Understanding GE Tax and Buy Limits
Two rules quietly govern every flip you make. Get them right and your margins are real; get them wrong and a "profitable" flip can lose gold.
Why the tax exists
In 2021 Jagex introduced a Grand Exchange sales tax as a gold sink — a mechanism that permanently removes gold from the economy to counteract inflation. Every gp paid in tax is destroyed, not redistributed. For flippers this matters because it's a real, unavoidable cost on the sell side of every trade above the exemption threshold, and it must be priced into every margin calculation.
How the 2% tax is calculated
The tax is 2% of the sale price, charged to the seller at the moment an item sells, and rounded down to the nearest gp per item. You never pay tax when buying. Because it's charged on the sale price rather than your profit, it scales with the item's value, not with how much you made — which is why low-percentage flips on expensive items are so easily wiped out.
Sell one item at 4,999 gp → tax = floor(2% × 4,999) = floor(99.98) = 99 gp.
Sell 1,000 of them → tax is applied per item, so roughly 99,000 gp total.
Exemptions and the cap
- Under 50 gp: items that sell for less than 50 gp each are completely tax-exempt. The 2% would round down to 0 anyway, but the rule is explicit.
- Per-item cap: the tax is capped at 5,000,000 gp per item. This only bites on extremely high-value items — anything selling under 250m pays the straight 2%.
- Exempt items: a specific list of commonly traded, run-essential items is exempt from the tax entirely. These exemptions change occasionally, so check current in-game information if a flip depends on it.
Rounding works slightly in your favour on cheap items, because the per-item tax rounds down. On a 74 gp item the tax rounds from 1.48 down to 1 gp. It's marginal, but on huge volumes of cheap items it adds up.
Working out your true margin
Your real, keep-it margin per item is:
Net margin = sell price − buy price − floor(0.02 × sell price)
Example: buy 2,000, sell 2,100. Tax = floor(42) = 42. Net = 2,100 − 2,000 − 42 = 58 gp.
As a return: 58 ÷ 2,000 = 2.9% per cycle, before you account for fill time.
A useful shortcut: for a flip to break even, your raw spread must exceed 2% of the sell price. Anything tighter loses gold. Most disciplined flippers want the spread to clear the tax with comfortable room to spare, so that normal price wobble between buying and selling doesn't push the trade underwater. See How to find high-margin flips for how this feeds into picking items.
How buy limits work
A buy limit is the maximum quantity of a given item you can buy through the Grand Exchange within a rolling four-hour window. Limits are set per item and vary enormously: a powerful or rare item might be limited to a handful per window, while cheap, high-throughput supplies can have limits in the tens of thousands.
Crucially, the limit applies only to buying. You can sell any quantity you already own at any time. The limit exists to stop a single player cornering a market, and as a side effect it's the main thing that caps how much profit one flip can produce per cycle.
The rolling 4-hour reset
The window is anchored to your first purchase of an item, not to a fixed wall-clock schedule. If you buy your first unit at 2:00, the limit for that item resets at 6:00 — regardless of when within that window you bought the rest. This is why experienced flippers stagger purchases and keep a rotation of several items going at once: while one item's limit is cooling down, others are free to buy.
Plan your rotation. Because every item resets on its own four-hour timer, holding 4–8 liquid flips at different points in their cycles keeps your capital almost continuously deployed instead of idling between resets.
Planning flips around both rules
Tax and buy limits interact to define a flip's ceiling. Per-cycle profit is approximately:
Per-cycle profit ≈ net margin per item × quantity bought (≤ buy limit)
That formula explains a lot of flipping strategy at a glance:
- High limit + thin net margin can still be excellent if the item is liquid enough to buy the full limit and sell it quickly.
- Low limit + fat net margin is capped no matter how good the percentage looks — you simply can't buy many.
- The best flips pair a net margin comfortably above the 2% tax floor with a buy limit and volume large enough to deploy real capital.
This is the arithmetic GE Uncut runs continuously across every tradeable item: it nets out the 2% tax, weighs each opportunity against its buy limit and live volume, and ranks what survives by capital efficiency. You set your capital and thresholds; the tool keeps the tax-and-limit math honest so you don't talk yourself into a flip that the rules quietly make unprofitable.
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