Gold Calculator

How This Gold Calculator Works

The calculator uses the same formula refiners and gold buyers use: convert the weight of your item to troy ounces, multiply by the karat purity ratio to get the fine gold content, then multiply by the gold spot price per troy ounce.

Worked example: say you have a 10 gram 18K gold chain and the spot price is $4,060 per troy ounce. 10 g ÷ 31.1035 = 0.3215 troy ounces. 18K gold is 75% pure, so 0.3215 × 0.75 = 0.2411 ounces of fine gold. 0.2411 × $4,060 = about $979 of gold content.

The live spot price refreshes every 60 seconds while the page is open. If you already have a quote from a dealer or want to model a different price, type it into the manual price field and the calculator will use your number instead. The dealer payout selector then shows what an offer at 90%, 80%, or 70% of melt value looks like.

Gold Purity by Karat: What the Stamps Mean

Karat measures how many parts out of 24 are pure gold. Jewelry is rarely pure gold, because 24K is too soft for daily wear, so it is alloyed with copper, silver, or zinc. That is why a 14K ring weighing the same as an 18K ring contains less gold and is worth less as metal.

Most jewelry carries a hallmark stamp with the millesimal fineness instead of the karat: 750 means 75% gold (18K), 585 means 14K, 417 means 10K. Look inside ring bands, on clasp tags, and on the back of pendants. If a piece is stamped GP, GF, HGE, or “gold plated”, it only has a microscopic gold layer and has essentially no melt value.

Gold Weight Units: Troy Ounce, Gram, Pennyweight, Tola

The single most common mistake when valuing gold is mixing up unit systems. Gold spot prices are quoted per troy ounce (31.1035 grams), which is about 10% heavier than the everyday avoirdupois ounce (28.35 grams) your kitchen scale shows. This calculator converts between all of the units below automatically.

What Gold Buyers Actually Pay

The calculator shows melt value — the ceiling, not the offer. Every buyer deducts testing, refining, overhead, and margin. As a rule of thumb: specialist online gold buyers and refiners typically pay 85–95% of melt value, local jewelers and coin shops 70–90%, and pawn shops often 40–60%. If an offer is far below 70% of the number this calculator shows, get a second quote.

Before selling: sort items by karat so a buyer cannot average everything down to the lowest purity, weigh everything yourself first, ask how gemstones and non-gold parts are handled, and get at least two or three written quotes. Use the payout selector above to see what a fair offer range looks like for your items.

How to Weigh Gold at Home

A pocket jewelry scale with 0.1 gram precision costs little and pays for itself the first time you sell. Calibrate it with the included weight, weigh each karat group separately, and write the numbers down before visiting a buyer. Remember that stones, glass, enamel, watch movements, and steel springs are not gold: buyers weigh and pay for recoverable metal, so a ring with a large stone will be quoted below its gross weight.

How to Check Gold Purity

Start with the hallmark, then sanity-check it. A strong magnet is a quick first filter — gold is not magnetic, so anything that snaps to a magnet is not solid gold (though passing the magnet test alone proves nothing). Acid test kits scratch-test each karat level and cost about as much as a pizza. Serious buyers use XRF analyzers, which read alloy composition in seconds without damaging the piece — if a buyer tests with XRF in front of you, that is a good sign.

The best free test at home is density. Weigh the piece dry, then weigh it fully submerged in water hanging from a thread: the submerged reading in grams equals its volume in cubic centimetres. Dry weight divided by volume gives density, and gold alloys are far denser than the brass and steel used in fakes — 18K is about 15.2–15.9 g/cm³ and 14K about 13.0–13.6, against 8.5 for brass and 7.9 for steel.

Typical Weights of Common Gold Items

If you have not weighed a piece yet, these ranges give you a rough bracket to work with. A plain wedding band is usually 2–7 grams; a signet or class ring 4–12 grams; a woman's dress ring 1.5–5 grams. A fine chain is around 1.5–5 grams, a standard 20-inch curb or rope chain 8–25 grams, and a heavy Cuban link chain 30–100 grams or more.

A pair of small stud earrings is often under 1 gram each; hoops 1–4 grams each. A light bracelet is 3–10 grams, a solid bangle 10–40 grams. A pendant without stones is typically 1–8 grams. Gold watch cases vary enormously, from 15 to over 60 grams, and only part of a watch is usually gold.

Two warnings about using ranges. Hollow chains — rope, herringbone and some Figaro — can weigh a third of what a solid chain of the same appearance weighs, so bulk tells you very little. And every one of these figures is gross weight, so stones, clasps and non-gold components still have to come out. Ranges are for setting expectations; weigh the item before you rely on a number.

What This Estimate Includes and Excludes

The calculator returns melt value: the market value of the recoverable fine gold in the weight you entered, at the price shown. That is a hard ceiling on what any scrap buyer will pay, and it is the right benchmark for checking whether an offer is reasonable.

It does not include gemstones, pearls, or their settings; craftsmanship, brand or designer premium; collector and numismatic value on coins; antique or period value; or the retail markup you originally paid. It also cannot know whether a piece is hollow, plated, or filled — it prices the weight and purity you give it.

This cuts both ways. A signed designer piece, an antique with intact hallmarks, or a pre-1933 gold coin can be worth several times its melt value, and melting is irreversible. If a piece has a maker's mark, a date, or is a recognisable coin, have it valued as an object before you price it as metal.

Gold Coin Melt Values

Coins are calculated differently from jewelry. Every issue has a published fine-gold weight, so you skip the karat step entirely: enter the fine weight in troy ounces with purity set to 24K, and the result is melt value.

The one-ounce flagship bullion coins all contain exactly 1.0000 troy ounces of fine gold despite differing gross weights and karats — American Gold Eagle, Buffalo, Canadian Maple Leaf, Krugerrand, Britannia, Vienna Philharmonic and Australian Kangaroo. Common historic coins are smaller: a British Sovereign holds 0.23542 troy oz, a French or Swiss 20 Francs 0.18670, a pre-1933 US $20 Double Eagle 0.96750, and a Mexican 50 Pesos 1.20565.

Bullion coins normally trade at or slightly above melt rather than below it, so a dealer offering 97–100% of melt on a common Krugerrand is making a normal market — a completely different standard from scrap jewelry. Never scrap a recognisable coin.

Gold Price Per Gram, Pennyweight and Troy Ounce

Buyers quote in different units, and the same offer can look very different depending on which one is used. To convert a troy ounce price: divide by 31.1035 for a gram price, divide by 20 for a pennyweight price, and multiply by 0.374878 for a tola price. Then scale by karat.

The pennyweight trap is worth naming explicitly. One dwt is 1.5552 grams, so a per-dwt price is 55.5% larger than the equivalent per-gram price. Set a per-gram offer next to a per-dwt offer and the second looks far more generous when it may be identical. Convert every quote to grams before you compare — divide any dwt price by 1.5552.

The live per-gram figures for each karat in your selected currency are in the table above and refresh every 60 seconds. Use them as your benchmark, and ask each buyer which unit and which karat their number applies to.

Gold Calculator FAQ