Live gold price, karat calculators and melt values
XAU / USD
What is your gold worth?
Pure gold is $138.06 a gram right now. Pick the karat stamped on your piece, or find your coin below - every figure is calculated live, not typed in.
Holding a coin or a bar instead?
What your gold is worth per gram
All calculatorsTools
Latest articles
All articlesSpot, and why that word matters
The headline figure on this page is the spot price of gold: $4,294.22 for one troy ounce, or $138.06 a gram, for immediate settlement. It is the number every offer you will ever be made is derived from.
A great many pages that rank for "gold price today" are quoting the futures contract instead. Futures trade at a different level from spot - frequently tens of dollars apart - and almost none of those pages tell you which one you are looking at. If you are selling a chain or valuing a coin, spot is your number and futures is not.
Melt value is the ceiling, not the offer
Almost nothing anyone owns is pure gold. A 14K chain is 58.33% gold by weight, so its metal is worth $80.53 a gram - and that figure, the melt value, is what the gold in it is worth before anyone has offered you anything.
Every buyer has refining costs, testing costs, overheads and a margin, and all of it comes out of that number. So a real offer is a percentage of melt, never melt itself. Any site showing you a melt figure and implying it is what you will be handed is misleading you.
Where these numbers come from
The live price is read from a market feed - currently swissquote - and refreshed continuously. A snapshot is written to our own database every 15 minutes, and 1,324 readings have been recorded so far. The chart and the daily change are measured against that record rather than estimated, which is why the change figure is hidden when the record does not reach back a full day.
More than one source is read and compared. When they disagree beyond a set threshold the site raises an alarm rather than quietly publishing whichever arrived first, and a stale feed is labelled as delayed instead of being shown as live.
Questions people ask
- What is the price of gold today?
- Gold is $4,294.22 per troy ounce, $138.06 per gram and $138,062 per kilogram, read at 01:02 UTC. This is the spot price for immediate settlement, not a futures quote.
- How do I work out what my gold jewellery is worth?
- Weigh it in grams, then multiply by the per-gram rate for its karat. 14K is $80.53 a gram at the moment. Weigh each karat separately if you have a mixed lot, and remember that stones and clasps are deducted before any buyer quotes you.
- Why does my scale disagree with the coin weight shown here?
- Because a 22 carat coin weighs more than the gold it contains. An American Gold Eagle weighs 33.931 grams gross but holds exactly one troy ounce - 31.103 grams - of gold; the rest is silver and copper added for hardness. Multiplying gross weight by the spot price overstates a 22 carat coin by about 9%.
- Is this site a gold buyer?
- No. We do not buy or sell gold, take commission on a transaction, or have any interest in which dealer you use. The site publishes price data and the arithmetic that follows from it. Nothing here is investment advice.