Premium Calculator — What You Are Paying Above Spot

The premium — dealers still call it the agio — is what you hand over above the pure metal value of a coin or a bar. That metal value falls out of the spot price, the world market price per troy ounce settled largely in London, multiplied by the fine weight the piece actually contains. Everything charged beyond that figure is premium.

None of it is a swindle. The premium pays for striking or casting, distribution, storage, insurance, the paperwork — and the dealer's margin. It is the running cost of owning metal in a handy, verifiable form. The only question worth asking is whether the premium is ordinary for that product on the British market, and that is exactly what the calculator above tests.

Two steps and you have it:

At today's Gold price: a 1 oz coin holds 31.1035 g of fine metal. With spot at 103.92 £/g the metal value comes to 3,232.22 £. Quoted at 3,377.67 £, that coin carries 145.45 £ of premium — about 4.5 per cent. The calculator at the top of the page does this for you on the live rate.

One rule matters more than the rest: the smaller the piece, the bigger the premium in percentage terms. Striking, packing and shipping cost much the same whatever the weight, so spread across less metal the mark-up climbs. Rough bands for newly minted gold on the British market, with no dealer named:

This is where it lands. For the same money you walk away with different quantities of gold, purely because of the size you chose. Put £10,000 to work at a 5 per cent premium on one full ounce, against 13 per cent on ten tenth-ounces:

At equal fine weight the metal is worth the same, so in the United Kingdom this is a tax decision first and a premium decision second. Sovereigns struck from 1837 onwards and every Britannia from the Royal Mint are legal tender in sterling, and under TCGA 1992 s.21(1)(b) — spelled out by HMRC at CG78305 — a disposal of sterling currency falls outside Capital Gains Tax altogether. A bar, a Krugerrand or a Maple Leaf gets no such treatment: gains are chargeable at 18 or 24 per cent for 2026/27, with only the £3,000 Annual Exempt Amount standing in front of them.

So the coin premium here buys something concrete. A Sovereign or a Britannia costs more per gram than a bar of the same fine weight, and on a holding large enough to run past the annual allowance that extra can be repaid many times over by the CGT exemption. On a small holding that never troubles the allowance, the cheaper bar usually wins on price alone. Either way both count as investment gold, both are recognised the world over, and neither carries VAT.

The premium is only half the story. What decides your return is the spread — the gap between what you pay going in and what you are offered coming out. Sell-back quotes sit closest to spot for standard bars and household-name coins, and further below it for fractional sizes and anything unusual.

The real cost of holding metal is therefore the whole round trip: bought above spot, sold below it. That is the case for sticking to liquid, well-known products with a tight spread. What a sale would realistically fetch is estimated by the buy-back price calculator.

This is where British buyers get caught out. Investment gold is exempt from VAT under VATA 1994, Schedule 9, Group 15 — silver, platinum and palladium are not. The tax is baked into the shelf price, so the premium looks alarming the first time you work it out.

The rate applied to silver, platinum and palladium in this country edition is 20 %. HMRC shuts the margin schemes to precious metals and investment gold outright (VATMARG02100), and VAT Notice 718 was withdrawn on 23 December 2021. The full rate therefore lands on the entire price — coins every bit as much as bars. That single rule is why silver premiums in the United Kingdom sit structurally far above those in countries where the margin scheme still applies.

The calculator holds your quoted price against the pure metal value, so on silver, platinum and palladium the premium you see is to be read with the VAT inside it. Nothing has gone wrong with the arithmetic — that really is what leaves your account. When you compare, compare like with like: a British silver quote against another British silver quote, never against a continental price you spotted online.

Tax rules for this country edition last checked: 09/08/2026.

Premiums are not fixed; they breathe with demand. When buyers crowd in — a crisis, a scare, a mint running short — premiums jump, sometimes to several times their normal level, and delivery dates stretch out. When the market is quiet and stock is plentiful they settle back.

For a buyer that makes the premium a useful thermometer. A low premium usually means a calm, well-supplied market and a comfortable moment to buy metal. Premiums well above their usual band signal strain in the physical market. Over a long holding period, paying a modest premium matters more to the outcome than catching the exact price on any given morning.