How Precious Metal Spot Prices Work
A spot price is the going rate to buy or sell a metal right now, for immediate delivery of its standard traded form. It is a wholesale benchmark set by global markets, and it is almost never the price you actually pay at a shop, which adds a premium, or receive when selling, which takes a discount. This guide explains the difference so the numbers on the price board make sense.
Quick answer: spot is the wholesale benchmark for immediate delivery. Retail sits above spot when you buy and below spot when you sell. The gap covers the dealer's costs and margin. This site shows spot; a dealer's quote will differ.
What a spot price actually is
The spot price is the price for immediate delivery of the standard traded form of a metal, such as a good-delivery bar of gold or silver at a recognized purity. It is discovered continuously in global markets: futures exchanges where contracts trade, and the over-the-counter (OTC) market where large institutions deal directly. All of that buying and selling settles on a single reference number at any given moment, and that number is the spot price. It is a wholesale, big-quantity benchmark, which is exactly why an individual buying one coin does not pay spot.
How retail differs: premium and discount
When you buy a coin, bar, or piece of jewelry, you pay a premium over spot. When you sell, you receive a price at a discount to spot. The gap between those two, the bid-ask spread, is how dealers cover minting or fabrication, shipping, insurance, storage, testing, and their own margin. Premiums are wider on small items and popular coins and narrower on large bars, and the buy-sell gap is wider for less liquid metals. The exact size varies by product, dealer, and market conditions, so this guide describes the concept rather than quoting a fixed percentage. The practical takeaway: use spot as your baseline, then expect to pay a bit more to buy and get a bit less to sell.
Why prices move constantly and close on weekends
Metal prices update in near real time during the trading week because the underlying futures and OTC markets are open and trading almost around the clock across global time zones. Every trade nudges the benchmark, so a live quote can change second to second. Those markets pause over the weekend, so from Friday's close until they reopen the price effectively sits still; a figure you see on a Sunday is the last traded level, not a fresh one. That is normal, and it is why a live board can look frozen outside market hours.
Troy ounce vs regular ounce
Precious metals are priced by the troy ounce, which is heavier than the everyday (avoirdupois) ounce used for food and postage. A troy ounce is 31.1034768 grams; a regular ounce is about 28.3495 grams. Mixing them up overstates or understates a value by roughly ten percent, so it matters. When a headline says gold is a certain price "per ounce," it means per troy ounce. The calculator on this site lets you enter weight in grams, troy ounces, regular ounces, pennyweight, pounds, or kilograms and handles the conversion for you.
What "melt value" means
Melt value is the worth of the actual metal content in an item at the current price, ignoring any collectible, artistic, or brand value. You work it out from three things: the weight, the purity (the fraction that is pure metal), and the price per unit. For example, at the snapshot price of $4,136.30 per troy ounce (snapshot, 2026-07-22), one gram of pure gold is worth about $132.99, so a gram of 14k gold, which is 14/24 pure, is worth roughly $77.58 of gold. Melt value is the floor for scrap and bullion; a dealer then applies the discount described above when buying. The calculator computes melt value from weight, unit, and purity automatically.
How the prices on this site work
The board uses three tiers, and it always labels which one you are seeing so nothing is presented as fresher than it is:
| Tier | What it is | When it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Live feed | Real-time spot prices fetched by your browser | Whenever the live source is reachable |
| Daily reference | A once-a-day reference rate for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium | If the live feed is unavailable |
| Snapshot | A built-in figure stamped 2026-07-22 | If both feeds fail, as a last resort |
Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and copper are live metals and step down through those tiers as needed. The rare platinum-group metals, rhodium, iridium, and ruthenium, have no liquid public spot market, so they are shown as dealer-indicative prices stamped July 2026 rather than live quotes. See rhodium price and why rhodium is so expensive for how those thin markets behave. Whatever tier is active, the price shown carries a freshness stamp, and everything on the board is indicative: it may be briefly delayed, dealers pay a premium or discount to spot, and none of it is financial advice.
Try it: the free metal value calculator takes any weight, unit, and purity and returns a melt value using the live spot price, and you can type in your own quote if you have one.
This guide is general information, not financial advice. Spot prices are indicative and can be delayed; dealers buy and sell at a premium or discount. Confirm prices with a dealer before any transaction.