COMEX Registered vs Eligible: What the Inventory Categories Mean

Every ounce of gold and silver sitting in a COMEX-approved depository falls into one of two categories: registered or eligible. The distinction is not about the metal itself. The same bar can be registered on Monday and eligible on Tuesday without moving an inch. The difference is a piece of documentation called a warehouse warrant.

Registered metal has an active warrant issued against it. A warrant is a document of title created through the exchange's electronic system, and it is the only instrument that can be tendered to settle physical delivery of a COMEX futures contract. When a short position holder delivers silver against a futures contract, what actually changes hands is a warrant covering specific, serial-numbered bars.

Eligible metal meets every physical requirement of the contract: it is the right bar size, the right fineness, produced by an exchange-approved refiner, and stored inside an approved depository. What it lacks is a warrant. Eligible metal belongs to someone (an investor, a fund, a bank, a refiner) who is simply storing it at a COMEX vault and has not made it available for delivery.

Here is the one-line summary before the side-by-side comparison: registered metal is the deliverable float, eligible metal is qualified bystander inventory.

A warrant is an electronic document of title covering specific bars in a specific depository. According to CME Group's COMEX warrants documentation, warrants are created and tracked through the exchange's electronic delivery system, and each warrant identifies the exact bars behind it: brand, serial numbers, weight, and fineness.

Warrants matter for three reasons. First, they are the settlement instrument: physical delivery of a COMEX futures contract is legally the transfer of a warrant, not a truck pulling up to a loading dock. Second, they are fungible collateral: warrants can be pledged to clearing firms to meet margin requirements. Third, they are auditable: because warrants map to serial-numbered bars, the registered category is the most precisely accounted slice of exchange inventory.

Issuing a warrant is the owner's choice. A depository cannot register a customer's metal on its own, and the exchange cannot force private eligible holdings into the registered pool. That single fact explains most of the debate about what COMEX inventory numbers actually signal.

Most day-to-day movement between the two categories is paper movement, not physical movement. When an owner of eligible silver decides to make it deliverable, the depository issues a warrant and the bars are reclassified as registered. Nothing is weighed, shipped, or even touched. The same is true in reverse: a warrant holder who wants to hold metal privately simply cancels the warrant, and the bars become eligible again.

This is why single-day swings in registered inventory can look dramatic while total inventory barely changes. A large reclassification shows up as tens of millions of ounces leaving or entering the registered column overnight, but the metal never left the building. Genuine physical flows (bars trucked in from refiners, or withdrawn for industrial use and private vaulting) show up as changes in the total figure, and they are usually slower and steadier.

Physical withdrawals do happen at scale during stress episodes. In early 2025, tariff fears pulled hundreds of tonnes of gold from London into COMEX depositories, swelling both categories; the World Gold Council documented registered gold stocks rising by roughly 300 tonnes and eligible by more than 500 tonnes in that window. In October 2025, the flow reversed for silver as a London liquidity squeeze pulled 1,000 oz bars out of New York vaults toward London. Watching registered, eligible, and total together is the only way to tell reclassification from real metal movement, which is exactly how our COMEX inventory dashboard presents the data.

Registered and eligible only have meaning relative to a contract's delivery specifications, which CME Group publishes in its COMEX rulebook. The table below summarizes the two headline contracts.

Per Chapter 112 of the COMEX rulebook, the silver contract calls for 5,000 troy ounces (with a 10% weight tolerance) of silver assaying at least .999 fine, delivered as 1,000 oz cast bars from an exchange-approved brand. Chapter 113 sets the gold contract at 100 troy ounces of minimum .995 fine gold, deliverable as a single 100 oz bar or three 1 kilo bars.

The 1,000 oz bar is the institutional standard of the silver world: roughly 31 kilograms of metal, poured rather than minted, and traded between refiners, banks, and exchanges. It is deliberately the same bar family that underpins London's Good Delivery system, which is why metal can flow between London and New York when price spreads make the freight worthwhile. Retail products like coins and 10 oz bars are never COMEX-deliverable, no matter their purity.

When a futures contract goes to delivery, the short must present a warrant. That makes registered inventory the hard ceiling on immediate physical settlement. If open interest in a delivery month implies more metal than the registered pool contains, one of three things has to happen: longs close or roll their positions, eligible holders register more metal (usually enticed by rising prices or lease income), or fresh bars arrive from refiners and other markets.

Analysts track this through coverage ratios: how many contract-equivalents of registered metal exist versus how many contracts remain open in the front month. A silver delivery notice settles 5,000 oz per contract, so 25 million registered ounces covers 5,000 contracts. When coverage gets thin, the market typically resolves it through price: higher futures prices and richer lease rates pull eligible metal into the registered pool.

Delivery volume itself is public data. Our COMEX silver page pairs the registered and eligible series with daily delivery notices, so you can see how much of the float is actually being called for in any month rather than guessing from inventory levels alone.

Not by itself. A falling registered number has two very different possible causes: warrant cancellations (paper reclassification, metal still in the vault) or genuine physical withdrawal (metal leaving the building). The first is an ownership decision; the second is a supply event. You can distinguish them by watching the total: if registered falls while total holds steady, it was reclassification; if both fall together, metal is physically leaving.

Context from 2025 and 2026 shows both modes. Persistent industrial demand and five consecutive years of global supply deficits (per the Silver Institute's World Silver Survey) drained visible inventories across exchanges for years. Then the October 2025 London squeeze demonstrated how fast the system can move metal when incentives flip: with London lease rates spiking to records and spot trading above futures, dealers flew 1,000 oz bars from New York to London within weeks, and COMEX stocks fell accordingly.

The honest takeaway: registered drawdowns are a necessary but not sufficient signal of physical tightness. They matter most when combined with rising delivery notices, elevated lease rates, backwardation in the futures curve, and falling total (not just registered) inventory. Track all of these on one screen via the COMEX inventory dashboard and the total visible supply page.

CME Group publishes depository-level warehouse stock reports every business day, listing registered, eligible, and total ounces for each approved vault (Brink's, JP Morgan, HSBC, Loomis, CNT, Delaware Depository, Malca-Amit, Manfra Tordella and Brookes, and others). MetalCharts mirrors that daily data with charts and per-depository breakdowns: