Gold Price Today: Live Rates by Karat, Updated Every 10 Minutes

What "the gold price" actually refers to

When a news ticker says gold is at a certain level, it is quoting the spot price: the price for immediate delivery of one troy ounce of 99.5%-or-better gold, in US dollars, in the wholesale market. Three details in that sentence do real work.

Troy ounce. 31.1035 grams, not the 28.3495 g ounce on your kitchen scale. About 9.7% heavier.

Pure gold. The quote is for essentially pure metal. Your 14K chain is 58.3% gold, so its per-gram value is 58.3% of the pure per-gram figure — before anything else happens.

Wholesale, immediate delivery. Spot assumes already-refined, assayed metal sitting in a recognised vault, traded in large lots. Your jewelry is none of those things yet, which is the structural reason no consumer ever sells at spot.

So the gold price today is a genuine, meaningful number — it is just three conversions away from your jewelry box, and each conversion moves the figure downward.

The benchmark used to settle most institutional gold contracts is the LBMA Gold Price, administered by the London Bullion Market Association; the World Gold Council publishes long-run price series if you want to see where today sits historically.

How today's price becomes your item's value

One line does the whole job:

weight in grams × purity × price per gram = melt value

Say the spot price works out to $143 per gram of pure gold. A 30 g 14K bracelet contains 30 × 0.5833 = 17.5 g of pure gold, so its melt value is about $2,502. A 30 g 10K bracelet contains 30 × 0.4167 = 12.5 g and is worth about $1,788 — the same weight, the same day, $714 apart.

That gap is the most useful thing on this page. People routinely assume a heavier piece is a more valuable piece. Karat beats weight far more often than intuition suggests, and a mixed jewelry box sorted by karat rather than by size will surprise most people who have never done it.

Today's price by karat, per gram

The calculator above is populated with the live figure, but the shape of the relationship is worth carrying in your head. Every karat's per-gram value is simply the pure per-gram price multiplied by its purity:

A pennyweight is 1.55517 grams, so any per-gram figure multiplied by 1.555 gives the per-dwt figure — useful because US jewelers quote in dwt and the larger-looking number can make a mediocre offer sound generous.

Notice that every row is the same arithmetic. Once you know the pure per-gram price, you can do any karat in your head to within a few percent. 14K is a bit over half; 18K is three quarters; 22K is a bit over nine tenths.

Why our price may differ slightly from another site's

Small differences between honest sources are normal and have boring explanations.

Refresh interval. This site updates every ten minutes. Many comparable sites cache for an hour or a day. In a quiet week that is invisible; in a volatile one it is a real gap, and the stale source is not lying — it is just old.

Spot versus futures. News outlets sometimes quote the front-month futures contract rather than spot. Futures typically trade slightly above spot because they price in carrying cost to a future delivery date.

Bid, ask, or mid. The market has a bid and an ask; sites variously publish one or the midpoint. The spread on gold is thin but non-zero.

Currency. Gold is quoted globally in US dollars. Every non-USD figure is a conversion, so it moves with the exchange rate as well as with gold.

If two sources differ by a fraction of a percent, both are probably fine. If they differ by several percent, one is stale or quoting a different instrument.

The price you see is not the price you get

This is the section that separates this page from a ticker.

No consumer sells gold at spot. Between your bracelet and the spot price sit assay, refining, process loss, insured shipping, the buyer's capital being tied up, and margin. The result is a predictable ladder:

So a bracelet with $2,502 of melt at today's price realistically sells for $1,750–$2,250 to a good refiner, or $1,000–$1,500 at a pawn counter. Both of those are the real price today. They are just the prices of different transactions.

The practical move is to convert every offer into a percentage of melt before you evaluate it. "$1,400" means nothing on its own. "$1,400, which is 56% of melt" means you are being quoted pawn rates and can almost certainly do better.

When today's price actually matters — and when it doesn't

Gold moves perhaps one or two percent in an ordinary week. The spread between the best and worst buyer for the same jewelry is twenty to forty percent. That ratio should govern how much attention you give to timing.

If you are selling scrap jewelry, today's price is a reference point and the buyer is the variable. Getting one more quote is worth more than waiting a month for a better market.

If you are selling bullion — a recognised coin or a stamped bar — the calculus flips. Bullion trades close to spot, so the spread you give away is small and the price genuinely is most of the outcome. That is the one case where watching the market is rational rather than a distraction.

And if you are buying, the same logic runs in reverse: premiums over spot on small bullion products vary far more between dealers than gold moves in a week.

Reading a price chart without fooling yourself

Two habits keep price history useful rather than misleading.

Look at a long window before a short one. A one-day chart makes every wiggle look like a trend. A five-year chart shows you where today actually sits. If your question is "should I sell," the five-year view answers it better.

Distinguish the price from your position. Gold trading near a record does not mean it will fall, and it does not mean it will rise. What it does mean, concretely, is that a seller today is receiving historically strong prices for scrap — which is a fact about your opportunity, not a forecast.

Nobody reliably times this market. Institutions with research desks do not manage it consistently, and a consumer with a jewelry box will not either. What a consumer *can* control is the spread given to a buyer, and that is a larger number than most price moves.

Getting your own number right

Three inputs, in order of how often people get them wrong.

Purity. Find the hallmark — inside a ring shank, on the tag by a chain clasp, on the back of a pendant. If there is no mark, test it before you calculate anything. And check for GF, RGP, HGE, GP or vermeil: those are surface layers, not solid gold, and applying today's price to their full weight overstates them roughly twentyfold.

Weight. Grams, on a scale that reads to 0.1 g. A $15 pocket scale pays for itself the first time you use it. Weigh each karat separately — never one mixed pile, because you will be paid on the lowest karat present.

Price. The live figure on this page, or any source you have checked is current. This is the input that needs the least of your attention, which is exactly the opposite of how most people allocate it.

A worked example, start to finish

Suppose you have three items and today's pure gold price is $143 per gram.

• An 18K ring, 6.2 g → 6.2 × 0.75 = 4.65 g pure → $665
• A 14K chain, 21.4 g → 21.4 × 0.5833 = 12.48 g pure → $1,785
• A 10K bracelet, 15.0 g → 15.0 × 0.4167 = 6.25 g pure → $894

Total melt: $3,344.

Now the realistic outcomes. A good online refiner at 82% pays about $2,742. A local coin dealer at 75% pays about $2,508. A pawn shop at 50% pays about $1,672.

That spread — $1,070 between the top and bottom offer, on the same three items, on the same day — is the entire argument for spending twenty minutes on quotes. It dwarfs anything the market is likely to do while you decide.

Frequently Asked Questions