Gold Price per Pound Today

Pricing a pound of gold from the troy-ounce quote

A pound of pure gold is worth the spot price per troy ounce multiplied by 14.583, because an ordinary pound of 453.59 grams holds 14.583 troy ounces. If the person asking means the old troy pound, the multiplier drops to exactly 12. Every other number on this page follows from which of those two pounds you’re holding.

Gold is never quoted per pound on an exchange. The market price is per troy ounce of pure metal, so any “price of gold per lb” you see anywhere has been converted from that ounce figure. That’s also why two websites can disagree by thousands of dollars on the value of one pound of gold: one of them used the wrong pound.

How many ounces in a pound of gold, and why 16 is the wrong answer

Everyone learns that a pound has 16 ounces. That’s true, but those are avoirdupois ounces of 28.35 grams, the ounce on a kitchen or postal scale. Gold is priced in troy ounces of 31.1035 grams, which are about 9.7% heavier.

So when you ask how many ounces are in a pound of gold, the answer depends on which ounce you count. Sixteen kitchen ounces, yes. But only 14.583 of the troy ounces that the price refers to. Multiply the spot price by 16 and you’ve valued 497.7 grams of gold, not 453.6, which inflates the result by nearly a tenth.

The calculation, one step at a time

1. Decide which pound you have. A reading from any household, bathroom or shipping scale is an avoirdupois pound.
2. Convert it to grams: one avoirdupois pound is exactly 453.59237 grams under the 1959 international definition.
3. Divide by 31.1034768, the gram weight of a troy ounce. The result is 14.5833 troy ounces.
4. Multiply by the price per troy ounce. At the $4,000 example, that gives $58,333.33 for 24K gold.
5. If the metal isn’t pure, multiply once more by its purity: 0.750 for 18K, 0.5833 for 14K and so on, as shown further down.

To get a live figure, replace the $4,000 example with the gold price today and repeat step four. The table at the top of this page already does that for every karat.

Avoirdupois and troy: two pounds with one name

Both systems are built on the same tiny unit, the grain. They just stack it differently, and that is where all the confusion starts.

Notice the crossover. The troy ounce is the heavier ounce, but the troy pound is the lighter pound, because it only has twelve of them. A troy pound is about 82.3% of an avoirdupois pound.

Is a pound of feathers heavier than a pound of gold?

The old riddle has a real answer. If the feathers are weighed in avoirdupois pounds and the gold in troy pounds, the feathers win: 453.6 grams against 373.2. Flip the question to ounces and gold wins, since a troy ounce outweighs an avoirdupois ounce by almost three grams. The riddle only works because precious metals kept their own weight system after everything else moved on.

How the troy pound fell out of use

For centuries, English mints, goldsmiths and apothecaries all worked in 5,760-grain pounds. The apothecaries’ pound was the same weight as the troy pound, divided differently into drams and scruples. In the United States, an Act of Congress in 1828 made a specific brass troy pound, kept at the Philadelphia Mint, the standard for the nation’s coinage.

The unit didn’t survive modern trading. Britain’s Weights and Measures Act 1878 abolished the troy pound and kept only the troy ounce for gold, silver and precious stones. American practice drifted the same way. Several things pushed it out:

• Two pounds of different weights in daily use invited mistakes, and the 12-ounce pound was the one ordinary people never met.
• The ounce was already a convenient size for pricing a coin or a small bar, so dealers quoted per ounce and had no reason to scale up.
• Large wholesale gold moved to bars defined in ounces or kilograms, such as the roughly 400-ounce London Good Delivery bar and the kilobar.
• Countries that adopted the metric system weighed jewelry in grams, leaving the troy ounce as the single survivor of the old system.

Today the troy pound appears mainly in conversion tables and old assay records. When a modern source mentions a pound of gold without saying which one, it almost always means the avoirdupois pound. For kilo bars and tonnes, the gold price per kilo page carries the metric side of the same math.

A pound of jewelry, coins or silver is a different number

The multiplier of 14.583 only tells you how much a pound of pure gold is worth. Most things that people actually weigh by the pound are alloys, coins with a gross weight bigger than their gold content, or not gold at all.

A pound of karat jewelry versus a pound of bullion

A pound of 24K bars holds essentially a pound of gold. A pound of 14K rings holds a little over half a pound. The rest is copper, silver, zinc and, in white gold, nickel or palladium, none of which a gold buyer pays for.

A jar of mixed jewelry weighing one pound on the kitchen scale is worth less than even the 10K row suggests. Clasps can be a different karat or plated steel. Stones, pearls and glass add weight with no gold value. Solder seams run slightly below the stated karat. Buyers sort a mixed pound by karat, pull out what isn’t gold and price each pile separately, so it pays to do the same sorting before you do any math. The gold price calculator handles each pile by weight and karat.

How many coins make a pound of gold?

Coin weights are stated two ways: gross weight, which is what the scale shows, and fine weight, which is the gold content. Take the Saint-Gaudens double eagle, the pre-1933 American $20 gold piece. It weighs 33.436 grams and holds 0.9675 troy ounce of gold in a 90% alloy.

1. One avoirdupois pound divided by 33.436 grams is about 13.57 coins.
2. 13.57 coins times 0.9675 ounce is about 13.13 troy ounces of gold.
3. At the $4,000 example, that’s roughly $52,500 of gold content, not the $58,333 a pound of pure gold would give.

Collector premiums on older coins can outweigh all of that, which is why a pound of rare coins has no fixed metal price at all.

Silver by the pound

The pound is far more common with silver than with gold, because silver is bulky enough that people really do end up with pounds of it: boxes of sterling flatware, tubes of rounds, a 100-ounce bar that weighs about 6.86 pounds, or a 1,000-ounce bar at about 68.57 pounds.

• A pound of fine .999 silver holds 14.583 troy ounces, the same as gold. At an example price of $40 per ounce, that is $583.33.
• A pound of sterling holds 14.583 × 0.925 = 13.49 troy ounces of silver, or $539.58 at the same example price.
• A pound of 90% U.S. coin silver holds 13.125 troy ounces, or $525.00 at that price.
• A pound of silver-plated flatware holds so little silver that refiners generally won’t pay for it as silver.

The same troy-versus-kitchen-ounce trap applies. The silver price page covers stamps and spot quotes for silver in detail.

Weighing a pound of gold at home without fooling yourself

Most errors in pricing a pound of gold aren’t math errors. They start at the scale.

A reliable weighing routine

1. Switch the scale to grams if it has a gram mode. It removes every ounce question in one step.
2. Check the scale against something of known weight. A clad U.S. quarter is specified at 5.670 grams, so ten of them should read very close to 56.7 grams.
3. Put the empty dish or bag on the scale and press tare before adding the metal.
4. Weigh each karat or purity separately rather than one mixed heap.
5. Write down each reading, then convert the total grams to troy ounces by dividing by 31.1035.

Kitchen-scale pitfalls

• Decimal pounds are not pounds and ounces. A display of 1.27 lb means 1 pound 4.32 ounces, not 1 pound 2.7 ounces. Mixing the two formats is one of the easiest ways to lose track of an ounce or more.
• Many kitchen scales count in steps of a gram or more, or 0.05 ounce, which is about 1.4 grams. At a $4,000 example price, a single gram of pure gold is worth about $128.60, so the step size alone can move a small lot by hundreds of dollars.
• Cheap scales drift with low batteries and uneven counters. A reading that changes when you pick the item up and put it back down isn’t one to price from.
• Scales set to “oz” never mean troy ounces. The readout is always avoirdupois unless the scale specifically offers “ozt.”
• Weighing jewelry inside its box or pouch adds the packaging to the gold.

A jeweler’s scale reading to 0.01 gram solves most of this, and it is what a buyer will use at the counter anyway. If your total lands well over one pound, the ounce figure is usually easier to work with than the pound: the gold price per ounce page lists the smaller fractions and the conversion constants in one place.

Quick reference for pound questions

• Avoirdupois pound: the everyday 16-ounce pound, 453.59 grams, 14.583 troy ounces.
• Troy pound: 12 troy ounces, 373.24 grams, abolished in Britain in 1878 and rarely used anywhere now.
• Fine weight: the pure gold inside an item, the only weight that ties to the spot price.
• Gross weight: what the scale shows, including alloy metals, stones and findings.