Experience rate

"Rate(s)" redirects here. For the chance at receiving a drop from a monster, see drop rate.

Experience rates refer to the hourly rates at which experience can be obtained through training a specific skill.

Some of the quicker and easier skills to train (such as Cooking and Fletching) can get experience rates upwards of 800,000 per hour, whilst some of the slowest and most tedious skills to train (such as Slayer, Runecraft and Agility) get maximum experience rates between 20,000–75,000 per hour, making them slower to train in comparison to the quicker and easier skills. In all cases, tediousness and "difficulty" of a skill is subjective; however, faster skills tend to be considered easier, with some exceptions such as Thieving due to its high intensity of clicking.

Calculating rates

Not all experiencing-giving actions are realistic for training; methods must contain repeatable actions. Experience rates on repeatable actions are determined by three factors: the actions per hour of a training method, the experience per action when training, and the cost of each action in the method.

Repeatability of actions

Many actions give experience, but not all of these actions are repeatable. For example, the genie random event rewards players with an experience lamp, but due to the inconsistency in how often the event spawns, it's extremely unlikely that players will see a second one within an hour, and certainly not at a common rate. Conversely, Cooking fish will always be able to be repeated, and a time can be given for each fish cooked, allowing repeatability, and therefore an hourly rate, to be determined.

Actions per hour

A skill like Cooking is fairly easy to calculate, as cooking most fish takes four game ticks. Since 28 foods can be cooked per inventory, a full inventory can be perfectly calculated to take 112 ticks, or 67.2 seconds.

Action limitations

Players also need to factor in the time that it takes after each inventory to open the bank, deposit the cooked food in their inventory, and withdraw a new inventory of raw food. In this case, players can find out how long it takes them to cook one inventory and bank, and then find out how many times that can be done in an hour, to find the actions per hour.

For example, if it takes 75 seconds to cook a full inventory and then use the bank, then 1344 foods can be cooked per hour. This "cooked per hour" number is found by first finding the number of seconds in an hour (since there are sixty seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, we simply multiply the two: $60*60=3600$) and then dividing that number by the time it takes to cook one inventory ($3600/75*28=1344$).

Outliers

Some skills or methods, such as Farming, are more difficult to calculate; this is because each action is locked behind a large amount of time, also known as being "time-gated."

Experience per action

Next, we factor in the amount of experience that is gained via performing certain actions in a skill. In our example of Cooking, if players were cooking lobsters, then they would be getting 120 experience per lobster cooked. Since it was determined that 1344 actions could be done per hour in the previous step, we would multiply $1344*120$ to get a rate of 161,280 experience per hour, which is the experience rate.

Cost of actions

Finally, players should consider the cost of each action. Full experience rates are only able to be done if the cost of training can be maintained; in this case, since a raw lobster costs 74, and a cooked lobster sells for 158, players can afford to cook for a full hour as long as they can afford to purchase 99,456 worth of raw lobsters, after which they can expect to receive 112,896 in profit.

Example rates

Below are a couple example rates for skills.

Skill	Repeatable method	Actions per hour	Limitations	Experience per action	Cost	Rate
Agility	Canifis Rooftop Course	82 laps	Falling off	240 total per lap	Stamina or energy potions	19k/hour
Fletching	Stringing maple shortbows	2,450 bows strung	Banking	50 experience per bow	Logs and bowstrings	122k/hour
Firemaking	Burning yew logs	1,485 fires lit	Banking, finding space	202.5 experience per log	Logs	300k/hour