Runescape Money Making Guide for Members: Best Methods by Level
A plain breakdown of members money makers by level, from low-level skilling to bossing and Grand Exchange flipping.
Gold runs pretty much everything in Old School RuneScape. Gear, prayer potions, runes, a membership bond, that Twisted Bow you keep staring at. It all costs gold, and the pile never feels big enough. Members get way more ways to make money than free players do, which is the main reason a bond pays for itself fast. The catch is that a slow method and a good one can sit ten times apart in gold per hour, and the best pick keeps shifting as your stats climb. So here's the breakdown by level, from the stuff you can do at combat 20 up through endgame bossing and Grand Exchange flipping. Match the grind to where your account actually sits and you'll spend less time scraping for scraps.
Low Level Gold per Hour Methods
When your combat stats sit somewhere between 3 and 60 and most skills are low, you're not going to be pulling millions an hour. That's fine. The goal here is steady, low-risk gold while you train. The rates below are rough estimates and they slide around as Grand Exchange prices move, so treat them as a ballpark rather than a guarantee.
Killing Chaos Druids
Edgeville Dungeon is the classic spot. Chaos druids are level 13, they hit weak, and they drop a pile of herbs: ranarr weed, snapdragon, kwuarm, the stuff people actually need for potions. You also pick up nature runes and law runes along the way. A looting bag helps you haul more. Expect maybe 200K to 400K an hour, depending on how fast you kill them and which herbs the rng hands you. About as safe as money making gets.
Tanning Dragonhide
Buy green or blue dragonhide off the Grand Exchange, run it to Ellis the tanner in Al Kharid, pay him a few coins per hide to tan it into leather, bank, and repeat. The tanned leather sells for more than the raw hide plus the tanning fee. That little spread is your profit, and it adds up. Ballpark 300K to 500K an hour. Carry your coins as platinum tokens so you move more per trip instead of doing the walk ten extra times.
Gathering Jobs That Pay Better Than They Look
A few low-skill gathering tasks beat what you'd expect:
- Mort Myre fungi. Needs the Nature Spirit quest and a blessed silver sickle. You cast Bloom to grow fungi on the rotting logs, pick them, repeat. Around 500K to 700K an hour, but it eats prayer points fast, so stack prayer bonus gear and bring potions.
- Blue dragon scales. Down in Taverley Dungeon. Each scale is worth a few hundred coins, give or take, and they stack, so you can haul a full inventory. Roughly 400K to 600K an hour, more if you've got the 70 Agility shortcut.
- Mining iron ore. The Mining Guild if you've got 60 Mining, otherwise any iron rock near a bank. Relaxing, pretty AFK, 300K to 400K an hour.
A Combat Option: Green Dragons
If you don't mind the Wilderness, green dragons drop dragon bones and green dragonhide, both in constant demand for prayer training and crafting. You can clear 500K to 700K an hour here. The catch is player killers. Wear an anti-dragon shield, keep Protect Item on, and only bring gear you're willing to lose. Glance at the map for white dots and bail the second one appears.
Don't Sleep on the Passive Bits
Birdhouse runs only need a low Hunter level and you do them every 50 minutes or so. The daily Zaff battlestave run in Varrock unlocks through the Varrock diary. Neither makes you rich on its own, but they stack up while you're doing something else, and that's basically free gold.
Mid Level Skilling Money Makers
Once your skills climb into the 50s, 60s, and 70s, skilling turns into real money. The numbers below come from the OSRS Wiki's money-making tables, which are recomputed from live Grand Exchange prices, so they drift over time. The methods themselves stay solid. Why runecrafting keeps showing up? Because most of the top skilling gold lives there.
| Method | GP/hour (wiki est.) | Main requirement | |---|---|---| | Pickpocketing elves | ~4.4M | Thieving 85+, Rogue outfit | | Double nature runes (diary cape) | ~3.4M | Runecrafting 91+ | | Blood runes (Arceuus) | ~3.3M | Runecrafting 77 | | Wrath runes | ~2.9M | Runecrafting 95 | | Sunfire runes | ~2.9M | Runecrafting 98 | | Mastering Mixology | ~2.5M | Herblore 60+ | | Blast Furnace: adamantite bars | ~2.2M | Smithing 70 | | Tan Leather spell | ~2.2M | Magic 78 | | Blast Furnace: runite bars | ~2.2M | Smithing 85 | | Killing Zalcano | ~2.1M | Mining 70+ | | Wilderness Agility Course | ~1.9M | Agility 52+ | | Guardians of the Rift | ~1.1M | Runecrafting 27+ |
Figures rounded from the OSRS Wiki money-making tables and they shift with GE prices.
Runecrafting Is the Big One
The training grind is famously slow, and yeah, that puts a lot of people off. The payoff is real once you're past it. Blood runes at 77, double natures at 91, then wrath at 95 and sunfire at 98. All of those sit in the 3M-an-hour range and up. The Abyss speeds up the combination runes and the multi-rune crafts. Runecrafting is kind of a pain to level, but it pays back better than almost anything else you can do without swinging a weapon.
Blast Furnace Smithing
The Blast Furnace in Keldagrim only uses half the coal, which is why smelting bars there turns a profit. You buy ores on the Grand Exchange, smelt them into bars, and sell the bars back. Adamantite bars at 70 Smithing and runite bars at 85 Smithing both clear around 2.2M an hour. It's clicky, and you pay a small fee to use the pumps unless you've done enough furnace shifts, but the income is steady and the inputs are easy to restock.
Processing Tricks
A few magic and herblore methods turn cheap inputs into pricier outputs. The Tan Leather spell (Magic 78) tans hides in big batches for a tidy profit. Mastering Mixology is a newer herblore method sitting around 2.5M an hour once you've got 60 Herblore. And Zalcano, the demon boss under Prifddinas you fight with mining instead of melee, pays about 2.1M an hour and basically just needs Mining 70. Nice change of pace from bar grinding.
High Level Bossing and Slayer Profit
This is where the real gold lives. Once your combat stats hit the 80s and 90s and you've got the gear, bossing and high-level Slayer blow skilling out of the water. The OSRS Wiki's top money-making entries are all combat, and the numbers get a little absurd at the very top. A lot of these rates assume maxed or near-maxed stats, top-end gear, and clean execution, so your real number will probably run lower until you're dialed in.
| Method | GP/hour (wiki est.) | Notes | |---|---|---| | Doom of Mokhaiotl (top tier) | ~15.3M | Endgame, group content | | Fortis Colosseum (Wave 12) | ~11.6M | Solo, needs 95+ combat | | Yama (duo) | ~11.3M | Newer boss | | Phosani's Nightmare | ~11.1M | Soloable | | Nex (duo) | ~10.4M | God Wars Dungeon 2 | | Theatre of Blood | ~9.2M | Raid, team | | Tombs of Amascut (solo 545) | ~8.4M | Raid | | Vardorvis | ~8.3M | Desert boss | | Vorkath (dragon hunter lance) | ~4.1M | Beginner boss | | Zulrah (max efficiency) | ~3.3M | Classic snake boss | | Cerberus | ~3.0M | Slayer boss |
Figures rounded from the OSRS Wiki money-making tables and they shift with GE prices.
The Beginner Bosses
Vorkath and Zulrah are the two everyone points at once you're combat-ready. Vorkath unlocks after Dragon Slayer II, needs decent ranged or melee, and sits around 4M an hour with a dragon hunter lance or crossbow. Zulrah is the classic snake boss, around 3.3M an hour at high efficiency once you've memorized the rotation. Neither needs a team. They're the bridge from skilling money into proper bossing money.
Raids Pay Best
The very top of the list is raids. Theatre of Blood and Tombs of Amascut both sit in the 8 to 9M-an-hour range when you're running them well, and the newer Doom of Mokhaiotl and Fortis Colosseum push past 11M. Raids want a team (or a practiced solo setup for ToA), maxed-ish gear, and a lot of learning before you're efficient. The payout comes from rare drops that you split with your group, so a chunk of your income shows up as occasional jackpots rather than a steady hourly trickle. Plan for streaky weeks.
Slayer Still Pays
High-level Slayer tasks fund themselves and then some. Cerberus needs Slayer 91 for the task and runs around 3M an hour off crystals and keys. Brutal black dragons, the Thermonuclear smoke devil, and the abyssal demon line all stay profitable too. Slayer also drops the bigger-ticket items like the abyssal whip and draconic visages, and a gem bag plus herb sack make looting painless. Even when a task isn't the best gold per hour, you're training combat and banking drops at the same time, so the time is rarely wasted.
Flipping on the Grand Exchange
Flipping is buying an item low and selling it higher a few minutes later, without ever leaving the Grand Exchange. No combat, no skill requirements, no quest. Just gold and a feel for prices. It's one of the lowest-risk ways to grow a bank, and you can do it on a brand new account with a few thousand coins. The catch is you have to actually understand how the GE works, or the tax eats your margins.
How Margins Work
Every item has two prices that matter. The instant buy price is what you pay when you bid high enough to fill right now. The instant sell price is what you get when you sell low enough to fill right now. The gap between them is your margin, minus the 2% Grand Exchange tax (capped at 5M per sale). So if you buy an item for 1,000 and sell for 1,050, the raw margin is 50, but after the 20-coin tax your real profit is 30. You need a spread above 2% just to break even, so anything thinner than that isn't worth the bother.
Test the Margin First
Before you commit gold, check the spread. Buy one of the item at well above guide price. It fills instantly and shows you the current instant buy price. Then sell that same one back for 1 coin. It fills and shows you the instant sell price. Now you know exactly where to set your real buy and sell offers for the rest of your stock. It costs you a tiny bit to learn, but it stops you from guessing and overpaying.
Buy Limits Shape Everything
Every item has a buy limit, the most you can grab in a 4-hour window. Runes let you buy tens of thousands. Common armor and weapons cap around 70 to 125. Rare high-value items cap at 8 to 15. A thin margin on something with a 10,000 buy limit can beat a fat margin on something capped at 8, because you actually move volume. Multiply margin times buy limit to see the real ceiling on a flip, then compare.
What to Flip and What to Skip
Good flips trade a lot, fill fast, and have a workable margin after tax. PvM supplies (potions, food, ammo), popular weapons and armor, skilling materials, and runes all move constantly. Skip stuff with a huge suspicious margin, since it's usually low volume or about to crash. Spread your gold across four to eight different items so a single price drop can't wipe you out. Experienced flippers pull anywhere from 500K to several million an hour depending on their bank, but that assumes you keep all eight GE slots busy and reinvest fast.
Mistakes That Waste Gold Fast
A lot of players stay broke not because they make no gold, but because they leak it. Here's where the money usually drains out, and most of these are easy to plug.
Overpaying on the Grand Exchange
Panic-buying gear at peak hours, or following an old guide that names a price that isn't right anymore, will cost you. Check current prices on a tracker before you buy, and don't impulse-snatch the first listing. Same goes for selling. Dumping items the moment a price dips can lock in a loss you didn't need to take. Sometimes you hold an item a few hours and it recovers.
Burying Bones Instead of Using an Altar
Burying bones as you find them is a brutally slow way to train Prayer. Bank them and use a gilded altar in a player-owned house, or the Chaos Altar out in the Wilderness, for several times the experience per bone. The boost is large enough that banking bones basically pays for itself over time, since you need far fewer of them to hit your target level.
Wrong Armor for the Job
Wearing melee plate armor while you cast magic or range tanks your accuracy. Your spells splash and your bolts miss. Match the armor to the style, magic robes for casting and ranged gear for ranging. This one mistake turns a fast kill into a slow, food-burning mess.
Wilderness with Everything You Own
Bringing your best gear into the Wilderness for a clue scroll or a quick task is how people lose it all to a player killer. Only carry what you're willing to lose, keep Protect Item on, and watch the map for other players the whole time. A 50K risk setup kills green dragons fine. A 5M setup does too, right up until it doesn't.
Trusting "Doubling Money" and Scam Trades
If someone in a bank says they'll double your gold, they won't. Same deal with fake item trades and "free" upgrades that need you to hand something over first. If it sounds too good to be true, it is, full stop. The Grand Exchange exists so you don't have to trust strangers in the first place.
Buying Gear Too Early
Dropping your whole bank on a fancy weapon before you can actually use it well, or before it'll speed up your money maker, just leaves you broke and undergeared everywhere else. Upgrade the thing that makes you gold first, the weapon that speeds your main grind, the diary gear, graceful. Then reach for the trophy items.
Grinding Cows and Chickens Past Their Use
Cows and chickens are fine for the first few combat levels. Staying there for hours, when sand crabs or rock crabs would level you two or three times faster, is just wasted time. Wasted time is wasted gold. Move on the moment your stats can handle something better.
One quick win worth grabbing today: gilded altars and the Chaos Altar both give a big experience boost per bone, so the bones you'd otherwise bury are worth way more banked and used in bulk. Fix that single leak and you've saved more than most low-level money makers pay out in an hour.