Silver Price History

Milestones behind the long-term silver chart

Silver price history in the U.S. is the story of a metal that lost its role as money and then traded as a volatile commodity. The yearly figures above begin in 2000, so this timeline covers the events that explain the chart before then.

Silver certificates

For much of the 20th century, the U.S. issued blue-seal silver certificates that could be exchanged for silver at the Treasury. Redemption ended in 1968. The notes remain legal tender at face value, and most circulated ones are worth only a small premium to collectors.

The free-silver fight

After 1873, farmers and debtors in the West and South pushed for unlimited coinage of silver, which would have expanded the money supply. Silver miners backed them. The movement peaked with Bryan’s 1896 campaign and his “Cross of Gold” speech. He lost, and the Gold Standard Act of 1900 settled the question in gold’s favor.

The Treasury’s $1.29 ceiling

A standard silver dollar held 371.25 grains of pure silver, which works out to a monetary value of about $1.29 per troy ounce. For decades, the Treasury sold silver from its stockpile near that level, which kept the market price from rising much above it. By the early 1960s, industrial demand was draining the stockpile. Once silver’s market price passed $1.29, a silver dime was worth more melted than spent, and people began hoarding them. Congress answered with the Coinage Act of 1965, which is why U.S. coins dated 1964 and earlier are now valued on our junk silver calculator rather than at face.

The Hunt brothers and Silver Thursday

In the late 1970s Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, heirs to a Texas oil fortune, built enormous positions in physical silver and silver futures, much of it bought with borrowed money. Along with other buyers, they helped drive the price from single digits to near $50 an ounce by January 1980.

How the squeeze unwound

Exchanges answered with rules limiting leveraged buying, including COMEX’s “Silver Rule 7” that January. With new purchases restricted, the price slid for weeks. On March 27, 1980, the brothers could not meet a margin call from their broker, and silver fell hard in a single session. The day is remembered as Silver Thursday.

What it left behind

The episode explains the lone spike on long silver charts, a high that was not matched in nominal terms for about three decades. It also shaped how regulators think about position limits and margin in commodity markets. Households felt it too: at the 1980 peak, people sold family sterling and coins to refiners in large amounts, and a great deal of antique silver was melted.

The 2011 run and the long slide after it

Silver’s second run toward $50 grew out of the 2008 financial crisis. The price fell below $10 in late 2008 as investors sold everything. Then near-zero interest rates, central bank bond buying and fears about the dollar pulled money into precious metals.

The quiet years before it

After the 1980 collapse, silver spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in single digits. Two events in that stretch still get cited. In early 1998, Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had bought about 130 million ounces of silver, a rare large bet on the metal by a well-known investor. In April 2006 the first U.S. exchange-traded fund backed by physical silver began trading, which let ordinary brokerage accounts hold silver without storing it. Both widened the pool of buyers heading into the next boom.

Why the peak didn’t hold

By late April 2011, silver was trading just under $50. CME Group then raised silver margin requirements repeatedly over a few days in late April and early May. Leveraged traders had to post more cash or sell, and many sold. The price dropped sharply within days.

From peak to trough

The decline continued for years as the economy recovered and the dollar strengthened. Silver was below $15 by late 2015. It sank below $12 in March 2020 during the pandemic sell-off, before rebounding strongly later that year.

The two near-$50 peaks, in 1980 and 2011, capped the nominal chart for decades. The yearly table above shows when that ceiling finally gave way. The same period for gold is on the gold price history page, where the swings look calmer.

Reading old silver prices without misleading yourself

• Old prices are nominal dollars. A dollar in 1980 bought far more than a dollar today, so the 1980 peak was much higher in real terms than it looks.
• Our yearly table uses daily closing prices. Intraday spikes, such as parts of the January 1980 top, can sit above any close.
• Futures closes and London benchmark prices differ slightly on the same day, so two historical tables rarely match to the cent.
• Percentage changes depend heavily on the start date. Starting at a low year flatters the result; starting at a peak does the opposite.

Turning two prices into an annual rate

1. Divide the ending price by the starting price. From an example $5 to $20, that gives 4.
2. Raise the result to the power of 1 divided by the number of years. Over 20 years, 4 to the power 0.05 is about 1.072.
3. Subtract 1. The example works out to roughly 7.2% a year, compounded.

Monthly vs yearly figures

The yearly rows above compress hundreds of trading days into five numbers. A year with a high far above its close, such as a spike that faded, looks calm in the average column and dramatic in the high column. The monthly table smooths less and shows when within a year a move happened. For tax lots, insurance claims or estate valuations, use a single date’s closing price rather than an annual average, since those purposes are tied to a specific day.

Gaps in older records

Before modern electronic trading, silver prices were recorded once a day at the London fix or as New York dealer quotes. Series stitched together from those sources can disagree by a few cents to a few percent in the same week. Treat pre-2000 figures as good for trends, and check the source before using an exact old price in a contract or a court filing.

Adjusting for inflation

To restate an old price in today’s dollars, multiply it by the ratio of today’s Consumer Price Index to the CPI in the old year. With made-up example values, if the index was 80 then and 320 now, a $10 price then equals $40 in today’s money. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the CPI series going back to 1913.

Gold is quoted with the same caveats on the live gold price page.

The current silver quote and intraday chart sit on the silver price page.

Over the long run, the gold and silver comparison shows how the ratio between the two metals has drifted.