About How Much Is Gold by the Pound
How Much Is Gold by the Pound answers one question well: what gold is worth when you measure it the way most people think about weight, in pounds. We publish the live gold price per pound in US dollars, a per-pound price chart, guides to karat gold, scrap and nuggets by the pound, a plain guide to buying a pound's worth of gold, and two free calculators.
We don't buy, sell or store gold, and we don't take orders. We publish information, and we earn money from one clearly disclosed affiliate relationship, described in full below. Because we have nothing to sell you, we can be direct about the things that cost buyers and sellers money: premiums, payouts, and the ×16 mistake.
Where Our Prices Come From
Every price on this site comes from one of two named sources.
The spot price (the headline figure). The big number at the top of our pages is the gold spot price from gold-api.com, converted to dollars per pound. Spot is the wholesale price of one troy ounce of pure gold for immediate delivery. It's what every dealer's and buyer's price starts from.
Charts and history. Our charts, tables of recent closes, 52-week ranges and record figures use COMEX gold futures (the GC contract) daily closing prices, via Yahoo Finance. Futures are the exchange-traded contract most of the industry watches, and they come with a clean history going back decades. Futures usually sit a little above spot; we label every figure with its source rather than mixing the two. At the moment, futures are +$35.10 per ounce away from spot.
Everything else is arithmetic. Per-pound, per-gram, per-karat, per-weight and calculator figures are calculated from the spot price using fixed definitions: 453.59237 grams to the pound, 31.1034768 grams to the troy ounce, 14.5833 troy ounces to the pound, and karat as parts in 24. We never type a price into a page by hand, and we never use 16 ounces to the pound for gold.
Premium and payout ranges (what dealers typically charge and buyers typically pay) come from published 2026 dealer and seller guides, and we present them as typical ranges, never as quotes. Company facts about Augusta Precious Metals come from Augusta's own website and its Better Business Bureau profile, and we re-check them before we publish any change.
How Often Prices Refresh
The site is rebuilt from scratch every 6 hours. Each rebuild fetches the latest spot price and futures data, recalculates every figure on every page, checks the result, and publishes it. That's the version search engines and readers without JavaScript see, and every figure carries the time it was fetched.
On top of that, while you have a page open, the headline price re-checks the spot price in your browser and updates the page's spot-based figures to match, restamping the time. If that check fails for any reason, nothing changes: you keep seeing the last rebuild's figures and their timestamp.
Stale beats blank. If a data source is unavailable when the site rebuilds, we keep publishing the last good data with its original timestamp rather than an empty page or an estimate. A price that's a few hours old and labeled is more useful, and more honest, than a guess.
Editorial Standards
- Units are stated, every time. A "pound" on this site is the avoirdupois pound of 453.59 grams. "Ounce" means the troy ounce. Prices are in US dollars, never British pounds.
- Melt value is labeled as melt value. Whenever we show what gold is worth, we say whether it's the value of the metal alone, what you'd pay to buy it, or what a buyer might pay you.
- Ranges, not promises. Premiums and payouts vary by dealer, day and market conditions. We give typical ranges and explain what moves them.
- No invented experts. Our pages are written and reviewed by our editorial team. We don't publish fake author profiles, ratings, testimonials or "editor's pick" badges.
- Recommendations say who they're wrong for. Our buying guide names one company and explains, just as plainly, which buyers should look elsewhere.
- Plain language. If a term needs explaining (karat, fineness, pennyweight, spot), we explain it.
How Corrections Work
We don't run an inbox, a contact form or a phone line. Corrections happen in three ways:
- Every rebuild re-checks the numbers. Each 6-hour build recalculates all prices from source data and runs automated checks before publishing, including checks that every price on a page is consistent with the others and that no page is missing its timestamp. A build that fails its checks isn't published.
- Facts are re-verified on a schedule. Company facts, premium ranges, coin specifications and regulatory references are re-checked against their sources periodically and before any page that uses them changes.
- Errors we find are fixed in the next rebuild, and material corrections are noted in the page's update history.
If a figure here looks wrong to you, check the timestamp and the source named beside it first. Most differences between gold sites come down to timing, spot versus futures, or the ×16 mistake.
How We Make Money (Full Disclosure)
This site has one commercial relationship. We earn a commission if you become a customer of Augusta Precious Metals through a link on this site. Every such link is marked, carries the label "BUY GOLD BY THE POUND", and includes a tracking code that identifies this site as the referrer.
- It costs you nothing. Augusta's prices are the same whether or not you arrive through our link.
- It doesn't change our numbers. Prices, calculators, premium ranges and payout ranges are calculated or sourced exactly the same way whether or not they help Augusta.
- It doesn't buy a ranking. We recommend Augusta for one kind of buyer: someone buying a pound of gold or more, for cash or an IRA, who values education before a purchase. We say plainly that buyers of a few ounces, or those chasing the lowest possible premium on bars, are better served elsewhere.
- Seller pages carry no affiliate link. Our pages about selling scrap, karat gold and nuggets don't promote Augusta at all.
- The pop-up is an ad, and it says so. Some visitors see a pop-up offer for Augusta when they leave a page. It carries the same disclosure, and closing it has no effect on anything else.
We don't accept payment for reviews, rankings or placement, and no other company pays us.
What This Site Is Not
Nothing on this site is financial, tax or legal advice, and none of it is an offer to buy or sell gold. Prices may be delayed. Always confirm a live price with the dealer or buyer you're dealing with before you trade. See our terms of use and privacy policy.