Historical record · Precious metals
The gold price history on this page runs 701 monthly closes from April 1968 to August 2026, and gold closed that last month at $4,562.75 an ounce. Gold has returned 8.5% a year across those 58 years, though the September 1980 peak took 26 years and 7 months to recover in nominal dollars. Every figure here comes from the LBMA London PM auction.
August 2026 close, LBMA PM auction
$4,562.75US dollars per troy ounce. The record close of $5,222.30 was set in February 2026, so this reading sits 12.6% under the high rather than at it.
The record in six numbers
Six figures drawn from the same 697 monthly closes, chosen because each one answers a question people arrive on this page already asking. The last close, the record, the long-run rate of return, the worst fall, the longest wait, and how often a decade of holding lost money.
Latest monthly close
$4,562.75/oz+33.1% measured against the August 2025 close
The LBMA PM auction close for August 2026, which is the last month in this record and not today's quote.
Record monthly close
$5,222.30/oz-12.6% where August 2026 sits against it
Set in February 2026. The record and the latest close are different months, so the page never treats one as the other.
Annual return since 1968
8.5%701 monthly closes over 58 years
Compound growth from the first free London fix to the last month in the file, before dealer premium, storage and tax.
Deepest decline in the record
-61.8%which ran from September 1980 to August 1999
The line traces how far below the previous record gold closed in every month of the record.
Longest wait back to a prior peak
26 yr 7 moSeptember 1980 peak regained in April 2007
Measured in nominal dollars, so the wait in purchasing power was longer again than the figure shown here.
10-year holds that lost money
130 of 581which is 22.4% of every rolling decade
Overlapping 10-year windows, annualised. The line dips below zero wherever a decade of holding ended under water.
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). File retrieved 2026-09-09. Returns are nominal, before dealer premium, storage and tax
The long record
Every monthly LBMA close since April 1968, drawn on a logarithmic scale so that a move from $35 to $70 takes up the same vertical distance as a move from $2,500 to $5,000. On a straight scale the first thirty years of this series would flatten into a line along the bottom of the chart, which is how most gold price charts end up implying that nothing happened before 2005.
LBMA PM auction, monthly close, US dollars per troy ounce
August 2026
$4,563The dashed rule is the $453 geometric average of all 701 closes, which is the right kind of average for a series that compounds. The shaded bands mark the three stretches gold spent more than three years below a previous record.
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). 701 monthly observations retrieved 2026-09-09
Download the full series as CSVDrivers
Gold pays nothing, so the case for holding it is always relative to what the alternative pays after inflation, and the six mechanisms below are the ones the record supports. The first row is the one most often stated wrongly, because the nominal 10-year Treasury yield explains almost none of gold's movement on its own. The correlation across 689 overlapping 12-month windows since April 1969 is 0.10. Gold's median return in the years that yield rose was 6.6%, against 5.4% in the years it fell.
| Driver | How it works | What the record shows |
|---|---|---|
| Real interest rates | Gold pays no coupon and no dividend, so the cost of owning it is whatever a safe bond would have paid you after inflation, which is why the metal tends to do its best work when that figure is low or negative. | The nominal 10-year Treasury yield on its own explains almost none of it, and the correlation across 689 overlapping 12-month windows since April 1969 is 0.10. The yield that matters is the one adjusted for inflation. |
| Central bank demand | Official reserve managers buy in size, hold for decades and do not sell to take a profit, so their switch from net seller to net buyer removed the supply that capped the price through the 1990s. | European sales were capped by the Washington Agreement in September 1999, the month after the low. Official buying then ran above 1,000 tonnes in 2022, 2023 and 2024 on World Gold Council figures. |
| The dollar | Gold is quoted in dollars, so a weaker dollar raises the quoted price even when demand from every other currency has not moved at all, which is a mechanical effect rather than an investment case. | The 1971 to 1980 run began with two formal devaluations of the dollar against gold, in December 1971 and February 1973, before the market took over the job. |
| Exchange traded funds | A listed fund holding allocated gold bars lets an adviser or a pension fund take a position without a vault, an insurer or a dealer, which widened the buyer base beyond the people willing to store metal themselves. | SPDR Gold Shares listed on 18 November 2004, when gold closed the month at $453.40. It closed at $1,813.50 in August 2011. |
| Mine supply | Almost every ounce ever mined still exists, so annual production adds only a small percentage to the stock already above ground and a higher price cannot call forth new supply the way it does in an ordinary commodity. | Mine production runs near 3,600 tonnes a year against an above-ground stock of roughly 216,000 tonnes on World Gold Council estimates, which is growth of under 2% a year regardless of price. |
| Crisis and policy shocks | Gold reprices fastest when the thing being questioned is a counterparty rather than an economy, because it is the only reserve asset that is nobody's liability and cannot be frozen by the country that issued it. | The 2011 peak followed the US debt ceiling standoff and the S&P downgrade, and the 2022 acceleration followed the freezing of Russian central bank reserves. |
Sources: LBMA monthly fixes, US Treasury 10-year constant maturity, World Gold Council demand and supply statistics
The historical record
Measured from the December close before each decade opens to the December close that ends it, which puts the 1970s at +30.7% a year and the two decades that followed it in the red back to back. Anyone quoting a long-run average for gold is choosing which of these six periods to lean on, so we publish all of them rather than the number that flatters the case.
Annualised price change, December close to December close
| Decade | Opening close | Ending close | Total | A year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1970s | $35.20December 1969 | $512.00December 1979 | +1354.5% | +30.7% |
| 1980s | $512.00December 1979 | $398.60December 1989 | -22.1% | -2.5% |
| 1990s | $398.60December 1989 | $290.25December 1999 | -27.2% | -3.1% |
| 2000s | $290.25December 1999 | $1,087.50December 2009 | +274.7% | +14.1% |
| 2010s | $1,087.50December 2009 | $1,514.75December 2019 | +39.3% | +3.4% |
| 2020sPartial | $1,514.75December 2019 | $4,562.75August 2026 | +201.2% | +18.0% |
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). The 2020s row runs to August 2026 and is not a full decade. Past performance does not predict future results
What we found in the data
Gold has fallen at least 20% from a record close on 8 separate occasions in this record, and the depth of the fall turns out to matter far less than the wait that followed it. The September 1980 peak of $666.75 gave back 61.8% over the following 227 months, and it then took 26 years and 7 months in total before a monthly close got back above it in April 2007.
Everything here is measured on monthly closes rather than intraday prints, which is why the 1980 peak in the table is the September 1980 close of $666.75 and not the $850 that gold touched on 21 January 1980. That January spike is real, and it appears in the timeline further down as the separate, shallower fall it produced. All 8 of these declines eventually recovered, which is the half of this table the gold industry quotes. The other half is that 406 of the 701 months in the record closed more than 20% below a previous high. A buyer picked at random from this series spent 58% of their time waiting to get back to level.
Deepest fall in the record
-61.8%September 1980 to August 1999
Longest wait back to level
26 yr 7 moRegained in April 2007
Depth of each decline, peak close to trough close
| Peak | Peak close | Trough | Trough close | Depth | To the bottom | Back to level |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 1973 | $123.25 | October 1973 | $98.00 | -20.5% | 4 mo | 7 mo January 1974 |
| December 1974 | $186.50 | August 1976 | $104.00 | -44.2% | 20 mo | 43 mo July 1978 |
| October 1978 | $242.60 | November 1978 | $193.40 | -20.3% | 1 mo | 4 mo February 1979 |
| January 1980 | $653.00 | March 1980 | $494.50 | -24.3% | 2 mo | 5 mo June 1980 |
| September 1980 | $666.75 | August 1999 | $254.80 | -61.8% | 227 mo | 319 mo April 2007 |
| February 2008 | $971.50 | October 2008 | $730.75 | -24.8% | 8 mo | 15 mo May 2009 |
| August 2011 | $1,813.50 | December 2015 | $1,060.00 | -41.5% | 52 mo | 107 mo July 2020 |
| February 2026 | $5,222.30 | June 2026 | $4,026.05 | -22.9% | 4 mo | Has not recovered still under the February 2026 high |
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz), monthly closes. Measured peak close to trough close, so an intraday low was deeper than the figure shown. Nominal dollars, with no inflation adjustment
Every figure in this table is nominal, and the inflation-adjusted record peaks 8 months earlier in January 1980, because consumer prices rose 7.6% over those 8 months while gold rose 2.1%. Measured in purchasing power the recovery took 44 years and 9 months and did not arrive until October 2024, against the 26 years and 7 months shown above, and the inflation-adjusted gold price carries that series in full.
The money supply moved the other way through the same window, because M2 grew 2.9 times between the September 1980 peak and the August 1999 trough while gold fell 61.8%. That is the hardest stretch to square with the argument that gold tracks the money supply, and what the money supply did through that decline sets it out against the full M2 record.
The decline running from February 2026 is not in this table, because at the last close gold sat 12.6% below that record and the threshold for entry here is 20%. Whether it belongs in a future version of this table is not something we are going to guess at, and the table is rebuilt from the file every time the LBMA series is refreshed.
What we found in the data
The average return on gold is quoted constantly and it hides almost everything worth knowing, so we measured every overlapping 10-year holding period in the record instead. There are 581 of them, and 130 finished below where they started in nominal dollars before inflation was considered at all, which is 22.4% of every decade a buyer could have chosen. The median window returned 5.3% a year against the 8.5% the full span works out to.
Count of rolling 10-year windows by annualised return
Worst 10-year window
-6.0% a yearJune 1980 to June 1990, over which gold went from $653.50 to $352.20 and a position held for the whole decade lost 46.1% of its nominal value.
Best 10-year window
34.0% a yearJanuary 1970 to January 1980, which turned $34.99 into $653.00 and remains the strongest decade any asset in our data set produced.
Most recent losing decade
-0.48% a yearOctober 2012 to October 2022, which is recent enough that plenty of people currently holding gold lived through it rather than reading about it.
Share of holding periods that ended below where they started
Holding for longer improves the odds without removing the risk, and the 20-year row is the one worth sitting with. Even across two full decades, 52 of the 461 windows finished under water, and the worst of them ran from September 1980 to September 2000 and lost 59.0% over 20 years.
The losing windows are not scattered evenly through the record, which is the part that changes how you read them. Every losing 20-year period started between 1979 and 1983, inside the five years after the 1980 peak, and every losing 10-year period began between 1979 and 1993 apart from a single cluster starting in 2012. Buying gold at any point in the 1970s or after 1994 has never produced a losing decade in this record, and buying it in the four years after January 1980 never produced a winning one.
Every figure here is nominal
None of these returns is adjusted for inflation, so a window that broke even in dollars still lost purchasing power over the same period. The inflation-adjusted gold price is a different question with a different answer, and we keep it on its own page rather than mixing two measures into one table.
The record in dollars
A stake bought at the January close of each year, valued at the August 2026 close. The spread between the best and the worst entry point is the argument this whole page is making, because 1970 turned $10,000 into $1,304,015 while 1980 turned the same stake into $69,874 across a wait of 47 years.
| Bought in | Gold price | Worth today | Multiple | A year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 1970 | $34.99 | $1,304,015 | 130.4x | 9.0% |
| January 1975 | $175.80 | $259,542 | 26.0x | 6.5% |
| January 1980 Worst entry | $653.00 | $69,874 | 7.0x | 4.3% |
| January 1985 | $306.65 | $148,793 | 14.9x | 6.7% |
| January 1990 | $415.05 | $109,933 | 11.0x | 6.8% |
| January 1995 | $374.90 | $121,706 | 12.2x | 8.2% |
| January 2000 | $283.30 | $161,057 | 16.1x | 11.0% |
| January 2005 | $422.15 | $108,084 | 10.8x | 11.7% |
| January 2010 | $1,078.50 | $42,306 | 4.2x | 9.1% |
| January 2015 | $1,260.25 | $36,205 | 3.6x | 11.7% |
| January 2020 | $1,584.20 | $28,802 | 2.9x | 17.4% |
| January 2025 | $2,812.05 | $16,226 | 1.6x | 35.8% |
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). Metal only, so no dealer premium, storage, custodian fee or tax is deducted. A real purchase started 3% to 8% behind the price shown
Six eras
Each era runs from one monthly close to another, and the dates are the ones the data supports rather than the ones the story is usually told with. The last era ends at August 2026. That is the last observation in the file rather than a turning point, and the boundary moves every time the series is refreshed.
| Era | From | To | Length | A year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two-tier market to the end of Bretton Woods London reopened for private trading in April 1968 while central banks kept settling with each other at $35, and the private price barely moved for three years until Nixon closed the gold window on 15 August 1971 and ended official convertibility for good. | $39.10April 1968 | $40.65August 1971 | 40 mo | +1.2%+4% total |
| The free-float bull market, 1971 to 1980 Once no government was fixing the price, gold ran through two oil shocks, a dollar devaluation and inflation above 13% to the highest monthly close it would record for the next 27 years. The famous $850 print came intraday in January 1980, and the London PM fixes never closed a month above $666.75 in that cycle. | $40.65August 1971 | $666.75September 1980 | 109 mo | +36.1%+1540% total |
| The long decline, 1980 to 1999 Paul Volcker took the fed funds rate above 19%, real yields turned sharply positive, and gold spent the next 19 years going nowhere anybody wanted to follow. Central banks sold into it throughout the 1990s until the first Washington Agreement in September 1999 capped those sales, which is the month the series bottoms. | $666.75September 1980 | $254.80August 1999 | 227 mo | -5.0%-62% total |
| The 2000s bull market, 1999 to 2011 Falling real rates, the dollar's slide, the arrival of exchange traded funds in 2004 and then the financial crisis gave gold the best twelve years in its floating-price history. The August 2011 close of $1,813.50 came weeks after the US debt ceiling standoff and the S&P downgrade of Treasury debt. | $254.80August 1999 | $1,813.50August 2011 | 144 mo | +17.8%+612% total |
| The post-2011 bear market, 2011 to 2015 The Federal Reserve began tapering its bond purchases, real yields rose off the floor, and gold gave back 41.5% over four years and four months. December 2015 is the month the Fed raised rates for the first time in nine years, and it is also the low. | $1,813.50August 2011 | $1,060.00December 2015 | 52 mo | -11.7%-42% total |
| The run into 2026 Central bank buying at the fastest pace since the 1960s, two inflation shocks and the 2025 tariff round took gold from $1,060.00 to a record monthly close of $5,222.30 in February 2026. The August 2026 close of $4,562.75 sits 12.6% below that peak, which is where this record currently ends. | $1,060.00December 2015 | $4,562.75August 2026 | 128 mo | +14.7%+330% total |
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). Boundaries are monthly closes, so an era peak measured intraday was higher than the figure shown
Timeline
Twelve dated events, each carrying the LBMA close for that month and the close five years later, so the story and the number cannot drift apart. The five-year figure is there because it is the horizon at which most of these events stopped mattering.
April 1968
The London market reopens and the record starts
Central banks abandoned the London Gold Pool in March 1968 and split the price in two, keeping $35 an ounce for settlement between themselves while private buyers traded at whatever the reopened London market would bear. The monthly series on this page starts with that first free private fix.
August 1971
Nixon closes the gold window
On 15 August 1971 the United States stopped converting dollars into gold for foreign governments, which ended the Bretton Woods system and left the price to the market for the first time since 1934. The London price barely reacted that month, and then it went up by a factor of 16 over the following nine years.
December 1974
Americans are allowed to own gold again
Public Law 93-373 restored private ownership on 31 December 1974, after 41 years in which holding bullion had been a criminal matter under Executive Order 6102. The bar and coin demand everyone expected did not appear, and the December 1974 close turned out to be a peak that took three and a half years to recover.
January 1980
The 1980 spike
Gold printed $850 intraday on 21 January 1980 in the middle of a run driven by 13% inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That intraday figure is the one everybody quotes, though the London PM fix ended the month at $653.00 and the highest monthly close of the whole cycle came eight months later.
September 1980
The highest monthly close of the cycle
Paul Volcker had spiked the fed funds rate to 17.6% that April and then let it collapse to 9% in July under the credit-control programme, so the month gold peaked was one of the cheaper months to borrow in that whole cycle. The tightening that broke inflation came after: the rate passed 19% in January 1981 and savers finally had a double-digit yield on an asset that paid them to wait, while gold paid nothing. The $666.75 close here is the peak the drawdown table measures the entire long decline from.
August 1999
The bottom, 19 years later
European central banks spent the 1990s selling reserves into a falling market, and Gordon Brown auctioned 395 tonnes of British gold between 1999 and 2002 at an average of around $275 an ounce. The following month 15 central banks signed the Washington Agreement capping those sales at 400 tonnes a year, and the price rose 17% in four weeks.
November 2004
The first big gold ETF lists in New York
SPDR Gold Shares began trading on 18 November 2004 and gave pension funds, advisers and ordinary brokerage accounts a way to hold bullion exposure without a vault, an insurer or a dealer. Gold had already risen 78% off the 1999 low by the time the fund arrived, and it rose a further 300% over the seven years that followed.
August 2011
The post-crisis peak
Standard and Poor's downgraded United States government debt on 5 August 2011, three weeks after a debt ceiling standoff that came within days of a technical default. Gold closed August at a level it would not see again for almost nine years, and anyone who bought that month spent the next four years watching the position fall by 41.5%.
December 2015
The bottom of the post-2011 bear market
The Federal Reserve raised rates on 16 December 2015 for the first time in nine years, which was supposed to be the end of the argument for holding a metal that yields nothing. December 2015 is the lowest close of that cycle and the start of the run this page ends on.
March 2022
Reserve sanctions change who buys gold
The freezing of roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves in February 2022 demonstrated to every other central bank that dollar reserves can be switched off by the country that issues them. Official sector buying ran above 1,000 tonnes in 2022, 2023 and 2024 on World Gold Council figures, which is roughly double the pace of the decade before it.
April 2025
The tariff round
The April 2025 tariff announcements put a bid under gold that had nothing to do with inflation expectations and everything to do with counterparty risk, and the metal ran 67.4% over the calendar year. That is the third largest annual gain in this 58-year record, behind 1979 at 126.5% and 1973 at 73.0%.
February 2026
The record monthly close
February 2026 set the highest monthly close in the record at $5,222.30, and the following month moved -11.8% against it. The last observation in this series is August 2026, so every era boundary and every figure on this page ends there rather than at today's date.
Our view
Every entry carries the day it was written. A tracker with one undated opinion sitting under live data is the failure mode we built this page to avoid, so an old note here is visible as an old note rather than passing for current thinking.
· latest
The record close in this series is February 2026 at $5,222.30 rather than the August 2026 figure the rest of the page runs on, which means gold ended the last observed month 12.6% under its own high. Nothing about that is unusual in a record with eight separate declines past 20% in it, and we would rather say so now than quietly redraw the chart if the gap widens.
The drawdown table is the part of this page we would want a 62-year-old to read twice. The 1980 peak took 26 years and 7 months to recover in nominal dollars, which is longer than most retirements last, and the wait measured in purchasing power was longer again. An allocation sized so that outcome would be survivable is a different allocation from one sized on the run since 2020.
We keep being asked for gold's average return, and the average hides the thing worth knowing. 130 of the 581 rolling 10-year holding periods in this record ended below where they started, before inflation was even considered, so the distribution is the number to carry rather than the 8.5% a year the full span works out to. The 61.8% fall from September 1980 was the deepest in the file when we wrote this, and it still is.
Written by the Gold IRA Digest Editorial Team. Opinion, labelled as opinion, and never a recommendation to buy or sell any metal.
What is scheduled
Windows are months rather than exact dates, because the later release dates are not published yet and inventing them would be the same mistake as inventing a verification date.
What this history means if you hold metal in an IRA
A gold IRA is a long hold by construction. The self-directed IRA that holds the metal comes with a required minimum distribution date attached to it, the bars sit in a depository until then, and selling any of them means going back through a dealer at whatever spread they quote on the day. That turns the 26 years and 7 months recovery above into a planning input rather than a piece of trivia. Somebody who bought at the September 1980 peak was still 39% down a decade later in September 1990, which is roughly when a 60-year-old buyer reaches their first RMD. Size the allocation so that outcome would have been survivable, and if you are still deciding whether to fund one, the rollover mechanics matter more than anything on this chart.
The stress test models how deep a fall an allocation can absorb, and the recovery times on this page come from the LBMA series above rather than from that tool.
Common questions
How this page is built
The series is the LBMA PM London auction close, taken as the last published fix of each calendar month, which gives 701 observations from April 1968 to August 2026. Drawdowns run from a record close to the lowest close before that record is taken back, and rolling returns use every overlapping window in the file rather than a sample of them. Every chart is server rendered and works with JavaScript disabled, which is also why the assistants that quote this page can read it.
The history was last updated from the LBMA file on 2026-09-09, and the figures move together whenever it is refreshed. Returns are nominal and metal only, so no dealer premium, storage charge, custodian fee or tax is deducted anywhere on this page, and a real purchase started behind every price shown by the premium over spot the dealer charged. The live figure in the strip at the top is a spot price from a different source with its own timestamp, and it is never mixed into a calculation with a monthly close.
Sources
Full dataset available as CSV, including the drawdown column. Corrections go to the editorial team and are logged publicly.
Gold IRA Digest is an independent publisher. This page is information, not investment advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or sell any metal. Past performance does not predict future results. Some links on this site earn us a commission, which never changes what we publish about a company.