What Is a Fair Percentage of Melt Value When Selling Gold?

For ordinary scrap gold — chains, rings, broken pieces sold for their metal — a fair offer sits between 64% and 80% of melt value. Under 60% you are being harvested; above 80% for true scrap, check the scale, because sustained generosity is not a business model. That band is not our opinion: it is the range this site derives from measured payouts, including the mystery-shop test cited across these guides, and it is printed beside every result our calculators return.

First, be sure what “melt value” means

Melt value is the live spot price applied to the pure gold content of your item — weight times purity times the per-gram price. It is the ceiling arithmetic sets, not an amount anyone pays: the five deductions between spot and your cheque (purity, refining, testing, overhead, margin) are anatomised in an earlier article in this series. “Percentage of melt” is simply the honest way to compare offers after those deductions, because it strips away weight, karat and the day’s price and leaves only the buyer’s take.

Where each buyer type typically lands

The exceptions that deserve more than the band

The 64-80% band is for metal headed to a furnace. Three things should never be priced inside it: recognisable bullion coins — Eagles, Krugerrands, Maple Leafs — which resell as coins and fairly trade within a few percent of melt or above (each has its own live figure on our coin pages); signed or antique pieces, where a maker’s name can beat the metal several times over; and sovereign-type collectible dates, where thirty seconds of date-checking has saved sellers real money. The costliest sentence at any counter is letting “it’s all just scrap” pass unchallenged. Challenging it politely is a learnable move — yes, you can negotiate. And the deduction stack behind every offer has its own anatomy lesson in why gold buyers pay less than spot.

A worked example, in dollars

Take a 20-gram lot of 14K u2014 a typical broken chain and a ring. At the $4,400-area spot price gold has traded near in August 2026, 14K runs about $82-83 per gram, so melt value is roughly $1,650. Now watch the band turn into cash: a 55% counter hands you about $905, a 72% counter about $1,190, and a 78% counter about $1,290. Nearly four hundred dollars separates the basement from the top u2014 on one small lot, decided entirely by which counter and how prepared. Run your own pieces through the calculator and do this multiplication before anyone else does it for you.

Two sentences that move you up the band

The measured gap between the band’s floor and ceiling is mostly information, not luck. Sentence one, before any offer: “I’ve calculated the melt value at [your number] — what percentage is your offer?” It announces that fog will not work. Sentence two, after: “Write the weight, karat and offer down for me — I’m comparing two shops today.” Same-day comparison is the entire trick; spot moves enough that stale quotes invite requoting. Sellers using both sentences reliably land in the low-to-mid 70s — the top third — without any talent for haggling, as the refusal-points guide shows in more detail.

What a sub-60% offer is actually telling you

Not that your gold is worse than you thought — the karat stamp already priced that in. It says this counter either does not really want gold, tests too crudely to price confidence, or read you as unprepared. All three have the same remedy, and it is not arguing: it is the door. In any town with two buyers, the second quote is the negotiation.

Questions people ask

Is 70% of melt a good offer?

For scrap jewellery, solidly fair — comfortably inside the honest band. For a clean bullion coin it is poor; coins are not scrap and should be quoted against their own coin value.

Why do payout percentages differ from the “we pay 90%” ads?

Undated percentages of unstated bases are marketing. Ninety percent “of scrap value at our internal price” can be less money than 70% of true melt. Always convert any claim to: what dollars, against what melt figure, computed when.

Does a higher gold price mean a higher percentage too?

Often slightly — hot markets add competing buyers and thin margins, as 2026’s record run has shown. But the price does the heavy lifting; the percentage is yours to defend with the two sentences above.