Refining profit in Albion Online, explained
How refining profit works in Albion Online: the refining chain, return rate bonuses, city specialisations, fees, market tax and when refining is actually worth it.
Return rate
1 - 1 / (1 + bonus / 100)
Royal 18 plus matching city 40 plus focus 59 is 117 points, a 53.9% return. The strongest bonuses in the game.
Refining fee
itemValue x 0.1125 x (usageFee / 100) x amount
Never comes back through the return rate. It is pure cost on every run.
Where you refine
royal 18 / island 0 / hideout varies
Island stations give no return at all, and hideouts replace the royal bonus with their own power level.
What refining actually involves
Refining turns raw resources into the materials crafters need. Ore becomes metal bars, hide becomes leather, fibre becomes cloth, wood becomes planks and rock becomes stone blocks. From tier four upwards each refine needs two inputs: the raw resource of that tier, and refined material from the tier below.
That second requirement is what makes refining profitable as a business and confusing as a calculation. Your cost depends on two separate markets moving independently, and both of them shift when a lot of players decide to gather or refine at the same time.
The calculator handles every tier and enchantment level, takes your actual buy prices per city, applies the return rate, adds the station fee, subtracts market tax on the sale, and shows you profit in silver and as a percentage of what you put in.
Return rate is where refining makes its money
Refining has the strongest return rate bonuses in the game, and that is essentially the whole business model. The bonuses run through the same diminishing returns curve as crafting:
returnRate = 1 - 1 / (1 + bonus / 100)
Refining in a royal city gives 18 points. Refining in the city that matches your material adds 40. Focus adds another 59. All three together is 117 points, which produces roughly a 53.9% return rate. Slightly more than half of your raw materials come straight back to you.
Refine the wrong material in the wrong city without focus and you are working on 18 points, or a 15.3% return. That gap between 15% and 54% is usually the difference between losing silver and running a genuinely good operation.
Which city refines what
The 40 point material bonus is city specific, and it only applies to the matching refining line.
- Thetford: ore into metal bars
- Martlock: hide into leather
- Lymhurst: fibre into cloth
- Fort Sterling: wood into planks
- Bridgewatch: rock into stone blocks
Fees, taxes and the numbers that eat your margin
The station fee is based on the item value of what you produce:
refiningFee = itemValue x 0.1125 x (usageFee / 100) x amount
Unlike materials, this fee never comes back through the return rate. It is pure cost on every run.
On the sell side, market tax comes off your revenue before you see any of it, and premium status changes how much you keep. The calculator applies the tax rate you set, so it is worth making sure that value matches your actual account status before trusting the profit column.
One more detail that catches people out: refining in a hideout removes the royal city bonus and replaces it with whatever bonus that hideout power level provides. Island stations give no return rate at all. If you refine somewhere other than a royal city, adjust the setting or your real return will be well below what you expected.
When refining is genuinely worth doing
Refining margins are usually thinner per unit than crafting margins, and they make up for it in volume and reliability. A few things that tend to hold true.
- Higher tiers move less silver per hour than they look like they should, because the raw material market for T7 and T8 is thin and your buy price rises as you clear listings.
- Enchanted refining can be very profitable when a lot of players are gathering enchanted resources and few are refining them, which happens in waves after each patch.
- Focus is close to mandatory at higher tiers. Without it the fee and the reduced return often leave nothing behind.
- Buying raw materials with buy orders instead of taking sell orders changes the entire calculation. If you plan to do this seriously, enter the price your orders actually fill at.
Frequently asked questions
- Is refining better than gathering the materials myself?
- They are separate decisions. Gathering earns you the raw material at the cost of your time and risk. Refining earns you the spread between raw and refined prices. Plenty of people do only one of the two, and the calculator works either way, since you can enter zero as your raw material cost if you gathered it yourself.
- Why does my return rate look lower in game?
- The most common causes are refining outside a royal city, refining a material in a city that does not match it, or forgetting that focus was not active. Hideouts and islands also change the bonus structure entirely.
- Do I need the lower tier refined material for every refine?
- From tier four upwards, yes. Tier two and three refines only need the raw resource. This is why the cost of a single T7 bar traces back through every tier below it.
- How does enchantment affect refining?
- Enchanted resources cost far more, produce far more valuable refined material, and carry a higher item value which raises the station fee. The relationship between those three is not linear, which is why enchanted refining is worth calculating rather than guessing.
- What market tax should I use?
- Use the rate that matches your account. Premium keeps more of your revenue, and over thousands of refines that difference is substantial. The default in the tool is a reasonable middle value but it is not a substitute for setting your own.
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