OSRS Overnight Flipping: Does Leaving Offers Overnight Pay?

What overnight flipping means in OSRS

Grand Exchange offers keep working while you’re logged out. They only pause if you stay away for several days [1]. But the items you buy wait for you to collect them, and nothing sells until you put in a sell offer. So an overnight flip buys while you sleep and sells after you wake up.

We tested that against what Trader normally does when you’re around: put each item up for sale as soon as it arrives. Both start from the same picks, at the same time, with the same prices.

Overnight offers made money

We took Trader’s picks every 2 hours for a month and played each set out twice: once selling items as they arrived, and once as an 8-hour night where nothing could sell until morning.

With a 10M bank, a night away made about 189K GP, against about 229K for selling as items arrived. With 50M it was about 228K against 270K. So a night away kept about 82–85% of the profit. 95 of every 100 nights made money, but the worst night lost about 368K with 10M, against about 45K when selling as items arrived.

What this means for you: Leaving offers overnight is worth doing. Expect a bit less than you’d make by selling as items arrive, and a few more losing nights.

Should you lower your overnight buy offers?

A common tip is to set overnight buy offers lower than usual, so they only fill at a bargain. We tried 0.5%, 1%, 2%, 3% and 5% lower, with the same picks and sell prices.

Each GP you spent did earn more: about +2.3% at the usual price, +3.2% at 1% lower and +6.5% at 5% lower. But far fewer offers filled. With the usual price, 93 of every 100 picks bought something; at 1% lower it was 71, and at 5% lower only 31. Less GP at work meant less profit.

At 1% lower, the drop (about 8K GP a night) was small enough that it could have been chance. At 2% or lower, the drop was clear.

What this means for you: Keep your usual buy prices overnight. Lower offers earn more on the little they buy, but they buy so little that you make less.

Which items hold up overnight

Waiting until morning hurt some items more than others. We compared the return on GP spent, by the item’s price.

Items under 1K kept about 83% of their return overnight. Items between 1K and 10M kept only about 66–70%. One likely reason: cheap items trade in large numbers all day, so a sale in the morning goes about as well as one at night.

What this means for you: For overnight offers, favor cheap items that trade a lot. Save pricier flips for when you can sell them as they arrive.

Does night length or time of day matter?

Not much. Against an 8-hour night, a 6-hour night made about 5–6K GP more and a 10-hour night about 6–10K less. No start time stood out either: the return from overnight offers was between +1.9% and +2.7% whatever time of day (UTC) they went in.

What this means for your next night

• Put offers in before you log off. A night away kept about 4/5 of what the same flips made when you were there.
• Use your usual buy prices. Lowering them by 2% or more made clearly less.
• Favor cheap items that trade a lot. They lost the least by waiting until morning.
• Sell what you bought when you wake up, at the price you planned. If it hasn’t sold after a while, lower it, but not below what you paid plus tax.
• Expect the odd losing night. In our test month, 5 nights in 100 lost money.

Limits

• Fills are estimates. We only see 5-minute averages and totals, not each trade. We assume an offer gets at most a quarter of the trading at its price, and we can’t see your place in line. With a tenth instead of a quarter, the results pointed the same way.
• RuneLite reports trades made while a player is logged out when they log back in, so some overnight trades may show up later than they happened.
• We used Trader’s picks and quantities, which are chosen for daytime play. Picks made just for the night might do better or worse.
• Each round is scored on its own. We kept Trader’s quantities, at most one GE buy limit, even though an 8-hour night spans two buy-limit periods.
• These are results from past prices, not a promise of future profit.

How we tested

We replayed real Grand Exchange prices and trading volume in 5-minute steps [2], and let simulated offers fill only when real trades reached their price. It’s the same fixed model we use to test every change to Trader, and our earlier study used it too [3].

Download the data

The tables behind this article, as CSV files, for the test month and the build period at fill shares of 25% and 10%.

• Profit per roundEvery way of playing out the picks, by bank: average with its 95% range, rounds in profit, worst round and GP spent.
• By item priceProfit and return for overnight offers and for selling as items arrive.
• By start timeThe same, by the hour (UTC) the offers went in.

Sources

1. OSRS Wiki, “Grand Exchange”. Offers stay active while you’re logged out, pause after several days away, and are collected at any bank.
2. OSRS Wiki, “Real-time Prices”. The 5-minute prices and trading volume we used, which come from RuneLite.
3. Gielinor Gains, “OSRS Flipping After the 2% Tax: What It Really Earns”, 10 October 2026. What flipping earns by bank size, and how we test.
4. Gielinor Gains, “Trader Gives Your Sales Time”. Why Trader holds a sale for 8 hours before lowering it.

Words we use

Bank

The GP you have to trade with. We tested 10M, 50M and 200M.

K and M

Thousand and million. 189K GP is 189,000 GP.

Round

One set of Trader’s picks, played out from the moment the offers go in. A new set starts every 2 hours, so rounds overlap and can’t be added up into a day’s income.

Left overnight

Buy offers stay open for 8 hours while nothing can sell; everything bought goes up for sale on waking.

Selling as items arrive

Each item goes up for sale as soon as it’s bought, as Trader does when you’re around.

Fill

When your offer actually buys or sells. An offer that never fills earns nothing.

Fill share

How much of the trading at your price we let your offer take. At 25%, if 100 units sold at your price, your offer could buy up to 25.

Return

Profit after tax as a share of the GP spent. Spending 1M and getting back 1.02M is a +2% return.

95% range

How far a number could move by chance. We worked out each number again thousands of times on random mixes of the days we measured, and 95 of every 100 results landed inside the range.