OSRS High Alchemy Calculator — Best Items to Alch

High alching turns items into gold. The trick is finding which items are profitable to alch right now — because nature rune prices and item prices both move constantly, the answer changes every few hours. This calculator does the math live.

Buy price (instant buy on the GE) plus nature rune cost, compared against the high alch value, equals profit per cast. We pull fresh prices from the OSRS Wiki API every 30 seconds and sort by profit, so the top of the table is your answer.

How profit per cast works

Profit per cast = high alch value − (item buy price + nature rune cost). The calculator pulls the live nature rune price every 30 seconds, so the per-cast figure on the table already accounts for it — no need to memorise a number that drifts daily.

The two fixed mechanics worth knowing: cast speed is 1 every 3 seconds (1,200 casts/hour at full focus), and nature runes have an 18,000 buy limit per 4-hour window — the real cap on how fast you can scale. Fire runes have a 50,000 limit and aren't the bottleneck.

Best items to alch right now

The calculator gives you three different lenses:

• Highest profit per cast — the per-cast gp number. Useful when nature runes are your bottleneck (small cash stack, slow refills).
• Highest profit per hour — multiplies per-cast profit by the buy limit, so items with very small buy limits get penalised. This is the realistic "what can I actually make per hour" view.
• Best for AFK alching — high-volume items where the buy limit refills fast enough that you can keep casting without running out. Less profit per cast, but the only items where alching feels passive.

Sort by whichever fits your situation.

Strategy by bankroll

The constraint at low cash isn't the cast speed, it's the buy limits. Whatever item you're alching, you can only buy a fixed quantity per 4 hours.

Under 1m, profit per hour is going to be modest — expect 100–200k at typical margins, because you'll spend half your time waiting on buy limits. Worth doing for the Magic XP, but don't expect it to fund much else.

1–10m: pick one item at a time, the highest profit per cast you can fully bankroll. Buy the limit, alch through it, wait for the reset, repeat. Realistic throughput lands closer to 600 productive casts per hour, because you're spending the other half waiting. Calculator shows the actual gp/hour live.

10m+: split across 5–10 items. The point is to never be waiting on a single buy limit. While items A, B, and C are on cooldown, you're alching D, E, and F. Ceiling is roughly 600k–1m gp/hour at the current item meta, plus 78k Magic xp/hour as the byproduct. Calculator shows the actual number live.

Alching while doing other content

Most players don't alch as their main activity. They alch while doing something else — bird house runs, Slayer tasks, idle skilling, anything where they have a hand free every 3 seconds.

The xp is real (78k/hr) and the gp is real, but the gp/hour ceiling on alching alone is below most other money makers. The reason it's worth doing is the stacking — you were going to do that Slayer task anyway, and now the task earned you an extra 600k–1m gp on top of the loot.

For that use case, sort the calculator by "Best for AFK alching" — high-volume items with quick buy limit resets and consistent margins. You don't want to switch items every 4 hours when your real focus is something else.

Common mistakes

A few things people consistently get wrong:

• Ignoring buy limits. A 50 gp/cast item with a 100/4hr buy limit is not the same as a 50 gp/cast item with a 25,000/4hr buy limit, even though the per-cast number looks identical. Always check the buy limit column.
• Alching during update spikes. When an item gets buffed, its buy price spikes immediately but the alch value stays the same. The item that was profitable yesterday might be unprofitable for a week. The calculator catches this automatically (live prices); if you're working off a memorised watchlist, double-check.
• Don't forget the Explorer's Ring. The Ring 4 gives 30 free high alch casts per day and the Ring 3 gives 30 free low alch casts. Trivial compared to a normal alching session, but free is free.
• Fire staff or Tome of Fire? High Alch costs 1 nature rune + 5 fire runes per cast. Wield any fire staff (Mystic, Smoke, fire battlestaff) or the Tome of Fire and you skip the fire rune cost — about 25 gp/cast saved. Either is fine; pick the cheaper option. There's no separate "alch buff" item, so don't let anyone sell you one.

FAQ

What level Magic do I need for High Alchemy?

55 Magic. Low Alchemy is at 21 but the conversion ratio is much worse — generally not worth it for profit.

Does GE tax apply to high alching?

No. Alching converts an item to gold via a spell, not a GE transaction. This is the main reason items profitable to alch aren't always profitable to flip.

How many nature runes do I need to get from 78 to 99 Magic?

Roughly 175,000 casts at 65 xp each (about 11.4M xp). At 1,200 casts/hour that's about 145 hours of pure alching for the level alone, separate from any flipping breaks.

What's the highest profit item to alch right now?

Whatever's at the top of the calculator. It changes hourly. Anyone selling you a static "best alch items 2026" list is working from old data.

Can I alch items I already own?

Yes. Just check whether selling them on the GE would give you more than alching first — for most items the GE price is above alch value.

Why does the best item to alch change so often?

Item prices move constantly, and so do nature rune prices. A 100 gp/cast margin can flip negative inside an hour during a volatile market. The calculator updates every 30 seconds; that's why we don't publish a static list.

Data is pulled from the OSRS Wiki Real-Time Prices API and refreshed every 30 seconds. Profit calculations include the current nature rune buy price; tax is set to zero (alch sells aren't taxed). If you want this data inside RuneLite while you play, install the 07Flip plugin. Bug reports and feature requests welcome — message us via Discord.