14K Gold Price Today: What a Gram Is Actually Worth
By Sukie Gao · July 28, 2026You looked up the 14K gold price today on your phone in the parking lot, walked in with a sandwich bag of chains, and the number the man behind the counter just said is about half of what you had in your head. Nobody is lying to you. You are simply holding two different prices and assuming they are the same one.
The first price is the market price of gold — a global benchmark for pure metal, quoted per troy ounce, moving every few seconds while markets are open. Scaled down to a gram of 14 karat alloy, with gold trading in recent months near $4,300–$4,500 per troy ounce, that comes to roughly $80–$85. This is what your jewelry contains.
The second price is what a buyer will hand you for it, and it is a percentage of the first — somewhere between 40% and 90%, decided almost entirely by which type of business you walked into rather than by anything about your gold. Same chain, same hour, a spread of hundreds of dollars.
Most pages about gold prices stop after the first number, which is why so many sellers arrive at a counter mentally anchored to a figure no honest buyer will ever match, then either storm out or accept something worse later. The calculator above gives you the live per-gram figure for 14K. The rest of this page gives you the second number — the one that determines what actually ends up in your pocket — and how to tell a fair offer from a lazy one in about sixty seconds.
Two Different Prices Are Both Called "Today's Price"
Say the phrase out loud at a coin shop and everyone will nod, but they are hearing something different from what you meant.
Spot is the price for immediate delivery of pure gold, per troy ounce, in wholesale quantities. It is a live, global number, the reference point that every other gold price in the world is derived from. It is also completely unavailable to you as a retail seller of jewelry, in the same way the wholesale auction price of a used sedan is unavailable to the person trading one in.
Melt value is spot scaled to your specific metal: spot divided by 31.103 grams, multiplied by your karat's purity, multiplied by your weight. For 14K that purity is 58.33%. Melt value is a real, defensible number about your property — but still nobody's offer.
Payout is melt value times whatever percentage the buyer works at. This is the only one of the three that is a price in the ordinary sense, because it is the only one at which a transaction actually happens.
The useful mental shift is to stop treating spot as your price and start treating it as a yardstick. It tells you whether an offer is good. It never tells you what an offer will be. Once that lands, a whole category of frustration disappears, and how much below spot should you sell gold becomes the more interesting question.
Where the Number Actually Comes From
The gold price you see quoted is not a single exchange's tick. It emerges from continuous over-the-counter trading between banks, refiners, and institutions, anchored twice each business day by the LBMA Gold Price auction in London — a benchmark used worldwide for contract settlement, and one you can read about directly at lbma.org.uk. Between those auction fixes, the price simply trades.
What that means practically: the 14K gold price today is a live derived figure rather than a daily fix somebody publishes each morning, it does not stop at 4pm, and any single source you check is a snapshot of a moving thing. It also means the price is not set in the United States, is not set by jewelers, and is not something your local buyer has any influence over. When a shop tells you spot dropped this morning, that is almost always true and almost always verifiable in ten seconds on your own phone.
Where the manipulation risk lives is not the benchmark but the retail edge — a buyer using a stale price from three days ago when the market has moved up, or quoting off a bid that conveniently sits below the actual market. The fix is cheap: check the current price yourself before you go in, and check it again if the visit runs long. The calculator above pulls a live figure and applies 14K's purity for you, so the per-gram number you are carrying is current rather than remembered. The homepage gold calculator does the same across every karat if your lot is mixed.
The Gram Rate, and Why It Moves While You Shop
Working at a clean assumed spot of $4,350 per troy ounce, so the arithmetic is checkable:
- Pure gold per gram: $4,350 ÷ 31.103 = $139.86
- 14K per gram: $139.86 × 0.5833 = $81.58
- 14K per pennyweight (1.555 g): $126.86
- 14K per troy ounce: $4,350 × 0.5833 = $2,537.36
A 1% move in spot moves the 14K gram rate by about $0.82. That sounds negligible until you are selling 80 grams, where the same 1% is $65 — enough to matter, not enough to gamble on. Gold routinely moves 1–2% in a week and occasionally in a day.
The practical consequence is about staleness, not timing. Do not price your jewelry on Monday, sell it on Friday, and assume the Monday number still applies — in either direction. And if a buyer's quoted per-gram rate implies a spot price meaningfully below where the market actually is, ask what price they are working from. Legitimate buyers quote off a live feed and will tell you the number without hesitating.
One thing that genuinely does not change hour to hour: the 58.33% purity of your metal. Karat is a property of the alloy, fixed at manufacture. Only the price side of the equation moves, which is why our gold price per gram calculator keeps those two inputs visibly separate.
Payout, Not Spot: The Per-Gram Numbers You'll Be Offered
Here is the table that is actually predictive of your afternoon. Same assumed $4,350 spot, so 14K melt is $81.58 per gram:
| Buyer type | Typical % of melt | What that is per gram of 14K |
|---|---|---|
| Online refiner | 70–90% | $57.11 – $73.42 |
| Local coin / bullion dealer | 65–85% | $53.03 – $69.34 |
| Jewelry store | 50–75% | $40.79 – $61.18 |
| Pawn shop | 40–60% | $32.63 – $48.95 |
| Mail-in TV service | 20–50% | $16.32 – $40.79 |
The top of the online refiner range and the bottom of the mail-in range differ by more than four times per gram. That is the whole game, and it has nothing to do with the market price you spent the morning researching.
Why the tiers exist: refiners buy in volume with almost no storefront cost and pay on assay, so they can afford to sit close to melt. Bullion dealers carry rent and staff but move enough metal to keep margins thin. Jewelry stores buy scrap as a side activity and price it like one. Pawn shops sell speed and discretion, which are genuinely valuable and genuinely expensive. None of these are scams — they are different businesses with different cost structures, which is precisely why comparing them pays so well. What percentage do gold buyers pay goes tier by tier, and where to sell gold ranks the specific options.
A 38.6 Gram Rope Chain, Priced Four Ways
Concrete beats abstract. Take one solid 14K rope chain, stamped 585, weighed on a jeweler's scale at 38.6 grams, with no stones and a gold clasp. Assumed spot $4,350, so 14K runs $81.58 per gram.
Melt value: 38.6 × $81.58 = $3,148.95.
That is the number to write on your hand before you leave the house. Now the offers it will generate:
- Online refiner at 70–90%: about $2,204 – $2,834
- Local coin dealer at 65–85%: about $2,047 – $2,677
- Jewelry store at 50–75%: about $1,574 – $2,362
- Pawn shop at 40–60%: about $1,260 – $1,889
Best plausible outcome, $2,834. Worst plausible outcome, $1,260. The chain is identical in every scenario. The difference — about $1,574 — is purely a function of how many phone calls you were willing to make.
Now reverse it. Suppose a shop offers you $2,300 for the chain. Divide: $2,300 ÷ $3,148.95 = 73% of melt. That is a solid jewelry-store offer, a middling dealer offer, and one you could probably beat by mailing it to a refiner if you are patient and insured. But you can only make that judgment because you knew $3,148.95 first. Without it, $2,300 is just a number a stranger said, and most people say yes to it.
How to Read a Quote in Under a Minute
Four questions, asked in this order, at any counter:
- "What spot price are you working from?" It should be within a few dollars of what your phone says. A buyer who will not name it, or who names something well below the market, has told you everything.
- "Is that per gram, per pennyweight, or per troy ounce?" Per-dwt quotes look 55.5% larger than the identical per-gram rate because a pennyweight is 1.555 grams. Convert before reacting — divide by 1.555.
- "What percentage of melt is your offer?" The most useful question in the trade. It converts every buyer to one comparable scale, and it signals that you know the framework, which measurably changes how the rest of the conversation goes.
- "Can I watch the weighing?" Legitimate buyers weigh in front of you on a legal-for-trade scale and will sort by karat while you watch. The FTC's selling gold jewelry guidance makes the same point about certified scales and getting multiple offers before committing.
Two red flags worth walking away from regardless of the number: weighing your items out of your sight in a back room, and any pile of mixed karats weighed as a single lot at the lowest karat's rate. Both are recoverable if you speak up, and both are common enough that speaking up is routine rather than rude.
When Waiting for a Better Price Is Worth It (and When It Isn't)
The honest answer for most sellers is: waiting is not a strategy, and shopping the offer is.
Here is why. On a 38-gram chain, capturing an extra 15 percentage points of melt — moving from a 70% buyer to an 85% one — is worth about $472 and takes an afternoon of comparison. Waiting for spot to rise 15% is worth the same amount, requires the market to cooperate, and has no timeline. One of those is under your control.
There are exceptions. If you are selling a large lot and gold has just fallen sharply on a single piece of news, sitting out a week costs you nothing but storage. If you inherited jewelry and have not yet checked whether any of it is worth more than melt, absolutely wait — melting a signed designer piece is irreversible and can destroy multiples of its metal value. And if you need to sell in December because of a tax year consideration rather than a price one, the calendar outranks the chart. Gold is treated as a collectible for US capital gains purposes, so a gain on a sale can be taxable; inherited pieces generally take a stepped-up basis at the date of death. That is worth a short conversation with a tax professional rather than advice from a website.
What is never worth it: holding jewelry for years hoping to break even on the retail markup you paid. Jewelry is bought at retail and sold near melt, and that gap does not close with patience. If your goal is gold exposure rather than sentiment, bullion trades far closer to spot in both directions. If your goal is cash for metal you no longer wear, today's price is fine — it is today's *buyer* you should be optimizing, and how much is 14K gold worth lays out the full weight-by-weight picture to price against.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the 14K price per gram so much lower than the gold price I see on the news?
Two reductions stack. First, headline prices are per troy ounce — 31.103 grams — so dividing by 31.103 already shrinks the figure enormously. Second, 14K is only 58.33% gold by weight; the rest is copper, silver, zinc, or nickel, which scrap buyers do not pay for. A $4,350 ounce becomes $139.86 per pure gram, then $81.58 per gram of 14K. Nothing has been taken from you at that stage — that is simply the metal you own, correctly scaled.
Does the 14K price change on weekends?
Gold markets close from late Friday to Sunday evening US time, so the quoted price sits still over the weekend — but that stillness is not safety. Monday's open can gap away from Friday's close if news broke in between. Practically, a weekend quote is a Friday quote wearing a Sunday date. If you are selling a large lot, price it again on the morning of the sale rather than relying on a figure you looked up on Saturday.
Is 14K gold priced differently in different cities?
The metal is not — spot is a single global market and melt value is arithmetic. What varies locally is the payout percentage, and it varies a lot. Dense urban areas with many competing bullion dealers tend to produce better offers than towns with one pawn shop, simply because competition compresses margins. This is also why online refiners are worth including in your comparison regardless of where you live: they neutralize local scarcity, at the cost of shipping and a few days of waiting.
Should I sell 14K by the gram or by the pennyweight?
Sell in whichever unit the buyer prefers — it makes no difference to the value, only to how the number sounds. What matters is that you convert their quote to a per-gram figure before judging it, because a pennyweight is 1.555 grams and a per-dwt price therefore reads about 55% higher than the identical per-gram price. Divide any dwt quote by 1.555. Our gold price per pennyweight calculator handles the conversion and shows the karat-by-karat table.
Where should I check the 14K gold price today before I sell?
Use any live source that shows spot per troy ounce, then apply the purity yourself, or use a tool that does both — the calculator above applies 58.33% to the current price so you get a per-gram 14K figure directly. What matters more than the source is the timing: check it the morning of the sale, not the week before, and check it again if the buyer's quoted spot sounds off. A price you looked up on Tuesday is not evidence about Friday.
What is a genuinely good offer for 14K jewelry?
As a rule of thumb, anything at or above 80% of melt is a good outcome for a walk-in sale, 65–80% is acceptable and typical, and below 60% means you should keep shopping unless speed is worth the discount to you. Judge it as a percentage rather than a dollar figure, and always calculate melt first. A number that sounds generous in isolation is often 55% of melt, and a number that sounds modest is sometimes 88%.
Written by Sukie Gao
Sukie Gao holds a master's degree from a business school, where she picked up the markets-and-pricing toolkit she now applies to the consumer gold trade. She created Gold Calculator Hub to give people an independent, data-driven way to find out what their gold is really worth.
Published July 28, 2026