How much is a gold bar worth What's the metal actually worth?

Melt value by bar size

Every standard size, priced at the live spot and 999.9 fine. Sizes confirmed against the Valcambi minted bar catalogue, the Perth Mint price list and the Royal Canadian Mint bar range.

A troy ounce is 31.1034768 grams exactly, per NIST Handbook 44 Appendix C. That is why a one ounce bar is not 28 grams. The kitchen ounce is the avoirdupois ounce at 28.349523125 grams, and confusing the two understates a bar by about 9 percent.

What dealers charge above melt

No dealer we could reach publishes its premium as a live number next to the product. Several block automated access entirely, and the ones that do discuss premiums write them as ranges in undated-looking articles. So rather than invent a current figure, here is what each source actually published, with the date it was written.

Treat those as the shape of the market, not today's quote. Both sources are dealer-published editorial rather than a measured survey, and each was written at a different gold price. The honest way to get your own number is the checker at the top of this page. It takes the price you were actually quoted and measures it against the live spot, so the premium is computed rather than claimed.

The pattern the sources agree on is that small bars cost proportionally more. Gainesville Coins writes that the fixed costs are proportionally higher for smaller quantities, and GoldSilver writes that smaller units always carry higher percentage premiums because striking, packaging and handling cost nearly the same whatever the size. Neither claim is confirmed by a mint, a refiner or a standards body, so it stands as dealer opinion that happens to be internally consistent.

Read the fineness, don't assume it

Minted bars are usually 999.9 fine. Valcambi states its available finenesses for minted bars are 999,99 and 999,9 for gold, and both the Perth Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint market their gold bars at 99.99 percent.

Cast bars are the exception worth knowing. Valcambi's cast bar range includes 999,0 and 995,0 gold alongside 999,9, so a cast kilo bar can legitimately hold about half a percent less gold than a minted one of the same weight. On a kilo that gap is real money. Set the fineness selector to whatever is stamped on your bar rather than to the best case.

The 400 ounce bar you've seen in photographs

The bar in vault photographs is a London Good Delivery bar, and it is a wholesale standard rather than a retail product. The LBMA specification sets a minimum of 350 fine troy ounces and a maximum of 430, roughly 10.9 to 13.4 kilos, with a minimum acceptable fineness of 995.0 parts per thousand. The LBMA notes those bars typically weigh a few ounces either side of 400 troy ounces.

Retail bars stop at about 1 kilo, so nothing a private seller owns is Good Delivery. It matters only because that standard is where the quoted spot price is set, and your small bar is priced off it with costs added.

How we measured this

Spot comes from a live feed, gold-api.com as the primary source, cross-checked against at least one other, and never typed by hand. The reading behind this page is $4,377.60 per troy ounce. Melt is grams times fineness times spot divided by 31.1034768, computed in code at view time.

Weights and conversions come from NIST Handbook 44 Appendix C. On how precious metals must be priced by weight, NIST Handbook 130 says the unit of measure and method of sale shall be either troy weight or SI units, though it also notes that requirement targets businesses buying from the public rather than bullion traded on commodity markets. Bar sizes and finenesses are quoted from the refiner and mint catalogues linked above. Where a figure could not be verified, this page says so instead of estimating.

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