What the Trading Post actually takes from you

Open the Trading Post, look at any item, and you see two numbers: what buyers are offering and what sellers are asking. The temptation is to subtract one from the other and call the difference profit. It is not. Somewhere between those two numbers the Black Lion Trading Company takes 15%, and it takes it in two separate bites at two different moments.

The 5% you pay before anything happens

The moment you post a sell listing, the game charges 5% of your asking price. Not when it sells: when you list it. That copper leaves your wallet immediately and does not come back if the listing never fills or you cancel it.

This is the fee people forget, because it is invisible in hindsight. If you list a stack at 10 gold, 50 silver is gone before a single buyer has looked at it. Relist that stack four times chasing the price down, and you have paid the listing fee four times.

There is one exception worth knowing: placing a buy order costs nothing extra. The gold is held in escrow and returned in full if you cancel. Buying is free to attempt; selling is not.

The 10% you pay when it sells

When the listing fills, the game takes another 10% of the sale price out of the proceeds. So of a 10 gold sale you keep 8 gold 50 silver: 50 silver went at listing, 1 gold at the sale.

Both fees round up, with a floor of 1 copper each. On a 5 copper item you are paying 2 copper in fees, which is 40%. This is why the very cheap end of the market is mostly unflippable, no matter how good the percentage spread looks.

Where break-even sits

Because the fees are taken from the sale price rather than the profit, the arithmetic is not “buy at X, sell at X plus 15%”. You need the sale price where 85% of it equals what you paid:

break-even sell price = buy price ÷ 0.85

That is a 17.6% rise, not 15%. The difference sounds small and is not.

You paid	You break even at	Required rise
1 g	1 g 17 s 65 c	+17.6%
8 g	9 g 41 s 18 c	+17.6%
50 g	58 g 82 s 36 c	+17.6%
250 g	294 g 11 s 77 c	+17.6%

Every item page on this site shows this line under the heading break-even sell price, so you never have to do the division.

Selling instantly is not a way around it

Selling straight into the highest standing buy order skips the waiting, not the fees. You still lose the full 15%; the 5% comes out of the sale instead of being charged up front. A quick way to value anything sitting in your bank:

what it is really worth = highest buy order × 0.85

That is exactly the number the account page uses when it tells you what your materials are worth. It is deliberately the pessimistic figure: the amount you could have in your wallet within a minute, not the amount you might get after a week of patient listing.

What this means for reading any spread

Take an item with a buy order at 1 gold and a sell listing at 1 gold 10 silver. The gap looks like 10 silver, a healthy 10%. Run it properly:

• buy at 1 g → you have paid 10 000 copper
• sell at 1 g 10 s → 11 000 copper, minus 550 listing, minus 1 100 exchange
• you receive 9 350 copper

You lost 650 copper on every unit. A 10% spread is not a 10% profit; it is a loss. The spread has to clear 17.6% before you are even.

Every profit and margin figure on this site already has both fees subtracted. When the flip list says a unit earns 40 silver, 40 silver is what reaches your wallet.

The part the numbers cannot tell you

One honest caveat. The Trading Post publishes how many units are listed and how many are wanted, but not how many actually change hands. A thousand units of something can sit in the sell column for months. Order depth is a measure of patience, not of demand.

Until an item has enough recorded history to estimate how fast it really moves, treat any “what to flip” list, this one included, as a set of candidates worth checking, not instructions. The safest flips are boring: materials that thousands of players consume every day, where the spread is thin but the queue moves.