Grand Exchange Buy Limits
How buy limits work and how they affect your OSRS flipping strategy.
What Are Buy Limits?
Every item on the Grand Exchange has a buy limit — the maximum quantity you can purchase within a 4-hour window. This prevents any single player from cornering the market on an item. Once you hit the limit, you must wait for the timer to reset before buying more.
How the 4-Hour Timer Works
The timer starts when you buy your first unit of an item. After exactly 4 hours, your limit resets for that item. Each item has its own independent timer — buying one item doesn't affect the timer on another.
Common Buy Limits
| Item Type | Buy Limit |
|---|---|
| Runes, arrows, bolts | 13,000 – 20,000 |
| Common resources (ore, logs, herbs) | 10,000 – 13,000 |
| Potions, food | 2,000 – 10,000 |
| Standard weapons & armour | 70 – 125 |
| Barrows equipment | 15 |
| Rare items (Twisted Bow, Scythe, etc.) | 8 |
Buy Limits and Flipping Strategy
Buy limits directly affect your profit per flip cycle. A high-margin item with a buy limit of 8 might earn you less total GP than a small-margin item with a limit of 10,000. The 07Flip dashboard shows buy limits alongside profit figures so you can calculate your total earnings per 4-hour window.
Tips for Working with Buy Limits
- Stagger your buys — start flipping different items at different times so limits don't all reset at once.
- Use all 8 GE slots — flip 8 different items simultaneously to maximise your throughput.
- Consider profit per limit — multiply the per-item profit by the buy limit to compare total earning potential.
Profit Per Limit: The Number That Matters
The most useful calculation in flipping is profit per buy limit: multiply the post-tax profit of one item by its 4-hour buy limit. That is the most you can earn from the item per cycle, and the result is often counter-intuitive. A rune item flipping for 30 gp profit at a limit of 11,000 earns 330,000 gp per cycle. A piece of gear flipping for 250,000 gp profit at a limit of 8 earns 2,000,000 gp per cycle — more in total, but it ties up far more capital and fills more slowly. Judging items by per-item margin alone is misleading; profit per limit, and how fast each actually fills, is what sets your real GP per hour.
Six Resets a Day
Because the timer is 4 hours, each item resets up to six times in 24 hours. An item earning 330k per cycle has a theoretical ceiling near 2M gp per day if you refill it on every reset. You will not catch every reset in practice, but staggering your buys so different items come off cooldown at different times keeps all of your slots productive around the clock.
Capital and Buy Limits Together
Buy limits cap quantity; your bank caps spend. The binding constraint is whichever you hit first. On a cheap item you usually hit the buy limit long before running out of gold; on expensive gear you run out of gold or slots long before the limit of 8 matters. Sizing each slot to the lower of "limit × price" and "what you can afford" is exactly what the 07Flip optimiser does automatically.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the buy limit reset at a fixed clock time?
No. It is a rolling 4-hour timer that starts when you buy your first unit of that item, not a fixed server reset. Each item tracks its own timer independently.
Do buy limits apply to selling?
No. Buy limits only restrict purchases. You can sell any quantity of an item at any time.
Does the limit reset on logout or world hop?
No. The timer is account-wide and persists across logouts and worlds.
Can I split a buy limit across multiple offers?
Yes. The limit is the total quantity bought in the window, whether in one offer or several. Once the combined total hits the limit, further buys are blocked until it resets.