Last updated: September 4, 2026
Live gold, silver, platinum, and palladium prices come from a third-party market data provider that aggregates real-time precious metals spot prices. Prices refresh automatically once per hour. If live data is ever unavailable, the site falls back to a clearly labeled placeholder price rather than showing a stale number as if it were live — every price on the site is tagged either “live” or “demo” so you always know which one you’re looking at.
Every calculator on this site uses the same formula refiners and dealers use:
Melt value = weight (in grams) × purity × spot price per gram
Purity is expressed as a decimal — for example, 14k gold is 58.3% pure (0.5833), and 925 sterling silver is 92.5% pure (0.925). Spot price per gram is the live troy-ounce spot price divided by the number of grams in a troy ounce. See our gold karat chart and silver fineness chart for the exact purity we use for every karat and fineness mark.
We use the troy ounce, not the everyday (avoirdupois) ounce, since it’s the standard unit for pricing precious metals worldwide.
Melt value is the raw value of the pure metal in an item at today’s spot price — it assumes 100% of that metal could be recovered and sold at spot with no cost. In practice, buyers (scrap dealers, pawn shops, refiners) pay a percentage of melt value, commonly somewhere in the 70–90% range, to cover refining costs, testing, and their own profit margin. Melt value is a ceiling on what an item is worth for its metal content, not a quote you should expect to receive.
Daily gold and silver price history shown on this site is recorded automatically going forward, and was backfilled using historical market data at the time this feature launched. Data quality varies by era: from 1970 onward, our longer-range historical figures use LBMA annual average prices. Gold before 1970 uses the actual legally fixed US gold price of that era ($20.67/oz until 1934, then $35/oz under the Gold Reserve Act) — these are exact figures, not estimates. Pre-1970 silver is less precise, blending US Treasury purchase-price records with published market data from a period before silver traded on a clean fixed standard.
See the Investment Calculator for more detail on how we use this historical data.
If you think a number or explanation on this page is wrong, we want to know — contact us and we’ll look into it.