How to Make Your First Million GP in OSRS

The first million is the hardest, because you have neither the levels that unlock good methods nor the capital that makes trading worthwhile. Everything after it is easier — the second million takes a fraction of the time.

This guide assumes a new or returning account with low levels and no meaningful bank.

Set the target properly

A million GP is not much in the modern game. It will not buy end-game gear, and it is not a goal worth optimising your account around. What it is worth is the threshold at which several things become possible: decent starter equipment, supplies for training, and enough capital that flipping starts to compound.

Realistically, a new account can reach it in a few hours of focused effort. Do not overthink the route.

Free-to-play

Free accounts have fewer options, but the ones that exist are reliable.

Cut and bank yew logs at Woodcutting 60. Slow to reach, but once you are there it needs nothing else and the logs always sell. The trees behind Varrock palace and outside Falador both have short bank runs.

Mine iron ore from Mining 15. Available almost immediately on a new account, and the ore feeds Smithing so demand is permanent. The Al Kharid mine is the usual choice.

Cook raw fish you buy from the Grand Exchange. This is a genuine processing loop — buy raw, apply the skill, sell cooked — and one of the few available to free players. Check the current spread between raw and cooked before buying in bulk, and use a range rather than a fire to reduce burning.

Craft air runes after Rune Mysteries. Available from Runecraft 1, and the rate roughly doubles at levels 11, 22 and 33 as extra runes per essence unlock.

Full details and current rates are on our free-to-play money making page.

Members

Membership opens considerably better options at low requirements.

Wintertodt from Firemaking 50 is the single best answer for a fresh members account. It requires no combat stats, trains a skill, and the reward crates contain ores, herbs, seeds and gems. Many accounts fund their entire early game here.

Thieving from Ardougne knights at level 55 drops coins directly — no banking, no selling, no exposure to price movement. Complete the Ardougne Medium Diary first if you can; the success rate difference is substantial.

Herb runs from Farming 32. These are unusual in that the money accumulates while you are logged out. A full run takes ten minutes and you return eighty minutes later. Measured against time actually played, this is among the best value activities in the game at any level.

Amethyst mining at Mining 92 is genuinely AFK, though the level requirement puts it out of reach early.

Our beginner money-making page filters everything by low requirement and low starting capital.

The quest shortcut

Several quests give enough experience to skip the slowest part of a skill entirely, which is often faster than training toward a method:

• Waterfall Quest requires nothing at all and gives 13,750 experience in both Attack and Strength — levels 1 to 30 in both, in about half an hour.
• The Knight's Sword needs Mining 10 and gives 12,725 Smithing experience, taking you to level 29.
• Doric's Quest gives 1,300 Mining experience for a few hundred GP of materials.
• The Restless Ghost gives 1,125 Prayer experience in about five minutes.

See quests with the best XP rewards for the full list ranked by what they give.

What not to do

Do not buy gold. It is against the rules, accounts get banned, and the sites selling it are not trustworthy with payment details.

Do not chase high-value methods you cannot support. A method that pays 3M an hour but needs gear you cannot afford and supplies you cannot replace is not available to you yet.

Do not spend the first million on gear. Reinvest it. A million cycling through low-budget flips becomes several million far faster than a million spent on equipment becomes anything.

Do not grind a skill purely for money if a quest gives the same levels in an hour. Check the quest rewards first.

After the first million

The useful next step is deciding what kind of account you want. If you enjoy combat, work toward the quests that unlock it — Dragon Slayer I for free players, Lost City and Monkey Madness I for members. If you prefer skilling, pick the two or three skills that unlock money-making methods you would actually enjoy doing.

And if the Grand Exchange interests you, a million is enough to start flipping properly. It is the one activity in the game that scales purely with capital rather than levels, which makes it unusually well suited to compounding from here.

Routes to a million, compared

The honest comparison is not gp per hour but hours to the goal including the time spent qualifying for the method.

Two things fall out of that table. First, the methods with no requirements are competitive at this level — the gap between "no requirements" and "moderate requirements" is much smaller than it becomes later. Second, the levels themselves are usually the bigger cost: Thieving 55 takes longer than the million it then earns.

The first million is mostly about not spending it

At this stage almost everything looks worth buying and almost nothing is.

Two hours a day for a week

If you can only play a little, this is the shape that works:

1. Start each session with a herb run

   Ten minutes, and it pays whether or not you do anything else. Over a week the runs alone are a meaningful share of the million.

2. Spend the middle of the session on one method

   Pick a single method and stay on it. Switching between three things means doing the low-rate opening of each three times.

3. Put idle gp into offers before you log out

   Even a few hundred thousand cycling on the Grand Exchange earns while you are away, and it costs a minute.

What comes after

A million is the point where the game stops being about the number and starts being about access. The next targets worth having are membership if you do not have it, the quest requirements that open better methods, and enough of a buffer that dying somewhere is annoying rather than ruinous.