How Much Below Spot to Sell Gold Is Fair?

Spot Is a Wholesale Number for a Product You Don't Own

The gold spot price is the price for immediate delivery of refined, standardized gold in institutional quantity — the kind of bullion that moves between banks, refiners, and large dealers under the settlement conventions the LBMA oversees. Recent prices have run near $4,300–$4,500 per troy ounce.

What you have is different in every dimension that matters to a buyer. It's small. It's an unknown alloy until tested. It's mixed karats. It may contain solder, stones, spring steel, or epoxy. It's one transaction rather than a standing relationship. Nobody in the chain can sell your chain onward as gold until somebody spends money making it into gold-shaped gold.

So the first mental adjustment is this: spot is not a price you were denied. It's the price of a *different product*. Your item's melt value — weight times purity times the per-gram price — is the honest starting point for a negotiation, and even that is a theoretical figure representing the metal's value at the far end of a refining process you're not going to run yourself.

Understanding that changes the question from "why won't anyone pay me spot" to the much more useful "which buyer keeps the smallest slice of the difference."

Where the Missing Money Actually Goes

The gap between spot and your check funds a real chain of costs. Roughly, in order:

• Assay and testing. Somebody has to establish what your metal actually is. XRF scans, acid tests, and eventually a proper assay all cost money and time.
• Refining. Separating gold from copper, silver, nickel, and zinc is an industrial chemical process with energy costs, chemical costs, and losses. Refiners charge per lot, and small lots are expensive per gram.
• Aggregation. Your 40 grams isn't a refining run. It sits in a safe until a dealer accumulates a kilo, which is capital tied up in inventory.
• Price risk. Between the moment a dealer buys your gold and the moment they hedge or sell it, the price can move against them. They price that risk in.
• Shipping and insurance. Moving precious metal safely costs real money.
• Overhead and margin. Rent, staff, licensing, security, and profit — the ordinary costs of any business.

That entire stack, run efficiently at scale, accounts for something in the range of a 10–30% discount from melt. Everything beyond that is not cost recovery; it's the buyer's assessment of how many other quotes you're likely to get. Which is the real variable this page is about.

The Fair Discount, by Buyer Type

Here's the honest map of how much below spot to sell gold is normal at each type of buyer. "% of melt" is what lands in your hand as a share of your item's metal value; "discount from melt" is the same number stated as the haircut.

Read the top row carefully, because it's the benchmark. An efficient buyer working at scale can pay 90% of melt and still make money. That's the ceiling, and it exists — it means every offer below it is a choice about margin, not a hard constraint of the business.

Our page on what percentage do gold buyers pay breaks these ranges down buyer by buyer, and where to sell gold ranks every venue by real payout. The short version for the impatient: online refiners and competitive local dealers are where the money is.

Converting Between "Percent of Melt" and "Percent Below Spot"

Buyers quote in at least four different dialects, and the translation is where a lot of confusion — some of it deliberate — lives.

• "We pay 80% of melt" means you keep 80% of your item's gold value. Straightforward.
• "We pay 20% below melt" means the same thing.
• "We pay $X per gram for 14K" is the most useful form, because it's directly comparable across shops. Divide their per-gram price by the melt value of one gram of 14K to get their real percentage.
• "We pay 95% of spot" is the one to watch. Spot is the price of *pure* gold. If a buyer applies a percentage of the pure-gold price to your 14K item's total weight, that's not generous, that's a category error in their favor — or a deliberate one.

Work an example. Assume gold at $4,400 per troy ounce, which at 31.103 g per ounce is $141.46 per gram. One gram of 14K is 58.33% gold, so it holds $82.51 of metal. A shop offering "$60 per gram for 14K" is therefore paying 60 ÷ 82.51 = 73% of melt, a 27% discount. A shop offering $70 per gram is paying 85%. A shop offering $40 is paying 48%.

That one division — their per-gram offer divided by the per-gram melt value — is the single most useful move in this entire topic. It makes every quote comparable in about ten seconds, and it strips the marketing language off instantly.

Scrap and Bullion Are Two Completely Different Markets

The ranges above describe scrap: jewelry, dental gold, broken chains, unidentifiable lumps. Bullion plays by different rules, and conflating the two produces both false outrage and genuine losses.

A recognizable bullion coin — an American Gold Eagle, a Canadian Maple Leaf, a Krugerrand — isn't feedstock for a refinery. It's inventory a dealer can put in the case and resell within days at a premium over spot. Their margin comes from that resale premium rather than from squeezing your buy price. Consequently it's entirely normal for a competitive dealer to pay 95% of melt or better on common bullion coins, sometimes above melt outright when premiums are strong.

So if you're holding coins, the fair-discount question has a much better answer than it does for jewelry, and anyone quoting you scrap percentages on an Eagle is not making a market — they're making an offer they expect you to accept out of ignorance. The specs and melt figures for every major coin are laid out in melt value of gold coins.

The reverse error is just as costly: taking a collectible coin to a scrap buyer, who will happily pay you 80% of melt for something a numismatic dealer would have paid a multiple of melt for. Know which market your item belongs in before you pick a buyer.

Why the Size of Your Lot Moves the Percentage

The discount you're offered is not a fixed rate. It slides with how much metal you're carrying, and the slope is steeper than most sellers expect.

Fixed costs dominate small transactions. Testing a 4-gram earring takes nearly as long as testing a 200-gram lot, and refining minimums don't care that your contribution is modest. A buyer paying 85% on a large parcel may genuinely only manage 60% on a few grams — the per-gram cost of handling it is simply higher.

Practical consequences:

1. Consolidate before selling. One trip with everything beats five trips with pieces, both for your rate and for your time.
2. Include the odd bits. Single earrings, broken clasps, bent rings, and dental crowns all count toward lot weight even though none of them is worth a separate visit.
3. Don't split across buyers to "test the market." Get quotes on the whole lot from several buyers instead; splitting it lowers your percentage everywhere at once.
4. Be realistic under about 10 grams. With roughly $800–900 of metal at recent prices, a small lot will not command a large-lot rate, and chasing one wastes an afternoon.

This is one of the few parts of the spread that's actually within your control, and it's worth several percentage points.

Worked Example: 46 Grams From a Jewelry Box

Concrete numbers, start to finish. Assume gold at $4,400 per troy ounce — $141.46 per gram of pure gold.

The lot, after sorting by karat stamp and weighing on a 0.1 g scale:

• 22.0 g of 14K (58.33% gold) → 22.0 × 0.5833 = 12.83 g pure
• 14.0 g of 18K (75% gold) → 14.0 × 0.75 = 10.50 g pure
• 10.0 g of 10K (41.67% gold) → 10.0 × 0.4167 = 4.17 g pure

Total pure gold: 12.83 + 10.50 + 4.17 = 27.50 g. Melt value: 27.50 × $141.46 = $3,890.

Now apply the spread to see what "how much below spot" means in dollars rather than percentages:

The spread between the best plausible offer and the worst is $2,723 on a single jewelry box — more than the entire lot is worth at the bottom of the range. The gold didn't change. The choice of buyer did. Run your own numbers with the scrap gold calculator before you go anywhere.

What an Actual Rip-Off Looks Like

A low percentage isn't automatically dishonest — a pawn shop paying 50% is transparently selling you speed. What makes an offer a rip-off is the technique used to get you there. Watch for these:

• Weighing in pennyweight while quoting per gram. A dwt is 1.555 g, so a per-gram price applied to a dwt weight underpays you by about 36%. Ask which unit the scale is set to.
• Down-karating. Testing a stamped 18K piece and calling it 14K, or lumping everything into "we'll call it all 10K" for convenience. Insist on karat-by-karat sorting.
• A scale you can't see. The display should face you. If it doesn't, that's the whole review.
• Bundling stones in the weight, then paying nothing for them. Gemstones must come off the gold weight or be paid for separately.
• Quoting a percentage of spot applied to gross weight — described above, and always in the house's favor.
• Urgency. "This price is only good today" on a commodity with a continuously published global price is theater.
• Opened mail-in packages with no return option. The FTC's guidance on selling gold jewelry is specific about getting terms in writing before you ship.

The full playbook, including the classics used on inherited lots, lives in cash for gold scams.

How to Get Quotes That Are Actually Comparable

Three quotes are worth more than any amount of research, but only if they're quoted in the same terms. The script:

1. Weigh and sort at home first. By karat, on a scale reading 0.1 g. Write it down.
2. Compute your melt value before you leave the house, and know it to the dollar.
3. Ask each buyer one question: "What's your per-gram buy price for 14K today?" (Substitute your dominant karat.) This forces a comparable number and skips the entire negotiation dance.
4. Divide their answer by your per-gram melt figure to get their real percentage. Note it.
5. Get the third quote even when the second one is good. The gap between quote two and quote three is frequently larger than people expect.
6. Don't accept a bundled "for everything" figure until you've seen it broken down by karat and weight.

Online refiners deserve a specific note: most publish per-gram buy prices openly, which makes them the easiest benchmark in the market even if you ultimately sell locally. Check two of them, and you have a number that any in-person buyer has to beat. The tradeoffs of mailing versus walking in are compared in sell gold online or locally.

Can You Ever Sell Gold At or Above Spot?

Occasionally, in four situations — none of which involve scrap jewelry.

Bullion coins during strong premium periods. When retail demand is hot and mint supply is tight, dealers sometimes bid at or slightly above melt for common coins because they can resell above spot immediately.

Private sales between individuals. Selling a coin directly to another buyer cuts out the dealer entirely, and a fair private price often sits between what a dealer would pay and what one would charge. You're taking on the counterparty risk and the authentication burden yourself, which is exactly why the price is better.

Jewelry worth more as jewelry. A signed designer piece, a period item, or anything with brand or craftsmanship value should never be sold by weight. Consignment or auction can far exceed metal value, at the cost of time and a seller's commission.

Numismatic coins. Rarity is a separate market with separate prices, and melt is irrelevant to it.

For everything else — the tangled chain, the single earring, the class ring nobody wants — melt minus a competitive discount is the honest ceiling, and the goal is simply to keep the discount in the 10–20% range instead of the 50%+ range.

The Number to Walk In With

If you want one target rather than a table: aim for 80% of melt or better on a decent-sized scrap lot, and treat anything under 60% as a signal to leave.

That's a 20% discount from your item's metal value at the target, which fairly compensates a buyer for testing, refining, aggregation, price risk, and margin. Getting there requires almost nothing: know your weight, know your karat, know your melt value, and collect three quotes. The sellers who get 45% aren't victims of a rigged market — they're almost always people who took the first offer.

Coins are a different target: expect 90%+ on recognizable bullion, and get an appraisal before selling anything old by weight.

And one last piece of perspective. The difference between a good and a poor sale is usually a couple of hours of effort, not a special relationship or insider knowledge. On the 46-gram lot above, those hours were worth more than $2,000. On a smaller lot they might be worth $200 — still an excellent hourly rate. Work out your number, make three phone calls, and refuse to be rushed. Nothing about a global commodity price expires this afternoon.

This is general consumer information rather than financial or tax advice; if a sale is large enough to have tax consequences for you, talk to a professional about it first.

Frequently Asked Questions