Scrap Gold Calculator

The biggest mistake sellers make is expecting the spot price. A gold buyer pays for the pure gold content, not the item's weight, and that payout is always a percentage of the melt value. The scrap gold calculator gives you the melt value, the floor for negotiation, before you walk into any shop.

You enter the weight, the karat, and today's spot price per troy ounce. The calculator converts everything to pure gold content and shows both the melt value and an estimated dealer payout at a percentage you set. That number is what a fair offer should be measured against, not the spot price you see on a ticker.

Scrap gold calculators are a tool for consumers with broken jewellery, inherited pieces, or dental gold. If you are buying bullion or running a refining operation, skip this, you need industry-grade references. For everyone else, this is how you get a number that puts you in control of the sale.

Weigh Your Items

Use a digital scale that reads to 0.1 g or better. A jewellery scale is ideal.23 at $2,450/oz. For trade, a NIST Handbook 44 Class II scale is required; your buyer's scale should meet that standard. Weigh each item separately, and remove any stones or non-metal parts before putting it on the scale.

Identify the Karat

If there is no stamp, assume the lowest plausible karat or test it. A nitric acid test kit is destructive but definitive, use it in a ventilated area with nitrile gloves. Never assume dental gold is high-karat; most dental alloys are 10K, 18K, and the ADA classifies them as high-noble only if they are 60%+ noble metal. Gold-filled items have a stamp like '14K GF' and contain at most 5% gold by weight, the calculator cannot account for that unless you enter the actual gold content.

Enter the Spot Price

Look up the LBMA Gold Price for today. It publishes at 10:30 and 15:00 London time. That figure changes daily. Type the number into the calculator. This tool has no live feed, you must enter the price yourself. Choose your currency from the dropdown: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, or AUD.

Add Items and Calculate

Click 'Add Item' for each piece. Enter a name, weight, unit (grams, troy ounces, pennyweight, avoirdupois ounces, or kilograms), and purity. The calculator converts everything to grams, then to troy ounces, applies the purity, and multiplies by your spot price. It also shows an estimated dealer payout at a percentage you set, start with 58.33% for 14K, 41.67% for 10K, and adjust based on the buyer's offer.

The formula is straightforward: Melt Value = Weight (troy oz) × Purity (decimal) × Spot Price per Troy Ounce. Here is a worked example using the gold price from 1 October 2026.

You have a 14K gold ring that weighs 10 grams. Gold is trading at $2,450 per troy ounce.

• Convert grams to troy ounces: 10 g × 0.0321507 = 0.3215 troy oz.
• 14K purity: 14/24 = 0.583 (58.3% pure).
• Melt value: 0.1875 troy oz × $2,450 = $459.38.

That is the melt value.If the dealer quotes $300, you know the offer is about 65%, below the typical range for 14K. That number is your negotiating position.

53, and a 75% payout would be $246.40. The difference shows why misreading a stamp costs real money.

The melt value is not what you get paid. A dealer's offer covers refining costs, assay fees, and profit margin. The payout percentage varies by karat, quantity, and buyer type.

For 10K and 14K, the most common scrap karats, a fair offer is 60-80% of melt value. Cash-for-gold shops tend toward the lower end; refiners who buy in bulk pay more. A pawn shop may offer 50-70%. The key is to know the range before you walk in.

If a buyer offers 90% on 24K bullion, that is excellent. If the same percentage is offered on a 10K chain, be suspicious, the refining loss on low-karat gold is higher, and the buyer is either misquoting the karat or building profit into the spot price they use.

Always ask the buyer what spot price they are using and what percentage of melt value they pay. If they will not say, walk out. A transparent buyer will tell you: 'We pay 75% of melt based on the LBMA fix.'

Never sell without checking the weight on the buyer's scale against your own. A scale that reads 0.1 g high on a 10 g piece overstates the weight by 1%, at $2,450/oz, that is about $1.25 on a 14K ring. Small, but it adds up over multiple items.

The benchmark is the LBMA Gold Price, set twice daily by the London Bullion Market Association. It is the price used by refiners and large-scale traders. You can find it on the LBMA website, on financial news sites like Bloomberg or Reuters, and on commodity price aggregators. Do not use a retail jewellery store's listed price, that includes markup.

For the calculator, type in the current LBMA price in your chosen currency. If you are in the UK, check the price in GBP. In Canada, use CAD. The exchange rate matters: a $2,450/oz price in USD is about £1,920 at 1 October 2026 rates. The calculator handles the currency conversion if you select the right one.

If you are selling in a country with hallmarking requirements, such as the UK or EU, the fineness mark (e.g., 585 for 14K) is your purity reference. The Vienna Convention on hallmarking recognises standard fineness marks: 375, 417, 585, 750, 833, 916, 990, 999. Use those to confirm the karat before entering it.

The single most common failure when using a scrap gold calculator is trusting the spot price you see on a generic website without confirming the LBMA fix. A stale example from an article written two years ago is useless when gold is $2,450. You must enter today's price. The calculator does the math; you have to provide the current number.

The second failure is forgetting that the payout percentage is your assumption, not a market guarantee. If you set it to 90% and the buyer offers 70%, the gap is not the buyer being unfair, it is your assumption being optimistic. Start with 75% for 14K, adjust based on what the buyer discloses, and use that figure as your negotiation target.

Finally, never sell without verifying the weight on the buyer's scale. A scale that is not NIST Handbook 44 Class II can be off by 0.5% or more. That 0.5% on a $500 melt value is $2.50, small, but repeated daily across hundreds of sellers, it adds up. Your own scale, checked against a known weight, is your best protection.