Quick answer: Grand Company seals convert to gil through Expert Delivery: turn in cheap dungeon or vendor gear for seals, then spend seals on items you can sell. The seal reward scales with item level, so the cheapest high-ilvl gear per seal is what you want. It's a steady, low-effort loop once you know which turn-ins pay best.
Grand Company seals are a currency almost every player has and almost nobody spends deliberately. They're also one of the few currencies with a clean, repeatable conversion into gil — and because seals are capped, the gil you don't convert is gil you actively throw away.
Buy cheap equipment off the market board, hand it to your Grand Company's Personnel Officer under Expert Delivery, and receive seals based on the gear's item level. Spend those seals at the quartermaster on something tradeable, and sell that on the board. The whole thing is a currency exchange: gil in, seals in the middle, more gil out — as long as you buy the right gear going in and the right goods coming out.
Expert Delivery pays purely on item level. Nothing else about the piece matters — not its slot, not its job, not what you paid. The payout follows two rules:
The two halves meet exactly at item level 200, which is worth 1,150 seals. Below that line each point of item level is worth 5.75 seals; above it, only 2. High-end gear is therefore far worse per item level than mid-range gear — an ilvl 600 piece pays 1,950 seals, barely more than something a third of its level.
Sort any list of gear by "cheapest gil per seal" and the top results will be garbage — low-level pieces with a single 1-gil listing and no sales at all. The ratio is spectacular and the item is unbuyable in any quantity. You can buy one. You cannot build a routine on it.
The fix is to only consider gear that is actually being traded. Our GC Seal Deliveries tool filters to items with real sales velocity by default; turning that filter on cuts the candidate list by roughly two thirds and leaves the pieces you can buy twenty of. It scores 7,262 eligible items — everything equippable, marketable, and with an item level — by gil per seal on your world.
Expert Delivery is the scalable source, but seals accumulate on their own from:
All of it is capped. Your seal ceiling rises with Grand Company rank, and once you're at the cap every further seal earned is discarded silently. Convert before you farm.
The quartermaster sells a mix of untradeable convenience items and genuinely marketable goods. The marketable ones are what close the loop — ventures are tradeable, for instance, and they're bought constantly by anyone running retainers, which makes them a reliable seal sink with a real buyer base.
The general rule is the same as for any currency conversion: rank the quartermaster's tradeable stock by gil per seal on your world, then check that it actually sells. A high price on something nobody buys is not a conversion, it's a retainer slot with a story.
Every dungeon run hands you gear you'll never wear. The default instinct is to sell it to an NPC for a few hundred gil. Expert Delivery turns the same piece into seals that are usually worth considerably more — and unlike the market board, there's no listing, no tax, and no waiting.
One honest caveat: that same spare gear is also desynthesis fodder. Gear can go to seals or to materials, not both. Mid-level gear with materials in demand is often worth more broken down; genuinely worthless gear should always become seals.
Put this into practice with live market-board prices for your world:
Rank gear by gil per seal → Passive & AFK gil →
XIV Profitability is a free, fan-made tool. Not affiliated with Square Enix. Prices via Universalis. FINAL FANTASY XIV © SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.