Getting Started: How to Flip on the OSRS Grand Exchange
A plain-English walkthrough for a brand-new flipper. What the Grand Exchange is, how margins and tax work, what buy limits mean, and how to find your first flip.
What the Grand Exchange is
The Grand Exchange (GE) is Old School RuneScape's central marketplace. Instead of standing around shouting prices, players place buy offers and sell offers, and the game matches them automatically. It's a lot like a stock exchange, but for in-game items and in-game gold (gp). When your buy offer meets someone's sell offer at the same price, the trade fills.
Every tradeable item has a live price that moves with supply and demand. You can buy below the going rate by offering a little less and waiting, and sell above it by offering a little more and waiting. That gap is the entire basis of flipping.
What flipping actually means
Flipping is buying an item at one price and selling it at a higher price, pocketing the difference. You're not playing the game in the usual sense. You're acting as a market maker, providing liquidity to other players and getting paid the spread for your patience. No skilling, no combat, just buy low and sell high, repeatedly.
The appeal is that it scales with gold rather than time. A few hundred gp of profit per item is nothing on its own, but multiplied across a full buy limit, then repeated every few hours, it compounds. The skill is in choosing which items, at what prices, and knowing when an item has gone quiet.
Margins: where the profit comes from
The margin is the difference between the price you sell at and the price you buy at. A quick way to estimate it: look at the item's instant-buy price (what you'd pay to buy right now) and its instant-sell price (what you'd get selling right now). The gap between them is the raw margin per item.
Suppose an item instant-sells at 1,000 gp and instant-buys at 1,050 gp.
Raw margin = 1,050 − 1,000 = 50 gp per item.
If the buy limit is 1,000, a full cycle moves 1,000 items for roughly 50,000 gp gross, before tax.
Two things separate a good margin from a useless one: the percentage return (50 gp on a 1,000 gp item is a healthy 5%; 50 gp on a 10m item is a rounding error) and whether the item actually trades. A huge margin on an item nobody buys or sells will simply never fill. Liquidity matters as much as the gap.
The 2% sales tax
Since 2021, OSRS charges a 2% Grand Exchange tax on sales. The tax is taken from the seller when an item sells, rounded down to the nearest gp, and it removes that gold from the game entirely. Key details every flipper should know:
- The tax applies only when you sell, not when you buy.
- It is 2% of the sale price, capped at 5,000,000 gp per item for very high-value trades.
- Items selling for under 50 gp are exempt, and a number of common run-essential items are exempt too.
Because the tax eats into the sell side, your real margin is always smaller than the raw gap. Always check that the spread survives the 2% before committing. A thin margin can flip from profit to loss once tax is deducted.
Back to the earlier item: buy at 1,000 gp, sell at 1,050 gp.
Tax on the sale = 2% × 1,050 = 21 gp.
Profit per item = 1,050 − 1,000 − 21 = 29 gp, not 50.
For a fuller treatment, see Understanding GE tax and buy limits.
Buy limits
Every item has a buy limit: the maximum quantity you can buy through the GE in a rolling 4-hour window. Limits range from just a few units for rare or powerful items to tens of thousands for cheap, high-volume supplies like runes and food.
The buy limit caps how much profit a single flip can generate per cycle. It resets four hours after your first purchase of that item, not on a fixed clock, so flippers often hold several items at once and rotate through them as each limit frees up. Note the limit applies to buying only. You can sell any quantity you own.
Your first flip, step by step
Good starter items trade constantly, so your offers fill fast and you learn the rhythm quickly:
Nature runevery high volume
Cannonballvery high volume
Magic logsmid-tier supply
Sharkpopular consumable
- Pick a liquid item. Start with something that trades constantly: a popular consumable, common rune, or mid-tier supply. High volume means your offers fill quickly and you learn faster.
- Check the margin survives tax. Confirm the gap between instant-buy and instant-sell is still positive after the 2% sales tax, and that the percentage return is worth your time.
- Place a buy offer slightly above the instant-sell price. Offering a touch more than the lowest sellers helps you fill near the bottom of the spread.
- Wait for the fill. Liquid items fill in seconds to minutes. If nothing happens, your price is probably too low for current demand, so nudge it up.
- Place a sell offer slightly below the instant-buy price. Undercutting the lowest sellers by a hair gets you to the front of the queue.
- Collect, and repeat. Once it sells, you've completed a flip. Reinvest and rotate to the next item as buy limits allow.
Patience beats greed. The most common reason a flip fails is chasing a wider margin than the market will give. A small, reliable spread that fills every time beats a fat margin that never does.
How GE Uncut helps
Doing the above by hand means manually checking margins, tax, buy limits, and volume across thousands of items. GE Uncut automates the search. It ingests live Grand Exchange prices every minute, keeps a deep price history for every tradeable item, and surfaces opportunities that have enough two-sided volume to actually fill, ranked by how efficiently they use your capital.
You set your capital and your minimum profit and ROI thresholds; the tool does the filtering. When you act on an opportunity, you can track it as a live position with current profit-and-loss, a sell signal, and a clear exit. Every signal it publishes is later scored against real prices, and the full hit-rate is public on the Track Record. The point is to remove the busywork so you can focus on the decision.
Your first session takes about a minute to set up. Open the Scan settings panel that sits directly above the results in the Flip Finder and do three things. Set Max capital per flip to what you would genuinely commit to one position, because every quantity and profit figure on the board is worked out from that number. Set membership to match your account, so nothing you cannot trade appears. Then leave the minimum profit and minimum margin boxes empty for now: each scan already opens with a bar that suits how it makes money, and typing your own figure applies it to all of them at once, which is the usual reason a beginner's board comes back empty. Everything these controls do is spelled out in your scan settings, explained.
From there the loop is short. Pick a flip, place the buy at the suggested price, and track it, which moves it into My Flips where you can watch the profit and loss and file the sale when it goes through. Add a price alert from the row if you would rather be told than watch.
Two other pages are worth knowing about on day one. Margins is the whole market with no opinion attached, every live spread laid out with the after-tax margin worked out, which is where to go when you want to look around rather than be handed a shortlist. Search takes you straight to any item's own page for its live prices, chart and volume, which is the fastest way to sanity-check something a friend told you about.
Each suggested flip also carries a comment thread from other flippers: real fill times, undercutting warnings, and item-specific quirks, posted under anonymous flipper names. Reading them is open to everyone; joining in takes a free account.
Common beginner mistakes
- Ignoring tax on thin margins. A 1% spread can be entirely consumed by the 2% sales tax. Always net it out first.
- Flipping illiquid items. A big margin on an item that trades twice a day will lock up your gold for hours or days.
- Over-committing to one item. Buy limits cap your upside per cycle; spreading across several liquid items keeps capital working.
- Setting offers and forgetting them. Prices drift. An offer placed an hour ago may now be mispriced, so check back and adjust.
- Chasing a crashing item. If demand is fading, today's margin can evaporate before you sell. Read the trend, not just the snapshot. See Reading demand and volume trends.
Beginner-friendly items to watch
High-volume items where a first flip fills quickly. Each page shows the live buy and sell price, margin after tax and daily volume: Blood rune, Yew logs and Superior dragon bones.
GE Uncut is an unofficial, fan-made tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Jagex Limited. RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are trademarks of Jagex Limited; in-game content and item images are the property of Jagex Limited, used for reference only. Price data is from the OSRS Wiki real-time prices API. See data attribution.