Experience, commonly abbreviated as XP or exp, is a measure of progress in a certain skill. It is generally obtained by performing tasks related to that skill. After gaining a certain amount of experience, players will advance to the next level in that skill, which can result in new abilities, items, and other achievements. You can earn experience by training skills, completing quests, and participating in activities such as Distractions and Diversions and Minigames. The minimum experience needed to max all skills is 374,968,717 (601,991,332 with level 120 Dungeoneering, Invention, and Slayer).

Gaining experience

Experience in a skill is obtained by performing a task related to that skill. Experience can also be gained by completing a daily challenge, completing a quest or a miniquest, or by playing a minigame.

For skills where failure is a possibility, experience is usually only granted on completion of a successful action. For example, if a player cooks a lobster, rather than burning it, they will gain a minimum of 120 Cooking experience. Experience gains can be increased in a variety of ways, including bonus experience, certain clothing, and the effect of bonfires on Cooking and Firemaking.

Players who help others using the Assist System can earn a maximum of 30,000 total experience every 24 hours, although the experience may be shared among many skills. Some skills cannot be shared through the Assist System (namely combat and gathering skills, such as Attack and Mining).

Players can continue receiving experience after level 99 in a skill, up to a maximum of 200 million experience. Once a player reaches this limit, they can continue using the skill, but receive no additional experience. The maximum total experience possible is 5 billion 400 million (5,400,000,000) when a player has 200 million experience in all 27 skills.

Until the Skills Interface update (on 12 November 2007), players with a level 99 skill could view the experience it would take them to earn level 100. However, even when "level 100" was "reached", the actual level remained at 99, and it would not show the experience required to achieve level 101.

The experience gain rates one may obtain varies very much between skills. For example, most Agility training methods give under 75,000 experience per hour, while making summoning pouches can give over 800,000 Summoning experience per hour.

Setting targets

It is possible to set an individual level target for each level. You can set a level target or a target experience for each level individually. Setting two different targets for two different skills will not affect either of the levels.

Relationship with level

This section discusses regular skills: elite skills use a different formula.

Exponential growth

The amount of experience between levels rises by a factor ${\displaystyle 2^{1/7} \approx 1.10409}$, or 10.4%, each level. This exponential growth means that level 99 requires about 13 million experience and level 120 requires about 104 million experience.

The increasing experience needed to get from one level to another has some surprising consequences; getting from level 98 to 99 requires approximately the same experience as from level 1 to level 75. Higher level activities award more experience than lower level ones, so going from level 98 to 99 is usually quicker than going from level 1 to 75.

Total experience required for a level approximately doubles every 7 levels (disregarding the first 20 levels), triples every 11 levels, quadruples every 14 levels, and increases almost 10-fold every 23 levels. 200,000,000 experience in a skill would put the level between 126 and 127.

Equations

The minimum total experience needed for a given level, L, is given by:

${\displaystyle \text{xp}( L ) = \left \lfloor \frac{1}{4}\sum_{n = 1}^{L-1} \left\lfloor n + 300 \times 2^{n/7} \right\rfloor \right\rfloor \ }$

Note: ${\displaystyle \lfloor x \rfloor}$ means the greatest integer less than or equal to ${\displaystyle x}$. This is also known as the 'floor' function.

This equation can be rewritten as:

${\displaystyle \begin{align} \text{xp}(L) &= \frac{1}{4}\sum_{n = 1} ^ {L - 1} n + 75 \sum_{n = 1} ^ {L - 1} 2 ^ {n/7} + \text{truncationerror}(L)\\ &= \frac{1}{8}L(L-1) + 75 \frac{2^{(L-1)/7} - 1}{1 - 2^{-1/7}} + \text{truncationerror}(L) \end{align} }$

The ${\displaystyle \text{truncationerror}(L)}$ function is the error made by not rounding each term of the sum down. The rounding error is at most 1 for each term, so a good estimate is

${\displaystyle \text{truncationerror}(L) \approx -aL }$,

where a is some number between 0 and 1. Using ${\displaystyle a = 0.109}$ gives an error less than 1 XP for any level between 1 and 120. Omitting the term gives an error of at most 13 XP. Omitting the ${\displaystyle \tfrac{1}{8}L(L-1)}$ term gives an error of at most 2% (peaking at around level 16).

The middle term always dominates. The total experience between consecutive levels is therefore

${\displaystyle \text{xp}( L + 1 )-\text{xp}( L ) \approx 75 \times 2 ^ {L/7} \approx 75 \times 1.10409^L}$

The experience to next level increases by 10.4% from the previous experience to next level.

For all levels above about 20 (i.e. for levels where 83 XP is negligible), doubling your experience after reaching a given level will result in rising seven levels, since ${\displaystyle 2^{(L+7)/7} = 2 \times 2^{L/7}}$.

Table

Graph

Graph of Level vs. Experience Needed

A graph of Level vs. Experience Needed and Experience to Next Level, zoomed in from levels 1 - 50

Gaining experience summary

While the main method of gaining experience is practice in the skill (including combat) substantial amounts of experience are available from other sources.

One-off

• Quests and related one-off events award several million XP.
• Achievements offer a total of 2,385,500 XP.
• Opening the balloon system up gives 8,000 Firemaking XP.
• After killing 4,000 chompy birds, the player is awarded 30,000 Ranged XP.
• Resource dungeons give 247,600 Dungeoneering XP after entering them all at least once.
• Showing Wizard Elriss talismans or tiaras to obtain the omni-talisman gives a total of 13,605 Runecrafting experience.

Daily events

• The Jack of Trades aura gives the player an experience reward book if they can gain experience in any 10 skills within 3 hours. It can be used every 24 hours. Upgraded versions of the Jack of Trades gives greater experience rewards when training 15, 20, or 25 skills within 3 hours.

Distractions and Diversions

• The maximum experience you can gain from the circus per week is 105,967 (around 17,710 Ranged, 25,006 Magic, 10,531 Agility, 2x 19,230 Firemaking and 14,260 Thieving experience).
• From Shattered Heart up to 9,703 per non-combat skill per week for an absolute maximum of 145,545 XP per week, and 4,366,350 XP over the time to build a full statue.
• From Tears of Guthix the maximum seen was about 70,000 per seven days, based on the previous highest amount seen and the capacity of the Ornate bowl.
• From Penguin Points points x 25 x skill level per week (maximum 57,000 XP for finding all penguins and using the points on level 120 Dungeoneering). (You can gain more penguin points per week upon the completion of the Cold War quest, The Hunt for Red Raktuber, and Some Like it Cold.)
• From the Troll Invasion distraction and diversion.
• Hanky Points in the Thieves' Guild gives weekly Thieving XP.
• From Wilderness Warbands
• From God Statues up to 5x large XP lamps worth in the Construction skill, and up to 5x medium XP lamps worth in Prayer or Slayer (Player's Choice)

Boosts

• A penance Horn from Barbarian Assault can be charged by playing and used to get double experience in either Agility, Firemaking or Mining.
• Smelting gold bars with the goldsmithing gauntlets gives 33.7 extra Smithing experience per bar, for a total of 56.2 experience.
• Various experience-boosting outfits give 5% or 6% additional experience.
• Extra Firemaking experience can be earned by wearing the flame gloves and ring of fire. If you wear one of them on its own, you get 2% extra XP, but if you wear both of them together, you get 5% extra experience instead of the expected 4%.
• Using firelighters from clue scrolls will grant an extra 10 experience per log. They can only be used with normal logs.
• With a pyrelord or forge regent summoned, lighting logs grants 10 additional Firemaking experience. However, this bonus does not apply to bonfires.
• Runecrafting gloves obtained from Fist of Guthix provide double experience when crafting air runes, water runes or earth runes.
• Swordfish gloves provide 100 extra experience when fishing swordfish.
• Shark gloves provide 100 extra experience when fishing shark.
• Dragon slayer gloves provide 15% extra Slayer experience when killing a dragon on a Slayer task.
• Wearing a seer's headband 2, 3, or 4 gives 10 extra experience per log when chopping maple trees.
• Saradomin's blessing, Guthix's gift, and Zamorak's favour provide 10% experience boosts to Farming, Herblore, and Hunter, respectively, when participating in the Herblore Habitat.
• Urns provide bonus experience while training Cooking, Fishing, Mining, Prayer, Smithing, and Woodcutting.
• The corruption, harmony, and salvation series of auras boost the experience a player gains in Prayer for as long as the aura is active. The percent of experience gained depends on the level of the aura.
• The wisdom aura boosts all experience earned by 2.5%.
• Cooking food on a bonfire grants 10% additional Cooking experience, while burning logs on a Bonfire will grant additional experience based on Firemaking level and other players burning with you.

Special events

• Double XP Weekend is generally active twice a year.
• The Hati paws, available for a limited time in the beginning of 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 gave additional combat experience to the wearer.
• On 25 October 2011 an event was held in celebration of the release of ClusterFlutterer, which gave players triple Slayer experience.
• From 12 November to 14 November 2011, double Dungeoneering experience and tokens were awarded "to celebrate [the] continued success in the war against bots."
• On 31 August 2012, 350,000 XP was given to players who had been a member all month.
• On 30 September 2012, 700,000 XP was given to players who had been a member all month, and all the previous month. The combined award of 1.05 million XP would get a new character to around level 41 in all skills, but is not enough to go from level 98 to 99 in one skill.
• From 15 December to 16 December 2012, double Dungeoneering experience was awarded during one of the Winter Weekends.

Gallery

A level up message before an update in 2007

The old style (prior to Level-up Messages update) of a player reaching level 70 in Mining.

How a level 99 in a skill appears after the interface update.

The level up interface before 16 January 2012

The Level Target view

The Experience Target view

Trivia

• Experience gained on member's skills while F2P is capped at 388 (Level 5).
• The sequence of amounts of experience needed to have a given level in a skill is sequence A111078 in the OEIS.
• If levels were capped at the point where 2,147,483,647 experience was reached in that skill, you could get up to level 150, needing ~2,034 million experience. The current maximum experience per skill (200,000,000) would allow a maximum skill level of 126.
• Experience is capped at 200,000,000 because experience is handled with an invisible tenths place, which means the real experience would look like 200,000,000.0 and is stored as 2,000,000,000 (2 billion). Since the maximum value a 32-bit integer can hold is 2.14 billion, it was cleaner to round it down to 2 billion (shown as 200M after the invisible decimal place).
• If RuneScape were to switch to 64-bit integers, which have a maximum value of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, the total experience someone could gain would be 922,337,203,685,477,580, due to experience being stored as tenths. Having this much experience would be equivalent to having a level of 351. Having every skill at level 351 would result in a combat level of 447 on free-to-play worlds, 491 on member's worlds, and a total level of 9477.
• The amount of experience between levels 98 and 99 is roughly the same as the amount between levels 1 and 75, while the experience between levels 119 and 120 is equivalent to getting levels 1 to 96.