Historical Precious Metal Prices — Look Up Any Past Date
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Enjoying what you see and read?
We pour our heart into keeping preciousmetalprices.com fast, clean and free — no paywalls, no clutter, just reliable facts and live prices. If it helps you, the nicest way to say thank you is to pass it on. Every share helps a fellow investor discover us and keeps the project going. 💛
Who Needs Historical Prices?
Archive prices are not a curiosity for data enthusiasts. Once you hold physical gold, silver, platinum or palladium, sooner or later somebody — HMRC, an insurer, a probate solicitor, or simply your own spreadsheet — wants to know what the metal was worth on a specific day.
Returns & Performance
Take the sovereign bought a decade ago and forgotten in a drawer. Whether it has been a good investment is unanswerable until you pin down what you paid relative to the market. Look up the daily closing price for the day of purchase, set it against today's quote, and the true performance appears — over months, over years, over an entire investing lifetime.
Running two metals over the identical window is just as revealing. Gold and silver usually travel in the same direction, but rarely by the same distance: silver amplifies whatever gold does, up and down alike. Side-by-side comparison is the only honest way to judge which metal actually rewarded you in a given market phase.
Capital Gains Tax & Records
Selling bullion in the UK can trigger Capital Gains Tax under the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992, charged at 18 % or 24 % depending on which income band the gain falls into. There is no holding period to wait out — hanging on for another year makes no difference to the liability. What does help is the Annual Exempt Amount of £3,000: only the gain above that threshold is chargeable. Working out the gain requires an acquisition cost, and where the original receipt has gone missing, the daily closing price for the purchase date is the natural substitute.
Insurance & Claims
After a burglary or a fire, an insurer will not settle on sentiment. It wants the market value of the metal on the day the loss occurred. An archive quote from a recognised reference gives loss adjusters and valuers something neutral to work from, which usually shortens the argument considerably.
Research & Backtesting
Would a monthly standing order into gold since 2010 have beaten a lump sum? How deep was the hole palladium fell into during the Covid crash? Questions of that kind belong to backtesting, and backtesting is only as trustworthy as the price series behind it. Analysts, wealth managers and private investors all lean on the same archive for exactly this reason.
Fix, Spot or Futures?
"The gold price" is a loose phrase. There are several of them, they rarely agree to the penny, and which one you should quote depends entirely on what you need it for.
Our Reference Price
The reference behind this lookup is the daily closing price, settled in London by electronic auction at 3 p.m. on every business day. London has set the benchmark for the physical bullion market for more than a century, and the auction result is treated worldwide as the authoritative figure for the day.
That authority is practical, not ceremonial. Refiners, miners, bullion banks and central banks settle delivery contracts against the fix, value their holdings against it and price ETF units from it. A spot quote moves every few seconds and no two screens agree; the fix is a single number everyone can sign a contract against.
Spot, Fix and Futures Compared
- ◆ Spot price: what the metal changes hands for right now, for immediate delivery. It is quoted around the clock on COMEX and in the London over-the-counter market and never stands still. Our dashboard tracks it live.
- ◆ Reference fixing: a reference price settled once a day, reflecting the average that emerges from a short auction, published as one figure and used as the binding settlement rate across the market.
- ◆ Futures price: the price agreed today for delivery later on — three months out, say. Because it carries funding and storage costs, it normally sits a little above spot, a condition traders call contango.
Data Sources & Quality
Price data reaches us through a professional financial market feed, is imported automatically each day and checked for plausibility. The archive currently runs to more than 45,000 records across gold, silver, platinum and palladium in several currencies.
Tip: Where paperwork is involved — a Self Assessment return, a probate valuation, an insurance claim — quote the daily closing price; it is the figure shown in the table above and the reference an assessor or valuer will already recognise.
Fifty Years of Gold Price Turning Points
Nothing in the gold price happens without a reason. Behind every vertical rally and every long slide sits an identifiable event — a broken monetary arrangement, a war, a central bank changing its mind. Six of them shaped the market we trade today.
Nixon Shock — Bretton Woods Ends
For decades an ounce was worth $35 because Washington said so. When Nixon severed the dollar's link to gold, that guarantee vanished overnight and the metal became what it had not been since the war: a commodity whose price the market alone decided.
1980: The First Great Rally at $850/oz
Double-digit inflation, a second oil shock and Soviet tanks in Afghanistan sent the price to $850/oz. Restated in today's money that peak is worth north of $3,000/oz — a bar the market then failed to clear for the better part of forty years.
The Bottom at $255/oz
Twenty years of decline bottomed out near $255/oz, with central banks themselves among the sellers. The Bank of England disposed of roughly half the nation's reserves between 1999 and 2002 at prices around this level — a decision that has been argued over ever since.
2011: A Record at $1,920/oz
Three years after Lehman, with the eurozone periphery in trouble and central banks printing on an unprecedented scale, gold cleared $1,900/oz. What followed was a four-year retreat to roughly $1,050/oz by the close of 2015 before the next leg upward began.
Pandemic Rally — $2,075/oz
Lockdowns, closed borders and monetary expansion on a scale nobody had modelled pushed capital towards the oldest refuge available. August 2020 brought the first four-figure-plus print above $2,000/oz, with the peak at $2,075/oz.
Records Again — Beyond $2,800/oz
Central banks in Beijing, Delhi and Ankara buying in quantity, conflict on two continents and the prospect of falling interest rates carried gold beyond $2,800/oz. Measured in sterling the advance was steeper still, clearing £2,100/oz for the first time on record.
Historical lesson: Read the six entries together and a pattern emerges: gold rises when confidence in money or in government fails, not when the economy prospers. That is precisely the opposite of what equities and bonds require in order to do well — which is the entire argument for holding some.
Working Out What You Have Actually Earned
"Up 145 %" sounds impressive until you ask over how long, and in money worth what. Two adjustments separate a headline from an honest figure: strip out inflation to get the real return rather than the nominal one, and annualise the result so that a five-year holding and a twenty-year holding can be compared at all.
Nominal vs. Real Return
- ◆ Nominal return: the headline change, inflation ignored. Take the closing value, subtract what you paid, divide by what you paid, multiply by 100.
- ◆ Real return: what the gain buys once prices have moved on. Earn 8 % a year while prices rise 3 % a year and you are roughly 5 % a year better off in purchasing power.
- ◆ Annualised return (CAGR): the steady yearly rate that would have produced the same end result. Divide the closing value by the starting value, raise the answer to the power of 1/n where n is the number of years held, then subtract 1.
A Worked Example
Bought: one ounce of gold on 2 January 2015 at £765/oz (daily close)
Now: gold trading around £2,200/oz
Nominal return: (2,200 − 765) ÷ 765 × 100 = +187.6 %
Held for: roughly 11 years
Annualised return: (2,200 ÷ 765)1/11 − 1 = about 10.1 % a year
UK consumer prices rose by something close to 3 % a year across that span, which leaves a real return in the region of 7 % annually. No instant-access account or gilt came anywhere near that over the same eleven years.
The Day You Bought Decides Almost Everything
A holding of bullion pays nothing while you own it: no dividend, no coupon, no rent. Every penny of return is the difference between two prices, which puts an unusual weight on the day you bought. Somebody who paid the 2011 high of $1,920/oz waited thirteen years to see a meaningful dollar gain. Somebody who bought in 2015 or 2018 more than doubled their money in the same market.
Since nobody identifies the low in advance, the practical answer is to stop trying. Buying a fixed amount at a fixed interval — the approach usually called pound-cost averaging — spreads the entry across good days and bad ones and quietly removes the risk of committing everything at the worst possible moment.