Live Gold Spot Price

What Is the Gold Spot Price?

The gold spot price is what one troy ounce of pure gold costs for immediate settlement in the wholesale market. It is quoted in US dollars, it applies to unallocated gold held in London vaults, and it is the reference every other gold price hangs off. A refiner buying scrap, a mint pricing a new coin, a dealer bidding on your bullion and a pawn shop making an offer all start from this one number and work outward from it.

Spot assumes pure metal. Nothing in the figure accounts for the form the gold takes, who made it, how easy it is to resell, or what a shop needs to earn on the trade. Those adjustments happen after spot, and they are where the money you actually pay or receive gets decided.

How the Gold Spot Price Is Determined

Gold has no single exchange the way a listed stock does. The price comes out of two linked markets running at once. The first is the London over-the-counter market, where bullion banks trade large unallocated positions between themselves and with miners, refiners and central banks. The second is the futures market, mainly COMEX in New York, where contracts for future delivery trade in high volume. Arbitrage between the two keeps them tied together, and the spot price you see quoted is effectively the nearest-term price implied by both.

Twice each London business day, at 10:30am and 3:00pm London time, the LBMA Gold Price auction produces a single benchmark figure. That auction price is not the spot price, but it is what long-term supply contracts and many funds settle against. Because gold trades in London, New York and Asia in overlapping sessions, the market runs from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon New York time with only a short daily break.

What moves the number during those hours is a separate question, and the answer is mostly real interest rates, the dollar and investment demand. That is covered in full on what affects the price of gold.

Spot Price vs Melt Value

Spot prices pure gold. Melt value prices your gold. The bridge between them is the formula every calculator on this site runs:

Melt value = spot price × purity × weight

At $4,378.38 per troy ounce, pure gold works out to $140.77 per gram. A 14K chain is 58.33% gold, so each gram of that chain carries about 58 cents of melt value for every dollar a pure gram is worth. Run any weight and karat through the gold melt value calculator for the exact figure, or read how gold melt value is calculated for the full worked example.

Spot Price vs Retail Gold Price

You cannot buy physical gold at spot. Every coin and bar sells for spot plus a premium that covers refining, minting, distribution, shipping, insurance and the seller's margin. When you sell that same coin back, a dealer bids at or slightly below spot. Both sides of that gap are real costs, and on a small purchase they can add up to more than any near-term price move.

Premiums are not uniform. They vary by product, by size, by how recognizable the item is and by how tight supply happens to be that week. Work out what you are actually paying over the metal on gold premium over spot, which includes a calculator for any bar or coin.

Troy Ounces vs Standard Ounces

Gold is quoted per troy ounce, which is 31.1035 grams. The ounce on a kitchen scale is an avoirdupois ounce, which is 28.3495 grams. The troy ounce is about 10% heavier, so treating the two as the same overstates what your gold is worth by roughly that amount. Weigh in grams and convert from there, or follow the method in how to weigh gold at home.

The kilogram figure above matters for a different reason: the 1 kg bar is the standard deliverable unit in Asian markets and a common institutional format. Seeing spot expressed per kilo makes those quotes readable without converting in your head.

Why the Gold Price Changes

Gold pays no interest and no dividend, so its appeal rises and falls against what safe interest-bearing assets yield after inflation. Real yields, the strength of the dollar, central-bank buying, flows into and out of gold ETFs, jewelry demand, mine output, recycled supply and periods of financial stress all pull on the price at once, often in opposite directions. No single input reliably governs the outcome on any given day.

For a seller, the practical point is smaller than the macro story. Spot sets your baseline today. Whether you accept an offer depends on how close that offer sits to the melt value spot implies, not on where gold might head next.

How Often Spot Prices Update

The underlying market reprices continuously during trading hours. This page requests a fresh reading every 60 seconds while it is open, and refreshes again when you return to the tab, so the timestamp beside the headline figure tells you exactly how current the number is. Prices on this site are for reference and are not a dealer quote or an offer to trade.