D&D 5e Magic Item Prices: A Complete Cost-by-Rarity Guide (2024 + 2014)

A player slides a Cloak of Protection across the table and asks the question every DM dreads: "How much is this worth?"

You open the Dungeon Master's Guide, find the rarity, and get handed a range so wide it is almost useless. "101 to 500 gp." Great. So is it 110 or 490? The book shrugs. Now the whole table is waiting while you do mental math you did not prep for.

I have run that scene more times than I can count, and I finally got tired of guessing. This is the guide I use now: real numbers by rarity, where they actually come from, the community system that patches the worst gaps, and a clean method for pricing the loot your players keep trying to sell. No more freezing at the shop counter.

The short answer: what magic items cost by rarity

If you just need a number right now, here it is. These are the working baselines I use at the table, drawn from Xanathar's Guide to Everything and confirmed by the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.

Rarity	Base price (permanent item)	Consumable (potion, scroll)
Common	50 to 100 gp	25 to 50 gp
Uncommon	400 gp	200 gp
Rare	4,000 gp	2,000 gp
Very Rare	40,000 gp	20,000 gp
Legendary	200,000 gp	100,000 gp
Artifact	Priceless, not for sale	n/a

That is enough to keep a session moving. If you want to understand the reasoning, set fairer prices for unusual items, or handle players selling loot, keep reading.

For a specific item with one click, our Magic Item Price Calculator does this math for you and adjusts for your world's economy.

Why is D&D 5e so vague about magic item prices?

This is the part that trips up new DMs, so it is worth being honest about. 5e was designed around the assumption that magic items are not for sale. The default setting is low-magic, where you find items in dungeons rather than buy them off a shelf. The designers did not want a Diablo-style magic shop on every corner, so they left pricing fuzzy on purpose.

The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide reflects that. It gives ranges, not prices:

Rarity	DMG 2014 value range
Common	50 to 100 gp
Uncommon	101 to 500 gp
Rare	501 to 5,000 gp
Very Rare	5,001 to 50,000 gp
Legendary	50,001 gp and up

The trouble is obvious the first time a player wants to actually buy something. A Potion of Healing and a Potion of Flying are both technically uncommon-tier consumables, but one saves a life every combat and the other is situational. The ranges treat them the same. The book hands you a span of gold and walks away. You are the one who has to pick the real number, live, in front of five people.

Magic item prices by rarity (the tables DMs actually use)

Two later sources cleaned this up. Xanathar's Guide to Everything introduced fixed base prices per rarity, and the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide kept nearly identical figures. These are the numbers most experienced DMs default to:

Rarity	Xanathar's / 2024 DMG base price
Common	50 to 100 gp
Uncommon	400 gp
Rare	4,000 gp
Very Rare	40,000 gp
Legendary	200,000 gp

The one rule you must remember alongside this table: halve the price for consumables. A single-use potion or scroll is worth roughly half a permanent item of the same rarity, because you only get one use out of it. Spell scrolls and potions of healing get their own specific prices in the books, but for everything else, the halving rule holds.

Not sure of an item's rarity? It is printed on the item's stat block, or you can look it up in the official magic item list on D&D Beyond. Rarity, not raw power, is what every pricing system keys off.

Sly Flourish, who writes some of the most practical DM advice on the internet, simplifies this even further into round numbers that are easy to remember mid-session. He uses 500 gp uncommon, 5,000 gp rare, 50,000 gp very rare, and 500,000 gp legendary, halved for consumables. His values run a little higher than the official averages on purpose, so the math stays clean. His full breakdown is worth a watch if you want the reasoning:

Here is how those base prices translate to items your players will actually encounter:

Item	Rarity	Typical price
Potion of Healing	Common	50 gp
+1 Weapon	Uncommon	500 gp
Bag of Holding	Uncommon	500 gp
Cloak of Protection	Uncommon	500 gp
Flame Tongue	Rare	5,000 gp
+2 Armor	Very Rare	40,000 gp
Belt of Fire Giant Strength	Very Rare	40,000 gp
Vorpal Sword	Legendary	200,000 gp and up

What are "Sane Magical Prices"?

If you have searched for 5e prices before, you have run into "Sane Magical Prices." It is worth knowing what it is.

Back in 2015, a player frustrated with the official ranges built a document that assigned a specific gold value to nearly every magic item in the game. It got posted to Reddit, spread fast, and became a community standard precisely because it solved the problem the books created. Instead of "501 to 5,000 gp for a rare item," it tells you a Flame Tongue is worth this exact amount and a Ring of Spell Storing is worth that exact amount. You can read the original Sane Magical Item Prices thread for the full list.

It is best for DMs who want a fast lookup and do not want to adjudicate every purchase from scratch. The one caveat: it predates the 2024 rules and a handful of newer items, so you will occasionally hit a gap and have to price something yourself using the tables above. Treat it as a starting point, not gospel, and you will get a lot of mileage out of it.

Worked example: pricing that Cloak of Protection

Back to the player at the start. Let us actually price the cloak.

A Cloak of Protection is uncommon, and it is a permanent item, not a consumable. Straight off the base table, that is 400 gp, or 500 gp if you use Sly Flourish's rounder numbers. Both are defensible. Pick one and own it.

Now adjust for your world. In a gritty, low-magic campaign where a cloak like this is a regional treasure, I would push it to 600 or 700 gp and make the player work to find a seller at all. In a high-magic trade city where enchanters compete for business, I would drop it to 350 gp and move on. The base price is the anchor. Your setting is the modifier.

That is the entire method: rarity sets the floor, consumable status halves it, and your world's magic economy nudges it up or down. Five seconds of thought instead of a panicked flip through the book.

How do I price items players want to sell?

Selling is where a lot of tables accidentally break their own economy. Here is the rule that keeps it stable: players buy at full price and sell at about half.

A shop is not a charity. When your fighter wants to unload that +1 weapon they replaced, the merchant offers roughly 250 gp for a 500 gp item, because the merchant needs to resell it at a profit. Xanathar's Guide formalizes this with a selling table and a Charisma (Persuasion) check, so a smooth-talking party gets a better cut and a gruff one gets lowballed. That single check turns a boring transaction into a small scene.

If you want the selling moment to actually land, give the buyer a face. A nervous fence who knows the item is stolen, a collector who pays over the odds for one specific piece, a guild that only deals with members. The price is the mechanics. The shopkeeper is the story. Our Magic Item Price Calculator and its shopkeeper mode will generate both for you if you would rather not improvise it cold.

A faster way to keep your prices consistent

Here is the trap I fell into for years. I would price an item one way in session 4, forget the number, and price the same item differently in session 12. My players noticed. Nothing erodes trust in your world faster than an economy that changes every time you forget what you decided.

The fix is to write your rulings down somewhere they stay. Whatever you price the party's first magic sword at becomes the precedent for the next one. If you keep a campaign wiki, your magic economy lives there alongside your NPCs and locations, and you stop contradicting yourself. This is the same discipline that separates campaigns that survive from the ones that collapse, which I get into more in how to keep track of a D&D campaign.

This is exactly the bookkeeping Saga20 handles for you. You run your session, it captures what the party bought, sold, and found, and the prices stay consistent because you are no longer holding all of it in your head. If you would rather assemble your own kit, our roundup of the best D&D tools for players and DMs covers what is worth installing and what is not, and the free Magic Item Picker helps you decide which items to hand out before you ever price them. And if your players are still at character creation, our guide to D&D 5e starting gold breaks down how much coin each class brings to that first shopping trip.

Price the first item well, write the number down, and the rest of your campaign's economy takes care of itself.