Melt value is the simplest number in the precious metals world and the one most often got wrong. It is the market value of the pure metal an object contains, and nothing else — no craftsmanship, no brand, no stones, no history. Getting it right needs three things: an accurate gross weight, a correct purity, and today's spot price. This gold melt value calculator handles the first two properly and asks you for the third, because a price printed into a web page is stale before the day is out.
Arb Digital publishes this as part of a free tools library, and the deliberate design choice here is that the tool never quotes a price at you. It computes fine metal content from weight and purity — arithmetic that is fixed and verifiable — and applies whatever spot figure you type in. Leave the price at zero and it still returns the useful half: exactly how much pure metal is in the item.
What This Gold Melt Value Calculator Does
Enter a gross weight in grams, troy ounces, pennyweight, avoirdupois ounces or grains. Choose a marked purity from the selector, or type an unusual fineness directly. Deduct the weight of anything that is not alloy — stones, enamel, a steel clasp. The tool multiplies the remaining alloy weight by the fineness to give fine metal content in grams, converts that to troy ounces, and if you have supplied a spot price it multiplies through to a melt value and applies your dealer payout percentage.
The nearest tools on this site do adjacent jobs. The weight converter handles unit changes on their own, the material weight calculator works the other way round by deriving weight from volume and density, and the density calculator is what you would use to sanity-check whether a piece is plausibly solid gold at all. This page is the only one that turns purity marks into fine metal content.
How to Use It
- Weigh the item accurately. Precious metal quantities are small enough that a kitchen scale reading to the nearest gram introduces real error on a light piece.
- Read the purity mark. Modern items are usually stamped with a karat number or a three-digit fineness. If there is no mark, the purity is unknown and the result is a guess.
- Deduct non-metal weight. Stones and findings are weighed with the piece but have no melt value, so they must come off before the purity is applied.
- Enter today's spot price. Use the quote for your metal in your currency, per troy ounce. The tool does not fetch it and never assumes one.
- Set a payout percentage. Buyers pay a fraction of melt. Setting it lets you compare a real offer against the metal content underneath it.
The Formula / How It's Calculated
Alloy weight is the gross weight converted to grams minus the non-metal deduction. Fine metal weight is alloy weight multiplied by fineness divided by 1,000. Troy ounces are fine grams divided by 31.1034768, the exact gram equivalent of the troy ounce given in the NIST Special Publication 811 conversion factors. Melt value is troy ounces multiplied by the spot price, and payout is melt value multiplied by the payout percentage.
Worked example. A 25 g chain marked 14K, no stones, quantity one. Fineness for 14K is 585 parts per thousand, so fine gold is 25 x 0.585 = 14.625 g. In troy ounces that is 14.625 ÷ 31.1034768 = 0.47020 troy oz. If the spot price you look up happens to be 2,000 per troy ounce, melt value is 0.47020 x 2,000 = 940.41, and at an 80% payout the offer would be 752.33. Change the spot price and every downstream figure moves with it; the fine weight does not.
Karat, Fineness and What the Stamp Legally Means
Karat is a fraction in twenty-fourths: 24 parts of a 14K alloy contain 14 parts gold, which is 14 ÷ 24 = 0.5833. The three-digit fineness stamped on European pieces expresses the same thing in parts per thousand, and the two systems do not round to identical numbers. Fourteen karat is exactly 583.3 but is conventionally marked 585, because manufacturers alloy slightly rich to guarantee the piece assays above the legal minimum. Eighteen karat is exactly 750, and 22K is 916.67 marked 916. This calculator uses the marked fineness rather than the raw karat fraction, which is why 14K defaults to 585.
The mark carries legal weight in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission's guidance for consumers on buying platinum, gold and silver jewelry explains that the karat mark states how much pure gold the piece contains and should sit next to a registered trademark identifying who stands behind it. A quality mark with no maker's mark beside it is worth less confidence, and an unmarked piece tells you nothing at all.
Gold Plated, Gold Filled and Rolled Gold Are Not in Scope
The single biggest source of disappointment in scrap valuation is applying a purity to something that only has gold on the surface. Plated items carry a microscopic layer measured in millionths of an inch and have essentially no recoverable melt value. Gold filled is thicker — a bonded layer expressed as a fraction of total weight, such as "1/20 12K GF" — but recovering it is a refining process, not a melt, and buyers price it accordingly if they take it at all.
If a piece is marked GP, GEP, HGE, RGP or GF, the fineness field on this page does not apply to its gross weight and any number the tool returns will be wrong by an order of magnitude. Vermeil is silver with a gold layer, so it is valued as silver. When a mark is ambiguous, the honest answer is that you do not know the purity, and no calculator can supply it.
Why the Payout Is Never 100%
Nobody pays melt. A buyer has to assay, refine, carry the metal until it is sold, and make a margin, and every one of those costs a percentage. The payout field exists so you can express an offer as a share of the underlying metal and compare offers on the same basis, which is a far more useful comparison than comparing two headline cash figures against pieces of different weight.
Worth noticing: payout percentages usually improve with quantity and with purity, because the refining cost per gram falls. A single 9K ring is expensive to process relative to what it contains; a hundred grams of 18K is not. The percentage calculator and the percentage difference calculator are useful for comparing offers, and the markup calculator shows the same spread from the buyer's side of the counter.
Weight Units Are Where Errors Hide
Precious metals are quoted per troy ounce, which is 31.1034768 grams, while the ordinary avoirdupois ounce is 28.349523125 grams. A troy ounce is about 10% heavier, so treating one as the other overstates or understates a valuation by roughly a tenth before anything else has gone wrong. Pennyweight, still used in the American jewellery trade, is one twentieth of a troy ounce or 1.55517384 grams. Grains appear on older scales and in ammunition, at 0.06479891 grams each.
The safest practice is to weigh in grams and let the tool convert, because grams are unambiguous. If a buyer quotes you a price per pennyweight and you are working in grams, convert the price rather than the weight — it is the direction less likely to be done backwards. The weight converter handles that step, and the unit converter covers the rest.
Melt Value Is a Floor, Not a Valuation
Melt value tells you what an object is worth if it stops being an object. For a broken chain that is the whole story. For an antique, a signed designer piece, a coin with numismatic interest or anything with gemstones, melt is the floor below which the item should never be sold, and the actual value may be a large multiple of it. Melting is also irreversible, which makes it a poor default for anything that might be collectable.
The reverse trap is assuming sentiment translates into money. Mass-market jewellery with small stones typically has little resale value beyond its metal, because the stones are hard to sell separately and the design carries no premium. Melt value at least gives you a defensible number to start from, and it is the only figure in the whole conversation that can be checked with a scale and arithmetic.
Arb Digital maintains a large free tools library covering measurement, finance and everyday arithmetic, and our team is happy to point you at the right one.
Browse Free Tools Talk to Arb DigitalCommon Mistakes to Avoid
- Applying a purity to gross weight — stones, clasps and enamel are on the scale but have no melt value and must be deducted first.
- Confusing troy ounces with ordinary ounces — a troy ounce is about 10% heavier, and mixing them up misprices everything by that margin.
- Treating a plated or gold-filled mark as a purity — GP, GEP, HGE, RGP and GF describe a surface layer, not an alloy.
- Using a spot price you read days ago — the price moves continuously, and melt value moves with it in exact proportion.
- Melting something worth more intact — coins, signed pieces and antiques can be worth many times their metal content, and the process cannot be undone.
Related Free Tools From Arb Digital
Use the weight converter for troy and metric conversions on their own, the density calculator to sanity-check whether a piece is plausibly solid metal, the percentage calculator to compare offers as shares of melt, the material weight calculator when you need weight from dimensions, and the profit margin calculator if you are trading rather than selling once. Everything else is in the tools hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because it would be wrong within hours. Spot prices move continuously, and any figure hardcoded into a page becomes misleading almost immediately. The calculator takes the price as an input so the arithmetic stays correct whatever the market is doing, and it still computes fine metal content when the price field is left empty.
Karat expresses gold content in twenty-fourths, so 14K is 14 ÷ 24 = 0.5833. Fineness expresses the same proportion in parts per thousand. Fourteen karat is conventionally marked 585 rather than 583 because manufacturers alloy slightly rich to stay above the legal minimum, and this tool uses the marked fineness.
Yes. The arithmetic is identical for any precious metal — weight times fineness gives fine content, and fine content times spot price gives melt value. Choosing the metal only reminds you which spot quote to look up, since each trades at its own price per troy ounce.
Deduct the weight of the stones and any non-metal findings before the purity is applied, using the deduction field. If you cannot weigh the stones separately, the fine metal figure will be overstated, and it is better to treat the result as an upper bound than to ignore the issue.
No. Gold filled, plated, vermeil and rolled gold carry a surface layer rather than an alloy purity, so applying a fineness to their gross weight gives a figure that is far too high. Marks such as GF, GP, GEP, HGE and RGP all indicate a coating.
Because assaying, refining, holding and reselling the metal all cost money, and the buyer takes a margin. The payout field lets you express any offer as a percentage of melt, which is the only fair way to compare two offers on items of different weight and purity.
Melt value is a floor, not a valuation. Coins with numismatic interest, signed designer work and antiques regularly sell for multiples of their metal content, and melting is irreversible. Establish whether an item has value as an object before treating it as raw material.
This tool performs weight and purity arithmetic only. It is not a valuation, an appraisal, or financial advice, and it does not verify that any item is what its markings claim. Precious metal prices are volatile and any figure produced here reflects only the spot price you entered. For anything of significant or uncertain value, consult a qualified independent appraiser before selling.
