How much is my gold worth?

Lots of people are looking to sell scrap gold, as the price of gold has been rising since about 2003. Unwanted gold items such as broken gold chains and watches, gold rings and other jewellery are often classed as scrap gold and can often be sold for a good price. A lot of the time scrap gold is sold to gold refiners as they will melt down the gold and make it into something new such as gold coins or even gold bullion.

If you are curious as to how much your gold is worth the first thing you will need to know it the carat rating or finess of the piece. Carat ratings for gold are in the range 9ct to 24 ct with 24 carat gold being the highest quality and 9 carat being the lowest. Sometimes gold coins are measured by the percentage of gold they contain. This is often written as a decimal such as 0.999 which translates to 99.9% pure gold. Gold coins usually range between 0.500 for less well known coins to 0.9999 for canadian gold maples and Austrian Philharmonic coins. Gold soverigns from the UK are .916 or 91.6% pure gold.

The second step to finding out what your gold is worth is to weigh it. There are different ways of measuring the weight of a piece of gold, pennyweights are 1/20 th of a troy ounce, which is the standard measure of precious metals. One Troy ounce is equivalent to 31.1 grammes.

To find out the actual content of gold in an item you multiply the weight (in grams) by the decimal gold percentage. This is not as difficult as it may sound for example: A gold coin which is say .500 and ways 20 grams. the quantity of gold in the coin is 20 x 0.5 so that is 10 grams of pure gold and 10 grams of other metal alloyed into the piece to make the final weight. To simplify things, just use our Scrap gold calculator on the left of the page!

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