How to Sell Gold in the UK
Britain is one of the easier places on earth to sell gold well: hallmarks give you a legal purity guarantee most countries lack, the trade quotes in checkable grams, and two tax rules quietly favour the prepared seller. Here is the whole route.
Start with the hallmark — it is a legal document
UK law has required independently verified hallmarks on gold jewellery sold as gold (above one gram) since long before anyone reading this was born, and the system still runs through four assay offices: London's leopard's head, Birmingham's anchor, Sheffield's rose and Edinburgh's castle. A full UK hallmark carries the maker's mark, the assay office mark and a fineness number — 375 for 9ct, 585, 750, 916, 999. Unlike an American stamp, which is only the maker's claim, a UK hallmark is a third party's tested verdict. Selling hallmarked gold, you negotiate from certainty: the purity question is already answered in the metal.
Imported, antique and inherited pieces may carry foreign marks or none. They are still sellable — as tested scrap — but expect the buyer's own test to be the deciding word, and see the fineness table on the UK price page to translate any three-digit mark you do find.
Where Britons sell, and what each channel is for
High-street jewellers take scrap but rarely lead on price — gold buying is a sideline. Dedicated gold buyers and busy pawnbrokers run higher volumes and often sharper offers. Postal gold buyers are a genuinely large British channel: insured envelope out, offer by phone or email, money if you accept — convenient, and priced accordingly, so treat their quote as one bid, never the only one. Coin dealers are the right counter for anything collectable. Whatever the venue, the discipline is identical: know your melt value from the calculator first, and compare offers as percentages of it — the method our fair-percentage guide walks through.
The two tax rules worth knowing
First: buying investment gold — qualifying bars and most bullion coins — is VAT-exempt in the UK, while jewellery carries VAT. That asymmetry is why a pound spent on a bullion coin buys more metal than a pound spent on a chain.
Second, and uniquely British: gains on UK legal tender coins — Sovereigns and Britannias — are exempt from Capital Gains Tax, because in law they are currency. Gains on bars, foreign coins or jewellery can fall within CGT's scope, subject to annual allowances and chattel rules. These positions have been stable for years but are creatures of HMRC guidance: verify the current rules before selling a large holding, and treat this section as orientation, not advice.
The counter ritual, UK edition
Expect identification — buyers operate under anti-money-laundering obligations — and expect testing even on hallmarked pieces, since worn and counterfeit marks exist. What you should expect back: weighing in grams on a visible scale, carat groups kept separate, and an itemised offer stating weight, carat and price per gram for each group. A buyer who lumps everything into one “best price for the bag” has answered a different question than the one you asked. The walk-away moves are universal — our field guide to the tricks applies on either side of the Atlantic.
Coins are not scrap
A Sovereign in the scrap pile is money burnt twice: it carries a collector-and-bullion market above its melt value, and its CGT exemption is worth most precisely to the people selling the most. Price coins on their own market — our coin value pages track the majors live — and sell them to coin dealers, not the melt furnace.
Questions people ask in the UK
- Do I pay tax when I sell my gold jewellery in the UK?
- Usually the practical answer for ordinary jewellery is that modest gains sit within CGT's annual exempt amount and chattel provisions — but the honest answer is that it depends on gain size and what you sold. Legal tender coins are the clean case: CGT-exempt. For anything substantial, check current HMRC guidance or an adviser.
- Can I sell gold that has no hallmark?
- Yes — as scrap, priced on the buyer's test rather than a stamp. What you cannot generally do is resell it as gold jewellery in the UK without it being assayed and hallmarked first, which is the trade's problem rather than yours when selling for melt.
- Are postal gold buyers safe to use?
- Established ones are a legitimate, insured channel — the risks are price rather than theft. Use insured tracked post, photograph everything, require a stated offer before any melting, and refuse the offer freely; the mechanics mirror the mail-in model we dissect in are mail-in gold buyers legit.
- What percentage of melt value do UK buyers pay?
- We publish measured payout figures only with their measurement dates, and our measured tests so far are US ones — where ordinary walk-in offers occupy a 65–80% band. Treat that band as the sanity benchmark: UK margins face the same arithmetic, and any UK offer under two-thirds of melt deserves a competing quote.