How Much GP Do You Need to Start Flipping?
Less than you think to start, more than you think to scale. The honest answer depends on two rules of the Grand Exchange: the 4-hour buy limit on every item and the 2% tax on every sale.
The two rules that set the answer
Buy limits cap how many of an item you can buy every four hours. That caps the profit one GE slot can make on that item, so a bigger bank only helps until every slot is full. The buy limits guide explains the mechanic.
GE tax takes 2% of every sale, rounded down, capped at 5M per item. On a 50 GP item that is 1 GP, which is often the entire margin. On a 1B item it is 5M, which is a smaller percentage than on a 300M item. The GE tax guide has the details and the exempt list.
Together they mean flipping income scales with bank size up to a point, then flattens. The tiers below describe that curve.
Under 100K
You can flip, but you are learning, not earning. Margins on items you can afford are a few GP each and the 2% tax rounds many of them to zero. Expect tens of thousands of GP an hour at best, and treat it as practice for reading margins and buy limits.
Where to start: Free-to-play consumables with huge volume: runes, arrows, feathers, raw food. Use the Beginner and F2P presets, which filter to low-price, high-volume, reliable-margin items.
100K to 1M
This is where flipping starts to pay. You can hold four to eight GE slots of mid-volume supplies at once and margins of 20 to 200 GP per item add up across buy limits of several thousand. Realistic: low hundreds of thousands of GP an hour of active play.
Where to start: Potions, ores, bars, bones, seeds, mid-level ammunition. Sort the flip finder by potential profit per hour rather than margin, so buy limits are already priced in.
1M to 10M
The sweet spot for most players. You can afford items with 1K to 10K GP margins that still trade hundreds of times an hour, and you can run all eight slots without being capital-constrained. Half a million to a few million GP an hour is normal for someone who checks offers every 20 minutes.
Where to start: Mid-tier gear, high-level potions, herbs, dragon-tier weapons, skilling outputs. Read the flipping-with-10M guide for a full method at this size.
10M to 100M
Buy limits become the binding constraint. A slot filled with an item limited to 70 per four hours cannot make more than 70 times the margin, no matter how much GP you have. Profit per hour keeps rising but more slowly than the bank does, and idle GP becomes normal.
Where to start: Spread across many items rather than concentrating; the Plan does this allocation automatically and shows how much of the bank can actually be deployed within buy limits.
100M and above
High-value gear and rares. Margins are large in GP but small in percentage, the 5M tax cap starts to matter (above 250M the effective tax rate falls), and a few items above roughly 250M have a structural problem where the tax exceeds the typical spread, so a perfect flip still loses. Merching and update plays matter more than pure spread capture here.
Where to start: Weapons and armour from raids and high-level bosses, with the tracker and price alerts doing the watching. Check the trend guard and dump status on every item page before committing a large position.
The practical shortcut
Whatever your bank, open the Plan, enter the GP you want to deploy, and it will allocate it across GE slots respecting every buy limit, showing how much can actually be put to work and what it should earn. If a large share stays idle, that is the buy-limit ceiling telling you to spread wider or hold longer merch positions rather than a bug.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum GP to start flipping in OSRS?
There is no hard minimum; you can margin-check a rune with 100 GP. Meaningful profit starts around 100K, becomes a real money-maker around 1M, and hits its most efficient range between 1M and 10M, where buy limits and capital are roughly balanced.
Does having more GP always mean more profit from flipping?
No. Each item has a 4-hour buy limit, so a single GE slot has a ceiling regardless of your bank. Past roughly 10M, profit per hour grows more slowly than the bank and you need to spread across more items, hold longer merch positions, or accept idle GP.
How much does the GE tax matter for small banks?
A lot. The 2% tax is deducted from the sale price and rounded down, so on very cheap items it can wipe out the whole margin. 07Flip shows every profit figure after tax so you never plan a flip that the tax turns negative.
Next: the beginner's flipping guide or flipping with 10M. Old School RuneScape is a registered trademark of Jagex Ltd.