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. That's 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 to 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.
You can also read the formula straight off the Margins board, which has a column for each of its terms. Margin is the after-tax figure, taken at the item's own rate and rounded down per unit exactly the way the game does it, so nothing above is left as an exercise for you. Limit is the quantity term. And Profit@Limit is the two multiplied together, which is to say the per-cycle ceiling this section is about, already worked out for every item in the game. Sort that column high to low and the board ranks itself by exactly the quantity the three bullet points above are comparing.
The tax as a percentage headwind
The most useful way to think about the 2% tax is as a fixed headwind on your return. Because it is charged on the sale price, it costs you very close to two percentage points of gross return on every flip, whatever the item. A flip with a 3% raw spread keeps only about 1% after the tax; a flip with a 10% raw spread keeps about 8%. The absolute gold changes with the item's value, but the two-point drag stays roughly constant, and that is what makes it so punishing on thin margins and so trivial on fat ones.
This is exactly why the different flipping styles feel the tax so differently. A fast flipper working sub-1% spreads on liquid staples is fighting the tax on every single trade, so a spread that does not clear two points cleanly is not a flip at all, it is a slow loss. A patient flipper holding out for a 6% or 8% margin barely notices the tax, because there is so much cushion above it. When you plan a flip, do not just check that the spread is positive; check that it is positive by a comfortable margin over two points, so that the normal drift in price between your buy and your sell cannot tip an already-thin trade into the red.
A four-item rotation in practice
The rolling reset sounds fiddly in the abstract, so here is how a flipper actually uses it. Say you keep four liquid items in rotation. At 2:00 you buy your full limit of the first and immediately set it to sell. Rather than sit idle waiting for that item's window to reopen at 6:00, you move straight to the second item and buy its limit, then the third, then the fourth, spacing the first purchases out across the session. By the time you come back around, the first item's four-hour window has reset and it is buyable again.
The effect is that your capital is almost never stuck waiting on a single timer. While one item cools down, three others are either buying, selling, or ready to re-buy. This is the practical reason experienced flippers hold several positions at once rather than pouring everything into the one item with the best margin: the buy limit makes a single item a bottleneck, and a rotation routes around it. The more liquid the items and the more staggered their timers, the closer you get to keeping every coin of your bank employed at all times, which is the real goal that both the tax and the buy limit are quietly pushing you toward.
Running a rotation from memory is where it falls apart, because four staggered timers are three more than anyone tracks reliably. Track each leg as you place it and My Flips holds the whole rotation in one view, with what is still open and what has been banked, so the question of which item is free to buy again has an answer you can look at. If you play with the RuneLite plugin linked to your account, your Grand Exchange fills arrive there on their own, which is the version of this that survives a long session.
See tax and limits on real items
Each item page shows the 4-hour buy limit and the margin after GE tax on live prices: Old school bond, Twisted bow 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.