What TTL means for an OSRS account in 2026 (and why botters pay more for it)

TTL means Total Level. It's the sum of every skill level on the account, so a fresh tutorial-island account is at 32 (the 8 starting levels of 1 plus a few from the tutorial), and a max main is at 2,277 (2,376 with all the members skills counted in). It is not "Time To Live" or "Total Time Logged" despite the rumours, although I understand the confusion since both meanings would make sense in context. The botter market settled on TTL = Total Level around 2015 and that's stuck.

The reason you keep seeing accounts listed as "500 TTL" or "1800 TTL" on Sythe, Eldorado, and Discord seller threads is that botters figured out a few years back that Jagex's detection scrutinises low-TTL accounts much harder than mid or high-TTL ones. The skill-sum number became the price floor.

What TTL is and how to read a listing

Account: 1765 TTL on a Sythe listing means the account has 1,765 combined skill levels across the 23 OSRS skills. There's no hidden formula. You can confirm any account's TTL in the in-game skills tab by adding up the columns, or look at the "Total" line on the hiscores. Trade Cape is 2,277. With Sailing and the new skill from late 2025 in, the cap moves higher. The listings still use the historic 2,277 anchor most of the time.

For practical purposes, three brackets show up most often in the shop talk:

• 30-60 TTL: fresh tutorial-island account. Tutorial completed, nothing else. Marketed as "fresh tut," "30 TTL," or just "starter."
• 500 TTL: an account with about 500 combined levels. This is the bracket botters reference as the survival floor.
• 1,800 TTL: a near-max main with most skills 80-99. The premium tier. Sells for $350 to $2,000 depending on quest cape, infernal, and ancillaries.

Why 500 TTL is the survival threshold

The single most-cited number in this niche, and the one buyers ask me about by name. The data comes from a 2024 OSBot thread titled "botting fresh accounts", where a botter named BananaTown laid it out in two short sentences: "Any tut island account I bot gets destroyed within 72 hours. Anything over 500ttl has been fine." Another commenter on the same thread, Suuh, posted the actual survival math: "out of about 200 accounts made in the last month, 100 of those being botted through tut, probably 25 accounts made it past my 72 hour resting time." That's a 12.5% survival rate on fresh scripted-tutorial accounts versus the near-100% Suuh reported for the hand-finished cohort that went on to 50 mining and 50 smithing without bans.

The community's working theory for why 500 is the threshold isn't official Jagex policy. Jagex has never publicly named TTL as a detection signal. The reasonable interpretation: low-TTL accounts have very little behaviour history for Jagex's heuristics to compare against. Anomaly detection works by comparing recent behaviour against an account's baseline. A fresh-tut account has no baseline, so anything weird shows up as a 100% deviation. An account with 500 combined levels has weeks of recorded actions across multiple skills, so the same botted activity blends in.

There's a 2021 OSBot quote from stanleylai1 that lines up with this: "The first 24 hours of an account's creation is heavily watched." The shape of detection seems to be a steep curve down to about 500 combined levels and then a long flat tail.

Why 1,800 TTL is the next tier

Beyond 500, the next bracket the market cares about is 1,800. This is the "near-max main" tier where most skills sit between 80 and 99 and the account behaves indistinguishably from a long-term legit account.

The RuneMate community thread "Has anyone managed a 1800 total with just botting" is the canonical source on this bracket. Several botters reported hitting 1,750-1,900 TTL on accounts that were "90% botted" without permabans, including a quote from dark sage: "1799 total, botted 90%, has quest cape, and manual farm/slayer." The mix of mostly-bot with a few hand-finished gates is the formula.

The market reflects this. A 1,800-TTL main on OSBot's 2,000+ TTL listing thread was listed at $350 USD via crypto. A 2,270+ TTL near-max with infernal cape and avernic defender got a price-check answer of "$800 to $2k" on OSBot/182790. The premium from fresh tut (~$0.30 in bulk) to high-TTL is on the order of 1,000x to 5,000x.

TTL versus rested: not the same thing

Buyers conflate these two terms regularly so it's worth pinning down.

TTL is a skill-sum number. It moves up when the account trains and never moves down.

Rested is a logout duration. A "6-day rested" account was created, possibly trained to spec, then left logged out for at least 6 days before being delivered. The OSBot listing HelloPeeps phrases it as "All tutorial island accounts are rested for at least 6 days with last login of at least 3 days."

A rested tutorial account is still ~32 TTL. A high-TTL account can be rested or fresh-logout. The two concepts solve different problems: TTL solves the "Jagex's anomaly detection has no baseline" problem, rested solves the "this account was just created and logged into from a new IP" problem. Best-in-class accounts have both.

Activity-specific TTL floors

Botters don't bot everything at the same TTL. Some activities forgive low-TTL accounts; some get accounts banned in hours regardless.

The numbers are loose floors. The OSBot thread 183264 on agility ban-rate has a Czar quote that's worth pulling: "If you skip the early agility levels, agility is extremely safe, but the 1-40 will get you if you're not careful." The recommendation in that thread settles on 6 hours on / 12 hours off for agility courses, on top of an account that's already past 1,000 TTL.

A tutorial account at 32 TTL trying to bot agility is the textbook case of failing both signals at once: no behavioural baseline plus the activity with the sharpest detection on the curve. Same account running NMZ slowly might survive weeks.

Pricing in 2026

What the market actually charges, pulled from listings live in the last quarter:

The price curve is non-linear because the survival curve is non-linear. A $5 account that lasts 3 days and a $50 account that lasts 90 days have the same total cost per day if the cheap account delivers 3 days of GP, but the $50 account also avoids the time cost of constantly rotating fresh accounts, swapping bot scripts to fit the TTL, and re-warming each one. Most volume botters end up clustering around the 500-1,000 TTL range as the sweet spot.

What this means for buyers

If you're not botting and just want a main to play, TTL is mostly a shortcut for "how much manual training have I skipped." A 500-TTL account is roughly the first 20-50 hours of grind already done.

If you are botting, the survival multiplier is the whole story. The osbot/184493 thread 12.5% number on fresh-tut versus near-100% on hand-finished is the math that pays for a higher-TTL account three times over.

What I sell at each tier

Most of my catalogue clusters around the brackets above. The relevant SKUs:

• 400 TTL OTP and 500 TTL OTP: entry-tier TTL, past the worst of the fresh-account survival cliff, set up for most bot scripts.
• 500 TTL skiller OTP: same TTL bracket but with skill weighting toward gathering / production instead of combat. The choice if you're botting woodcutting, fishing, or mining specifically.

The accounts in stock right now page lists everything currently available, with TTL labelled per SKU. Crypto checkout is the default, Stripe is there if you'd rather. Delivery is automated, credentials land on your order page the moment payment confirms.