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Silver price per gram
The London benchmark in sterling, with the history behind it. Everything below is the price of the metal itself, which is the floor under any piece of silver you own.
Loading the price history.
Source: the LBMA silver price, the London benchmark published each working day by the London Bullion Market Association. A refiner pays under the benchmark, and a high-street buyer pays less again.
What a gram is worth, by standard
Silver is alloyed with copper to make it hard enough to use, so a piece is never worth the fine price. Sterling is 925 parts pure in every thousand.
| Standard | Fineness | Per gram | Per troy ounce | Per kilo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Fine silver Bullion bars and coins | 999 | £1.58 | £49.09 | £1,578 |
Britannia British, 1697 to 1720 and again since 1999 | 958 | £1.51 | £47.08 | £1,514 |
Sterling Almost all British silver, marked 925 or with the lion passant | 925 | £1.46 | £45.46 | £1,462 |
Continental Much German, French and Italian silver | 800 | £1.26 | £39.31 | £1,264 |
Coin silver British sixpences to half crowns struck 1920 to 1946 | 500 | £0.79 | £24.57 | £790 |
Where this price comes from
The figure is the LBMA silver price, set by auction at noon each working day in London and published by the London Bullion Market Association. British refiners, bullion dealers and scrap buyers all quote against it, which makes it the number to check before selling rather than any single dealer's board price.
It is set once a day, so the reading here holds until the next London auction. Silver trades around the clock and the spot price moves in between, though for deciding whether to sell a teapot the daily benchmark is the right resolution.
Per gram, per troy ounce and per kilo
Silver is quoted the world over in troy ounces, an old unit of 31.1034768 grams, heavier than the 28.35 gram ounce on a kitchen scale. Divide the troy ounce price by 31.1 to get the gram price. Multiply the gram price by a thousand for the kilo price.
Weigh in grams and work in grams. Every British piece you are likely to own falls between a 15 gram teaspoon and a 900 gram coffee pot, and the troy ounce only invites arithmetic mistakes at that scale.
Sterling is not fine silver
A piece marked 925 contains 925 grams of silver in every kilo, the rest being copper added to make the metal hard enough to work. So sterling is worth 92.5 per cent of the fine price by weight, which the table above already accounts for.
Weighted candlesticks are the trap. The base is filled with pitch or plaster and the mark sits on a thin silver skin, so a pair that reads 1,200 grams on the scale holds a few hundred grams of metal. Anything stamped "weighted" or "loaded" needs the filling deducted before the sum means anything. Glass liners, wooden handles and steel knife blades come off the weight too.
What a buyer actually pays
Nobody pays the benchmark for scrap. A refiner takes a margin plus a refining charge and settles at something under it, and a high-street buyer or a "we buy gold" shop pays less again. Treat the figures here as the ceiling, then judge an offer by how far below it sits.
The number matters most as a decision point. Once you know the melt value, you know the least the piece is worth, and the only question left is whether a maker, a date or a form takes it above that. Our scrap silver calculator does the weight and fineness sum for a specific piece and puts the result beside what comparable objects have made at auction.
Reading the chart
The line plots pounds per gram of fine silver. Drag or hover to read any single day, and use the range buttons for a month through to twenty years.
The long view is the one worth a minute before selling. Silver reached a peak in 2011 that took more than a decade to approach again, and anyone who sold a canteen of cutlery in 2015 got roughly a third of what the same metal fetches now. The gap between a weak year and a strong one dwarfs the gap between one refiner's offer and the next.
Before you sell
Check the marks first. A lion passant, a town mark and a date letter take two minutes to read with the hallmark identifier, and they separate a common Edwardian tray from something by a maker worth many times its metal. The hallmarks guide explains the four marks in order, and scrap value or auction value covers the decision itself.
Plate is worth nothing as metal. If the piece reads EPNS, A1 or "Sheffield plate", the silver is a coating measured in microns and no refiner will weigh it. The six tests for solid silver or plate settle it at the kitchen table.