Melt value calculator
What the metal in an item is actually worth, at the live spot price. Enter weight and purity — grams, troy ounces or pennyweight, 10K through 24K.
Value & buy-tax calculator
Metal value & US sales tax
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Choose a state to see how it treats this item.
Shops usually pay less than melt (scrap bid). This is metal value only.
Details
Melt value is spot × troy ounces × purity. The tax side uses a simplified table of public state rules — general rate for jewelry, and the common investment-bullion exemption for bars and coins, with the invoice thresholds some states apply. These are simplified public rules and can go stale. The rate field starts at the state base rate; add county and city on top yourself. Verify current status with your state revenue department before a large purchase.
How melt value is calculated
Melt value is the worth of the metal itself, and the arithmetic is short: spot price per troy ounce × troy ounces of metal × purity. Nothing else enters it — no brand, no craftsmanship, no resale premium.
The one step people get wrong is weight. Jewellery is usually weighed in grams, bullion in troy ounces, and the American scrap trade often in pennyweight. A troy ounce is 31.1035 grams, not the 28.35 grams of the ordinary kitchen ounce, and a pennyweight is 1.5552 grams. Converting with the wrong ounce overstates your metal by about ten percent, which is why the calculator above asks for the unit rather than guessing.
Purity, and what a karat actually means
Karat is a fraction out of twenty-four. 24K is pure gold, 18K is eighteen parts gold to six parts other metal, and so on down. In the United States most jewellery is 14K, which is 58.33 percent gold — so a 10-gram 14K chain holds roughly 5.8 grams of actual gold. That is the number that has value.
- 10K — 41.67% gold
- 14K — 58.33% gold, the common US jewellery standard
- 18K — 75% gold
- 21K and 22K — 87.5% and 91.67%, common in South Asia and the Gulf
- 24K — 99.9%+ gold
Silver works the same way but is quoted as fineness. Sterling is .925, or 92.5 percent silver; investment bars and rounds are normally .999.
What a shop will actually pay you
This is the part worth being blunt about. A buyer pays less than melt. They have to — they carry the price risk between buying your metal and refining it, they pay refining costs, and they need a margin. A scrap bid is typically some percentage below melt, and that percentage varies by shop, by quantity and by how clean the lot is.
So treat the figure above as a ceiling and a negotiating baseline, not as an offer. Knowing that your 14K bracelet holds $690 of gold tells you whether a $500 offer is reasonable or insulting. It does not entitle you to $690.
Stones, clasps and plating are excluded entirely. A gem-set ring weighs more than its gold content, and only the gold counts here. If an item is plated rather than solid, its melt value is close to nothing regardless of what it weighs.
Which price is used
The calculator uses the live spot price shown beneath it, with a timestamp so you can see how fresh it is. Spot moves constantly while markets are open, so a quote from this morning is not the quote you will be offered this afternoon. Check the live price board for the current print.