How to value gold, silver, platinum & palladium — without getting taken

The single most important fact about a piece of jewelry is the tiny number stamped somewhere most people never look. Find it before you do anything else.

On a ring it is inside the band, near the join. On a chain it is on the clasp, usually engraved into the tongue or the oval tag soldered just beside it. On earrings it is on the post, sometimes the butterfly back, sometimes both. On a coin it is the denomination and the country, plus often a fineness on the rim or reverse. Use a 10× jeweler's loupe — they are eight dollars on Amazon and they will turn a smudged scratch into a legible "750." A magnifying glass works. Your phone camera on macro mode works.

Gold: karats

Gold is stamped in karats out of 24. 24K is pure (99.9%). 22K is 91.7%, traditional in India and the Middle East. 18K is 75%, the European standard. 14K is 58.5%, the American standard, and the karat you'll see most often in scrap. 10K is 41.7%, the floor for gold to legally be called gold in the United States. European numeric stamps mean the same thing in parts per thousand: 999, 916, 750, 585, 417. 750 means 18K. 585 means 14K. Memorize that pair and you are halfway there.

Silver: fineness

Silver is almost always stamped in parts per thousand, or with a word. 999 (also .999, "fine silver") is investment-grade purity. 925 ("sterling") is 92.5% silver — the world standard for jewelry and flatware. 900 is "coin silver," common in older American flatware. STERLING spelled out is the same as 925.

Platinum & palladium

Platinum is stamped PLAT, PT, or PT950 (95% platinum). Palladium is stamped PD, PALL, or PD950. They're heavier than they look and harder to scratch than gold; if a "white gold" ring weighs noticeably more than its size suggests, check for a Pt stamp before assuming.

What "no stamp" means

No stamp does not mean no value. It means do the next step manually. Take it to a jeweler with an XRF gun and ask for an elemental scan; many will do it free in hope of buying the piece. Or do a simple home magnet test — gold, silver, platinum, and palladium are all non-magnetic. If a "gold" chain sticks to a refrigerator magnet, the gold is plating, not the substrate.

Stamps that look like value but aren't

The most common heartbreak in this whole process: "18KGP" means "gold plated," a microns-thin layer of gold over brass. "1/20 12K GF" means "gold filled" — a thicker layer, still not solid. "HGE" means "heavy gold electroplate." "GE" means "gold electroplate." "RGP" means "rolled gold plate." None of these have meaningful melt value. If the stamp contains the letters GP, GF, GE, or EP, the metal underneath is not what's on the outside, and refiners will not pay you for the coating.

Buy a jeweler's scale. Use grams. Don't include the stones. That sentence is most of what you need to know.

A digital scale that reads to a hundredth of a gram (0.01 g) costs about fifteen dollars. Search "jewelry scale 200g 0.01g." Buy it before you sell anything over a couple hundred dollars; you will earn its cost back the first time. A kitchen scale reads to 0.1 g and is fine for back-of-envelope estimates but loses precision on small items. Bathroom scales are useless here.

Why grams

Grams are clean. Troy ounces are confusing — precious metals trade in troy ounces (31.1035 g) while groceries trade in avoirdupois ounces (28.3495 g), and dealers occasionally exploit the confusion. Stick to grams and convert only at the end. Our calculator does this in your head's place.

Batch by purity, never across it

Weigh all your 14K pieces together, all your 18K together, all your sterling together. Mixing purities means the lowest one drags everything down because dealers will not let you have it both ways. A 5g 18K chain and a 5g 14K chain are worth the sum of their individual values, not 10g at the average purity. Separate, weigh, label.

Stones

If you're selling for scrap, don't weigh the stones along with the metal. Refiners pop them out and throw them away. There are two exceptions to mind. The first is a real diamond, ruby, sapphire, or emerald over about a quarter carat — get it appraised separately, because the stone may easily outvalue the setting around it. The second is the much more common case: cubic zirconia, paste, glass, marcasite. None of those have meaningful resale value. You can leave them in for the weigh-in but tell the buyer they're there, so the per-gram math the two of you do is honest on both sides.

Practical numbers, so you have a benchmark

A typical women's wedding band: 2–4 g. A men's wedding band: 5–9 g. A typical small chain (18-inch rope, link, or box): 3–8 g. A heavy curb chain: 20–50 g. A 1 oz American Gold Eagle: 33.93 g total weight, of which 31.10 g is pure gold (it's alloyed with copper for durability).

A 10g 14K ring is not 10g of gold. It is 5.83g of gold and 4.17g of base metal. The base metal is worth essentially nothing.

This is the most lucrative and most-missed step in the entire process. The number stamped on the inside of the ring is not what the ring is made of; it is the proportion of precious metal in the alloy. Most jewelry, especially gold, contains substantial amounts of copper, silver, nickel, palladium, or zinc — chosen for color and hardness, not value. When you sell scrap, the buyer pays for the precious-metal fraction only.

The purity table

The math

Pure metal weight = total weight × purity fraction. For 14K: 10 g × 0.585 = 5.85 g of pure gold. For sterling: 10 g × 0.925 = 9.25 g of pure silver. For 18K: 10 g × 0.75 = 7.50 g. The calculator at the top of every metal page does this for you, but you should be able to do it on the back of a receipt, because that is what you will do when standing at a dealer's counter.

Spot is the wholesale price of a troy ounce of pure metal that banks and refiners settle at — the market's best estimate of what the metal is worth at this instant.

"Spot" actually means one of two slightly different numbers, depending on whom you're asking. The LBMA London Fix is set twice a day — 10:30 and 15:00 London time — by a handful of bullion banks coming to a consensus over a phone call. The COMEX spot is a continuously-trading futures-derived number out of New York that runs 23 hours a day. The two agree to within a fraction of a percent at any given moment, so for our purposes "the price of gold today" is a single number. The fraction of a percent matters to a bank moving a tonne of bullion at a time. It doesn't matter to you and your chain.

Today, in grams

One troy ounce is 31.1035 grams. To convert ounce price to gram price, divide by 31.1035. Our calculator pulls the daily mean across three independent providers (goldapi.io, metals.dev, metalpriceapi.com) every night at 00:00 UTC and serves it per-gram in the panel above. At today's update:

• Gold$128.46 / g · $3,995.44 / troy oz
• Silver$1.74 / g · $53.99 / troy oz
• Platinum$49.84 / g · $1,550.06 / troy oz
• Palladium$33.71 / g · $1,048.59 / troy oz

Refreshed at the next build; for a live tick, use the calculator on any metal page.

Worked example

Say you've got a 14K gold chain. Stamped 585. No stones. Your kitchen scale reads 12.4 g. The purity math from the previous step gives you 12.4 × 0.585 = 7.25 g of pure gold inside the chain. Multiply by today's per-gram spot — 7.25 × $128.46 — and you get $931.31 of melt value. That's your ceiling. You won't get all of it; the rest of the handbook is about how much you actually walk away with, and how to make sure that number is closer to 90% than 60%.

Spot is the ceiling. From there, every buyer takes a cut. The cut is not a scam; it is the cost of converting your jewelry into wholesale-grade bullion. The cut is also negotiable.

The four kinds of buyer, ordered by what they typically pay:

A couple of things worth remembering about every payout. First: percentages scale with weight. A single 5 g earring will get you maybe 65% of spot at a refiner who would happily pay 95% on a half-kilo lot, because the assay and admin cost is the same either way. Second: any percentage quoted "per gram of gold" is gross. You still have to ask what spot price the buyer is using to compute that gram. Some lock to the London morning fix. Some lock to whatever COMEX prints the moment they open your envelope. A small number use a "house" price that drifts a percent or two off the real one, and they're hoping you won't ask. Ask.

Get at least three written quotes for anything over two hundred dollars of melt value. The gap between best and worst on the same chain is regularly 25–35%.

The mechanics. Take a clear photo of each piece on a kitchen scale with the weight visible, plus a close-up of the stamp. Email or DM that, with the exact weight you measured, to three buyers. Ask each one for a per-gram price at today's spot for the karat in question, and the assay/handling fees if any. Tell them you are getting quotes from competitors. Watch how the numbers move.

Online vs local — the real trade-off

For clean material — bullion coins, hallmarked chains, ingots — the online buyers win, usually by 5–8 percentage points. They have lower overhead and they can price aggressively because they know exactly what they're getting. Mixed bags are a different problem. A Ziploc full of grandma's miscellaneous costume-and-real-mixed-together is exactly the kind of lot online buyers underprice, because they have to assume the worst and price for hand-sorting time. That's where the local jeweler with an XRF gun comes back into the picture: she can scan each piece in thirty seconds, separate the real from the plated on her counter, and quote you on the spot.

Red flags in a quote

• The buyer's scale is in a back room "for accuracy" — you cannot weigh in front of them.
• The price is quoted "per pennyweight" without telling you what a pennyweight is (1.555 g; sometimes used to make a quote look bigger than it is).
• Refusal to itemize: a single price for the whole pile rather than per-piece by karat. You always have the right to a per-karat breakdown.
• Pressure: "the price is going down today, lock in now." Spot moves a percent or two on a typical day. There is no urgency.
• The check is "in the mail" and you mailed your metal a week ago. Reputable online buyers ACH within 48 hours of receipt and let you decline the offer and have the metal returned at their cost.

Document everything

Photos before you ship. Weights written down. The quote in writing, with a date and a name. The shipping tracking number. The day the metal arrived. The day you were paid, in what amount, by what method. Most of the time none of this matters. The one time it does, it is worth a thousand dollars.