and the difference across 99 levels is millions.