OSRS Flipping Guide (2026)

Flipping is buying an item on the Grand Exchange and selling it again for more, usually within the same session. You are not betting on the price going up — you are being paid for standing between a buyer in a hurry and a seller in a hurry.

The Grand Exchange is not one price. It is two, and the gap between them is the whole job. At any moment there are players who want an item now and will pay above the going rate to skip the queue, and players who want out now and will accept below it. A flipper buys at the low end, waits, and sells at the high end. You are not predicting anything — you are supplying patience to a market full of people who have none, and the spread is your fee for it.

Which means your enemy is not a price crash. It is time. GP sitting in an unsold item earns nothing, and an item that takes nine hours to sell has cost you every flip you could have run with that GP instead. Most of what follows is really about fill speed wearing other names.

Both are worth learning, in that order.

Every sale pays 2% to the Grand Exchange. On a 1,000 gp buy and a 1,120 gp sell, that is 22 gp of the 120 gp spread — nearly a fifth of what you thought you made — and 98 gp is what actually reaches your bank. Three details decide how hard that bites, and most guides skip all three:

Rounded down

The tax is the sale price divided by 50, floored. Anything selling under 50 gp is taxed nothing at all — which is why bulk low-value flips keep their whole spread.

Capped at 5M

Tax never exceeds 5,000,000 gp on a single item, so the cap only starts binding above a 250M sale price. Below that you always pay the full 2%.

Bonds are exempt

The Old school bond pays no tax at any price. On a ~20M item that is around 400k the game never takes — see the bond page for its live spread.

The rule this gives you: a spread has to clear 2% of the sell price before you have made anything at all. A 1,000,000 buy against a 1,020,000 sell looks like a 2% winner and loses 400 gp a unit. Every margin figure on this site is already after tax, so the number you see is the number you keep.

Every item caps how many units you can buy per four hours. That cap, not your bank, decides what one flip pays: a 4,000 gp margin with a limit of 8 pays 32,000 gp a cycle, while a 12 gp margin with a limit of 12,000 pays 144,000 gp — 4.5 times more, on a margin 333 times smaller.

The buy limit is a rolling four-hour window, per item, per account. It is the most misunderstood number in flipping because it converts a per-unit margin into an actual hourly rate — which is what Margin x Limit means, and why that is the figure to rank flips on rather than the raw margin.

It also explains why bigger banks flip wider rather than deeper. Once you can afford a full buy limit of an item, extra GP does nothing for it: the game will not sell you more for another four hours. The only way to deploy more capital is more items at once, which is why experienced flippers run six or eight positions and beginners run one.

Watch limit / volume alongside it. A buy limit that is a large share of everything that trades in a day means you are asking the market for a slice it may not have; the offer sits unfilled and the flip never happens.

Every item page draws two dashed lines — the median sell price and the median buy price over the period you are looking at. The shaded strip between them is where the item has actually been trading, and almost every entry worth taking is a price that has left it. A median is the middle reading, not the average — half the period sat above it and half below. That matters because one manipulated trade drags an average and barely moves a median, so the band is the honest picture of a normal day for this item.

A thick band is a real spread

The gap between the two dashed lines is the margin this item has been paying all period, not just in the last tick. A band you can comfortably see is a flip that has been worth running repeatedly. A band so thin the two rules almost touch is an item whose margin exists only in the moment you happened to look — and it will be gone by the time your buy fills.

A dip below it is the entry

When the price drops under the lower dashed line, people are dumping into the buy side and you are being offered the item below its own normal. That is the moment a limit buy fills fast and sells back into the band. It is also the only kind of "wait for it" this guide recommends, because you are waiting for a number you can see rather than for news.

A spike above it is not your flip

A price well over the upper line has already made its move. Buying there means paying the top of the range and hoping it goes further, which is merching with none of the reasoning — and the reversal back into the band is usually faster than a sell offer fills. If you are already holding, a spike is where you sell, not where you buy.

The period changes the answer

The medians are computed from the window on screen, so switching 24h to 1M redraws both lines. A price that looks cheap against a single day can be mid-band against a month — which is the check worth doing before you size up. Read the short window for the entry and the long one for whether the item has simply been sliding all month.

The band is on by default; the Median lines switch in the chart settings turns it off, and the palette there repaints both rules. Open any item — the item directory lists every one — and the chart is the first thing on the page.

The right item changes as your GP grows, because buy limits do not. The flips above are banded on what a full buy limit costs to acquire, so each band is a bank that can actually run the flip, and the figure on each is Margin x Limit — what one full cycle pays. At every level the trap is the same: the expensive item is not automatically the better flip.

Under 1M

A full buy limit costs under a million. Runes, supplies, teleport tabs. Right now: Sandworms, Lava rune, Maple logs.

1M to 20M

A cycle ties up a few million. Potions, bolts, mid-tier gear. Right now: Ancient essence, Numulite, Amethyst arrow.

20M and up

A full limit is 20M+. Bigger margins, brutal limits, slower fills. Right now: Magic longbow, Onyx bolts, Raw marlin.

Prices on any site, including this one, are the last trades — not a promise about your next one.

Step 1

Buy one unit at the instant-buy price. It fills immediately and tells you what sellers are truly asking right now.

Step 2

Sell that one unit at the instant-sell price. It also fills immediately, and now you know the real spread rather than the reported one.

Step 3

Subtract the tax from the sell side. If what is left is worth having, place the real offers just inside both ends — a little above the buy, a little below the sell, so you are first in each queue.

Step 4

Give it a deadline. If the buy side has not filled in the time you expected, the spread has moved and the flip is gone; cancel and look elsewhere rather than waiting it out.

The test costs you the spread on a single unit. On a flip you were about to size up into, that is the cheapest information you will ever buy.

Nearly every losing flip is one of these, not bad luck.

• Reading the spread as profit and forgetting the 2% on the sell.
• Trusting a margin on an item with almost no daily volume.
• Putting the whole bank into one item, then having no GP when a better flip appears.
• Holding a failed flip and calling it a merch, which turns a small loss into a long one.
• Chasing an item that has already spiked, where the spread has closed and only the risk is left.
• Ignoring the buy limit and expecting a big bank to buy its way to a bigger cycle.