Spot gold $4,386.25 a troy ounce. LBMA benchmark set 11 September 2026.
What a buyer would actually pay
- a pawn shop
- $205.66 – $246.79
- a local jeweller
- $267.35 – $308.48
- a cash-for-gold buyer
- $226.22 – $287.92
- a mail-in refiner
- $329.05 – $349.62
Ranges are typical published trade spreads, not an offer. A buyer takes refining, assay and margin out of melt before paying you, so nobody pays spot. Troy ounces (31.1 g) are the metals ounce, not the 28.3 g ounce a kitchen scale shows.
Gold calculator: what your karat gold and silver are really worth
What your gold and silver are actually worth, by karat, gram and ounce.
What this gold calculator tells you
This gold calculator gives you the melt value of a piece of jewellery, coin or scrap: the worth of the metal inside it, at the benchmark price published on . Enter the metal, the purity stamped on the piece, the weight and the unit you weighed in, and it returns the figure, along with what a pawn shop, a jeweller and a mail-in refiner would realistically pay for it. Gold is $4,386.25 a troy ounce as this page was built, which works out at $141.02 a gram of pure gold.
Most calculators stop at the melt number. That is the easy half. The number people actually need is the one at the counter, and it is always lower, for reasons that are legitimate and worth understanding before you walk in.
How to use it
Find the stamp first. On a ring it is inside the shank, on a chain it is on the clasp tongue or a small tag beside it, and on a pendant it is usually on the back of the bail. It will be a karat mark like 14K, or a three digit fineness like 585. If there is no stamp at all, the piece may still be gold, but you are guessing, and a jeweller will acid or XRF test it for nothing in a few seconds.
Then weigh it. A digital scale reading to 0.1 g is enough. Weigh each karat as its own lot, because mixing a 10k chain in with 18k earrings and taking an average loses you money on the 18k. Set the unit to match your scale: grams, pennyweight or troy ounces are all here, and picking the wrong one is the single most common way people arrive at a number that is nowhere near right.
Karat is a fraction out of 24
Every purity figure on this site comes from one rule. Karat is parts of gold in 24, so 18k is 18 parts in 24, or 75% gold by weight. Pure gold is soft enough to mark with a fingernail, so almost everything made to be worn is alloyed with copper, silver, zinc, nickel or palladium for strength and colour. That alloy is worth approximately nothing at melt. It is why a heavy 10k bracelet can be worth less than a slim 18k one, and why the stamp matters more than the heft in your hand.
| purity | stamp | per gram | per dwt | per troy oz |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24k | 999 | $140.88 | $219.09 | $4,381 |
| 22k | 916 | $129.27 | $201.04 | $4,020 |
| 21k | 875 | $123.39 | $191.90 | $3,837 |
| 20k | 833 | $117.52 | $182.76 | $3,655 |
| 18k | 750 | $105.77 | $164.48 | $3,289 |
| 14k | 585 | $82.26 | $127.93 | $2,558 |
| 12k | 500 | $70.51 | $109.66 | $2,193 |
| 10k | 417 | $58.76 | $91.38 | $1,827 |
| 9k | 375 | $52.88 | $82.24 | $1,644 |
| 8k | 333 | $47.01 | $73.10 | $1,462 |
In round numbers at the price above: a gram of 18k gold is $105.77, a gram of 14k is $82.26, and a gram of 10k is $58.76. A typical 14k wedding band of 5 grams therefore holds $411.31 of gold, whatever the receipt said in 1994.
Silver, platinum and palladium
The same arithmetic runs for the other three metals, using their own fineness standards rather than karats. Sterling silver is 925 parts per thousand, coin silver is 900, and fine silver is 999. A gram of sterling is worth $1.90 at the current silver benchmark of $63.84 a troy ounce, so a sterling flatware set is worth real money by weight but nothing like what its size suggests. Watch for weighted or hollow pieces: a loaded candlestick base is mostly pitch and plaster.
Platinum is stamped 950, 900 or 850 and is denser than gold, so a platinum ring weighs more than the same ring in 18k and fewer buyers will take it over the counter. Palladium turns up in white gold alloys and in some modern wedding bands, and its price has been far more volatile than gold over the past decade.
What a buyer will actually pay
Melt value is the ceiling, not the offer. Your piece has to be tested, melted, assayed and refined before it becomes the deliverable metal the benchmark prices, and the cost of doing that comes out of your side of the deal. The bands this site uses are 50% to 60% of melt for a pawn shop, 55% to 70% for a cash-for-gold buyer, 65% to 75% for a local jeweller, and 80% to 85% for a mail-in refiner on a lot big enough to be worth the assay.
Those percentages move with the size of the lot, not with how well you negotiate. Refining costs are close to fixed per batch, so they eat a large share of a small lot and a trivial share of a large one. If you have several pieces, take them in as one lot. If you have one thin chain, expect the low end and do not be surprised by it.
Where the numbers come from
The spot prices are pulled from a published benchmark once for the whole site and baked into every page at build time, so the figures are correct and readable with JavaScript switched off, then refreshed in your browser when the page loads. Purity fractions are the legal fineness standards, not a house estimate, and the unit conversions use the exact values: 31.1034768 grams to a troy ounce, 1.55517384 grams to a pennyweight. How we calculate shows every formula and constant on one page so you can check the result by hand.
Nothing on this site buys or sells metal, and there is no dealer behind it. That is the whole point. A calculator run by somebody who wants to buy your gold has an obvious reason to round in one direction, and the purity fractions here are deliberately the conservative ones: 14k is treated as 14/24, the US legal minimum for the stamp, rather than the slightly richer European 585.
The mistakes that cost the most
Confusing a troy ounce with the ounce on a kitchen scale overstates a result by 9.7%. Taking a pennyweight quote and comparing it to a gram quote without converting makes a bad offer look generous, since a pennyweight is 1.555 grams. Assuming an insurance appraisal is what someone will pay leads to the worst conversation of all, because a replacement valuation includes retail markup and labour that no scrap buyer will ever refund you. And selling a dated coin or a signed piece for its metal can throw away most of its value: check the hallmark and the maker before anything goes in the melt pile.
Gold calculator questions
How much is a gram of gold worth?
A gram of pure 24k gold is the spot price per troy ounce divided by 31.1034768. Jewellery is almost never pure, so the figure for a real piece is that number times its purity: 0.583 for 14k, 0.75 for 18k, 0.417 for 10k. At the current benchmark a gram of 14k is worth about the amount shown in the calculator above, before any buyer takes a margin.
How much is 14k gold worth per gram?
Fourteen karat is 14 parts gold in 24, so 58.3% of the weight is gold and the rest is copper, silver, zinc or nickel. Multiply the pure gram price by 0.583 and you have the melt value of one gram of 14k. A typical 14k wedding band weighs 4 to 6 grams, so it carries roughly 2.5 to 3.5 grams of actual gold.
What is the melt value of gold?
Melt value is the worth of the metal in an item if it were melted down and refined, and nothing else. It ignores the brand, the craftsmanship, the stones and what you paid. For scrap jewellery it is the honest ceiling on any offer, because melting is what the buyer is going to do with it.
How much is 5 grams of gold worth?
It depends entirely on the karat. Five grams of 24k carries 5 grams of gold, 5 grams of 18k carries 3.75, and 5 grams of 10k carries just 2.08. That is why two pieces of the same weight can be worth less than half of one another. Set the weight to 5 grams in the calculator and switch the purity to see the spread.
How much does a pawn shop pay for gold?
Typically 50% to 60% of melt value. A pawn shop is lending against an item it may have to store, insure and resell, and it prices for that risk. A local jeweller who buys for stock or scrap usually pays 65% to 75%, and a mail-in refiner 80% to 85% on a lot large enough to be worth assaying.
What does 585 mean on jewellery?
It is the fineness stamp for 14 karat gold: 585 parts per thousand. European standards alloy slightly richer than the US 14/24 figure of 583, and both are stamped on pieces sold as 14k. Other common marks are 417 for 10k, 750 for 18k, 916 for 22k, 925 for sterling silver and 999 for fine gold or silver.
Is 925 silver worth anything?
Yes, though less than most people hope. Sterling is 92.5% silver, so its melt value is the silver gram price times 0.925. Silver is priced in dollars per ounce rather than thousands, so a heavy sterling bracelet is usually worth tens of dollars at melt, not hundreds. Hollow handles and weighted candlesticks contain far less metal than their weight suggests.
Will a jeweller pay the spot price for my gold?
No, and anybody who says they will is not being straight with you. Spot is the wholesale benchmark for refined metal in deliverable form. Your ring has to be tested, melted, assayed and refined before it becomes that, and every step costs money. A quote at 70% of melt from a shop that weighs in front of you is a better deal than a quote at 95% from one that will not show the scale.
How do I weigh my gold at home?
A digital scale that reads to 0.1 g is enough, and a jeweller uses the same resolution for anything under an ounce. Weigh each karat separately, remove anything that is not metal, and do not try to subtract for stones by guessing. Kitchen scales that jump in 1 g steps will cost you real money on a small piece.
What is a troy ounce?
A troy ounce is 31.1034768 grams and is the unit precious metals are traded in. The ounce on a kitchen scale is an avoirdupois ounce, 28.3495 grams. Treating one as the other overstates a result by 9.7%, which on a 10 ounce lot of gold is a serious amount of money.
What is the difference between melt value and appraisal value?
Melt value is the metal. An insurance appraisal is the cost to replace the item at retail, which includes the design, the labour, the stones and the shop margin, and it is routinely three to five times melt. Neither is what a buyer will hand you for scrap. An appraisal is not an offer, and it never has been.
Is gold-plated jewellery worth selling?
For the metal, effectively no. Plating is measured in microns and a whole box of it may hold a fraction of a gram of gold, less than the cost of refining it. Gold-filled is different: it is a bonded layer at a stated fraction of the weight, so 1/20 12k gold filled is 5% of the weight in 12k gold, which is small but real.
How much is a Morgan silver dollar worth in silver?
A Morgan dollar is 26.73 grams at 90% fineness, which is 0.7734 troy ounces of silver. Multiply that by the silver spot price for its melt value. Dates, mint marks and condition can make a particular coin worth far more than its silver, so check the coin before you sell it as bullion.
Why does this calculator show a range instead of a price?
Because a range is the truth. The melt value is a single computed number, but what you will be offered depends on who is buying, how much you are selling and what their refining costs are. Showing one figure and calling it the value of your gold would be the same trick the buyer is pulling.