What Is the Spot Price of Gold and Silver?

The spot price is the price for a transaction that settles now (in practice, within two business days) rather than at some future date. When a website, dealer, or news ticker says gold is trading at a given price per ounce, it is quoting spot: the going rate for one troy ounce of wholesale-grade bullion, exchanged immediately, with no premiums, taxes, or shipping attached.

Three details matter in that definition. First, the unit is the troy ounce (31.1035 grams), the bullion industry standard, not the regular avoirdupois ounce. Second, the quality is wholesale-grade: spot describes large Good Delivery bars moving between banks, refiners, and vaults, not coins in a flip. Third, it is a moving target: spot updates continuously nearly 24 hours a day during the trading week, following the sun from Asia to London to New York.

Spot is a benchmark, not a menu price. You cannot buy a single ounce of physical gold at exactly spot, and understanding why is most of what this guide covers. You can watch live spot prices on our gold price and silver price pages.

No committee sets the spot price. It emerges from two deep, interconnected wholesale markets trading against each other around the clock.

1. COMEX futures (New York). The most visible price discovery happens on CME Group's COMEX exchange, where standardized gold and silver futures trade nearly 24 hours a day. The front month (the nearest actively traded contract) is so liquid that most retail price feeds derive their spot quote from it, adjusting for the small time-value difference between a contract settling weeks from now and metal changing hands today.

2. London OTC market. The London bullion market is an over-the-counter (OTC) network of bullion banks trading physical and unallocated metal directly with each other, coordinated by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). London trades loco London: metal held in London vaults, settled two business days after the trade. This is where much of the world's institutional physical business actually clears.

The two markets cannot drift far apart in normal conditions because arbitrageurs link them: if New York futures get expensive relative to London metal, dealers sell futures, buy London bars, and ship or swap metal across (a mechanism explored in our LBMA vs COMEX guide). On top of the continuous market, the LBMA Gold Price auction (10:30 AM and 3:00 PM London time) and LBMA Silver Price auction (12:00 noon), administered by ICE Benchmark Administration, produce once-a-day reference benchmarks used to settle contracts and value ETFs; these are snapshots of the same market, not separate prices.

Spot is really two prices. The bid is what buyers are willing to pay right now; the ask (or offer) is what sellers demand. The gap between them is the bid-ask spread, and it is the first, smallest layer of cost anyone pays to transact. In deep wholesale markets the spread on gold is typically well under a dollar per ounce in normal conditions; quoted single-number spot prices are usually the midpoint.

The spread widens when liquidity thins: overnight between major sessions, during holidays, and during violent price moves. It also widens as you move from wholesale to retail: a bullion dealer's buy and sell quotes for a single coin sit much further apart than interbank quotes for a 400 oz bar, because handling one coin carries fixed costs that handling a bar spreads across thousands of ounces.

Physical bullion always costs more than spot to buy and returns less than spot when you sell. The difference is the premium (buying) and the bid discount (selling), and both exist because turning a 1,000 oz wholesale bar into a coin in your hand consumes real resources. The takeaway from the table: each step from vault to pocket adds a layer of cost that spot does not include.

Premiums vary by product and by market stress; they are covered in depth in our premium over spot guide, with live typical ranges on the coin premium tracker. The key point for a beginner: comparing dealer prices against spot is how you measure whether a quote is fair. Spot itself is the reference line, not an attainable price for small quantities.

A futures price is the price agreed today for metal delivered on a set date in the future. Because the seller of a futures contract carries the metal until delivery (paying storage, insurance, and financing costs in the meantime), futures for later months normally trade slightly above spot, a structure called contango. The rarer opposite condition, backwardation, means near-term metal costs more than future metal and usually signals physical tightness, as it did during the October 2025 silver squeeze in London.

Retail price feeds commonly derive spot from the most active futures month because it is the most liquid, continuously traded reference available. That works because arbitrage keeps futures and physical prices tethered. The mechanics of that relationship (carry costs, EFP transactions, rolling contracts) are covered in our dedicated gold futures vs spot guide.

Spot prices move on the same forces that move any deep financial market: shifts in supply and demand expectations, macroeconomic data, and positioning. For gold and silver, the recurring drivers are well documented.

For a physical buyer, spot is the yardstick for every decision. Before buying, convert a dealer quote into a percentage premium: divide the total price by (spot times ounces of pure metal) and subtract one. Before selling, compare the offer against the live bid. For scrap or jewelry, multiply the item's pure metal content by spot to get melt value (our melt calculator does this automatically), then expect real-world offers below that number.

For portfolio tracking, spot times holdings gives a live mark-to-market value, which is exactly how the MetalCharts portfolio tracker values positions. And for market watchers, the useful skill is knowing which spot you are looking at: a US-hours quote is futures-led New York pricing, while an early-morning quote reflects Asian and London trade. The price is one global conversation, but the accent changes with the time of day.