Live tracker · Precious metals
The gold price today is $4,363.10 an ounce, quoted live on 11 September 2026. That is 16.5% below the record monthly close of $5,222.30 set in February 2026, and +27.2% against the August 2025 close. Gold has compounded at 8.5% a year since April 1968, and this page reads the 701 monthly LBMA London fixes behind that figure at build time.
Live spot from the live spot market 701 monthly observations since April 1968
One of the trackers on our gold price and silver market data hub, all built from the same committed series.
Gold spot, US dollars per troy ounce
-4.4% against the Aug 2026 LBMA close of $4,562.75
· the live spot market
Where that sits against the last 12 months
Live prices
Six readings of the same metal, each one carrying the date it belongs to. The live quote and the published monthly close come from different sources on different days, so every card below names which of the two it was built from. Nothing on this page averages the August 2026 close with a price quoted in September 2026.
Gold spot price
$4,363.10/oz-4.4% against the 31 August 2026 LBMA close
Live from the live spot market, written into this page at build time so the figure is in the HTML before any script runs, then refreshed in your browser when you load the page. Spot is the interbank price for one troy ounce, before any dealer premium.
Change since Aug 2025
+27.2%from $3,429.15 on 31 August 2025
Measured against the monthly close nearest a year before the live quote, and labelled with that month. The published series runs months behind the live price, so a fixed count back through the rows would quietly measure a longer window.
12-month range, monthly closes
$3,825 to $5,22212 closes, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026
The high and the low of every LBMA month-end inside the year ending 11 September 2026. It covers 12 closes rather than 12, because the published series stops at August 2026.
Distance from the record close
-16.5%record $5,222.30, Feb 2026
The live quote sits 16.5% below the highest monthly close in the record. Gold has spent 157 of its 701 months within 5% of a record, so this reading is more ordinary than the coverage around it suggests.
Year to date
-0.1%from $4,367.80 on 31 December 2025
Measured from the December close of the previous year, which is an exact observation rather than a nearest match. A missing December returns nothing instead of borrowing November.
Last LBMA monthly close
$4,562.7531 August 2026
The benchmark the 58-year history on this page is built from, fixed twice a day in the London auction. This is a different number from a different date than the live quote above, and the two are never mixed without saying so.
Sources: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz) for the monthly history, the live spot market for live spot, retrieved 2026-09-11
The long record
Every monthly LBMA close since April 1968, drawn on a logarithmic axis. The series runs from $39.10 to $5,222.30, and on a linear axis the first thirty years of it flatten into a line along the bottom of the box.
LBMA London fix, monthly close, US dollars per troy ounce
Live
$4,363Three points are marked on the line. September 1980 closed at $666.75 at the top of the inflation spiral, and August 1999 closed at $254.80 after two decades of decline. February 2026 set the record close of $5,222.30 that the live quote at the top of this page is measured against, and the dashed rule across the chart marks it.
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz), with live spot from the live spot market, retrieved 2026-09-11
Download the gold price CSVThe shape of this chart is three long regimes rather than one trend. Gold repriced violently for a decade after the dollar stopped converting into it, then fell for twenty years while real interest rates made holding a metal that pays nothing expensive. It has spent most of the period since 2001 rising. A deeper treatment of those regimes belongs on our gold price history page rather than here, because this page is about what the metal is worth this morning.
Drivers
Gold pays no coupon and generates no earnings, so almost everything that moves it runs through the return available somewhere else. Across 687 overlapping 12-month windows since 1969, gold's annual change and the change in the real 10-year Treasury yield correlate at -0.36. That is the strongest single relationship we can measure from the series committed to this repository.
| Driver | Measured | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Real interest rates | r = -0.36 | Gold pays no coupon, so the return available on an inflation-protected Treasury is what holding it costs. Across 687 overlapping 12-month windows since 1969, gold's annual change ran against the change in the real 10-year yield more consistently than against anything else we measured. US Treasury 10-year constant maturity and BLS CPI, monthly, via FRED |
| Central bank demand | Over 1,000 tonnes a year | Official-sector net purchases passed 1,000 tonnes in 2022 and stayed above that level in 2023 and 2024, roughly a fifth of annual mine supply going into reserves that rarely come back to market. This buyer is price-insensitive in a way no retail buyer is. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, full-year 2024 |
| Consumer price inflation | 8.3% against 4.0% | Gold compounded at 8.3% a year from April 1968 to July 2026 while US consumer prices compounded at 4.0%, so the metal beat inflation by 4.3 points a year over 58 years. It did that with two separate stretches of 20 years or more when it did not, which is why the horizon matters more than the average. LBMA monthly closes and BLS CPI-U, 1968 to 2026 |
| Money supply growth | r = 0.09 | Twelve-month M2 growth and gold's 12-month change barely move together across 688 windows since 1969, even though money printing is the argument most dealer landing pages open with. The relationship shows up over decades rather than years, and a page selling you metal this quarter is using it as a mood rather than as evidence. Federal Reserve H.6 M2 and LBMA monthly closes |
| The dealer premium | Quoted on the call | The spot price is what the metal trades at between banks, while the number you pay adds a dealer premium that almost nobody publishes on their site. On a $50,000 purchase the difference between a 3% and an 8% premium is $2,500, which is larger than most of the month-to-month moves this chart shows. Gold IRA Digest dealer pricing checks |
Most of this applies to silver as well, because the two metals have moved together closely enough that their monthly returns correlate at 0.71 across 700 months since 1968. What separates them is how hard silver moves rather than which direction it takes, so the silver price today usually tells a louder version of the story on this page, and the gold to silver ratio is the number that shows which of the two has run further.
The relationship that holds
A Treasury inflation-protected security pays a real yield, and gold pays nothing, so when that yield rises the cost of holding metal rises with it and the price tends to fall. That link shows up at -0.36 across 687 windows, which is meaningful without being a rule you could trade on month to month.
The one that does not
Money supply growth is the argument most dealer landing pages open with. At a 12-month horizon it correlates with gold's change at 0.09 across 688 windows. That is close enough to nothing that we publish the coefficient rather than leave the claim standing.
The historical record
Gold compounded at 8.5% a year across the whole 58 years, and almost none of the decades inside that record look anything like the average. Two of them lost money for ten years at a stretch, and the 1970s alone returned more than the other six combined.
Compound annual change, first close to last close of each decade
| Decade | Start | End | Months | A year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960s | $39.10 | $35.20 | 21 | -6.1% |
| 1970s | $34.99 | $512.00 | 120 | +31.1% |
| 1980s | $653.00 | $398.60 | 120 | -4.9% |
| 1990s | $415.05 | $290.25 | 120 | -3.5% |
| 2000s | $283.30 | $1,087.50 | 120 | +14.5% |
| 2010s | $1,078.50 | $1,514.75 | 120 | +3.5% |
| 2020s | $1,584.20 | $4,562.75 | 80 | +17.4% |
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz). Past performance does not predict future results
What we found in the data
We flagged every month in the 701-month record whose LBMA close finished above every close before it, which comes to 86 of them. Every record on this page is a month-end close rather than an intraday spike, so the January 1980 top reads as the $653.00 close rather than the $850 an ounce it touched on the 21st. We then measured what the price did over the following 6 and 12 months, and compared it with every month that was not a record. The result runs against the instinct that buying near a high is the expensive moment to buy.
A year after a record month the median change was 30.2%, against 4.2% from the 609 months that were not records. Of the 80 record months with a full year behind them, 65 finished higher. The six-month cut says the same thing at half the horizon, with a median of 12.8% after a record against 2.0% after everything else. Cutting the 1970s out of the sample entirely leaves 45 record months and a median of 25.5%, so the finding is not an artefact of one decade.
What this measures is momentum rather than value, and momentum turns. Those 80 windows are not 80 independent observations, because 80 of the 86 record months fall inside just four runs, including April 2007 to August 2011 and March 2023 to February 2026. A conditional return measured inside a trending series is partly measuring the trend, which is why the cut that drops the 1970s matters more than the headline number does. The worst year that ever followed a record was September 1980, which lost 35.7% over the following twelve months, and June 1980 lost 34.8%. Both sat inside the collapse that followed the January 1980 top, and anyone reading this table as a signal should read those two rows first.
Higher a year after a record
81%65 of 80 months
Higher after any other month
60%363 of 609 months
Median change after a record month, against every other month
| Record month | Close | 12 months on |
|---|---|---|
| September 1980 | $666.75 | -35.7% |
| June 1980 | $653.50 | -34.8% |
| November 1974 | $184.00 | -24.9% |
| December 1974 | $186.50 | -24.8% |
| January 1980 | $653.00 | -22.4% |
Where today sits
The live quote is 16.5% below the $5,222.30 record monthly close set in February 2026, and the question that follows is whether a reading that close to a high is unusual. Measured across all 701 monthly closes it is not unusual at all, because gold has finished 157 months within 5% of its running peak and 223 within 10%. Roughly a third of the record has been spent near a high.
Distance below the running peak at each monthly close
The dark bar is the band today's price falls into. The distribution has two clusters rather than a centre, because gold either grinds to new highs in a run or sits a long way underwater for years at a time. The 36% of months sitting 30% to 50% below a peak are almost entirely the two decades between 1980 and 2001.
The second half of this cut is what those starting positions were worth. Grouping every month by how far below the peak it began, then measuring the next twelve months, gives the same answer the record study gives from a different direction. That is what makes it worth publishing rather than a restatement of the first finding.
Median 12-month change, by how far below the peak the month started
Within 5% of a record
+26.2%Median 12 months on, 151 months, higher in 76% of them
5 to 20% below
+10.4%Median 12 months on, 134 months, higher in 72% of them
More than 20% below
+0.9%Median 12 months on, 404 months, higher in 53% of them
The deepest hole in the whole record is August 1999, which closed 61.8% below the September 1980 peak after two decades of European central banks selling reserves into the market. Someone who bought that peak at $666.75 waited until April 2007 to see their money back in nominal terms, and every record on this page is a nominal one, so the real wait ran longer again. Measured in constant dollars the January 1980 peak took 44 years and 9 months to recover, which our page on the gold price adjusted for inflation works through properly. Our gold price history page lists every decline past 20% since 1968 with the time each one took to come back, which is the depth this section deliberately stops short of.
Timeline
Eight dated events, each carrying the LBMA close for that month and the close twelve months later, so the story and the number cannot drift apart. Every price here is asserted against the committed series in a test rather than typed in from memory.
August 1971
Nixon closes the gold window
The United States stops converting dollars into gold at $35 an ounce, which ends the Bretton Woods system. Gold traded freely for the first time since 1934, closed August at $40.65, and spent the rest of the decade repricing against a dollar with no metal behind it.
December 1974
Americans are allowed to own bullion again
Public Law 93-373 took effect on 31 December 1974 and lifted the private ownership ban that Executive Order 6102 had imposed in 1933. The price had already run to $186.50 in anticipation, and everyone expecting a further surge from newly legal American buyers watched it fall by a quarter over the following year.
January 1980
The January 1980 inflation peak
Gold touched $850 intraday on 21 January 1980 and closed the month at $653 while US consumer prices were rising at 13.9% a year. The fed funds rate averaged 13.8% that month against inflation of 13.9%, so a saver was earning nothing in real terms, and it was only when Volcker pushed the rate past 19% in January 1981 that real yields turned positive and the metal began two decades of falling.
August 1999
The bottom of the 20-year bear market
August 1999 closed at $254.80, which is 61.8% below the 1980 peak and the deepest drawdown anywhere in this record. European central banks were selling reserves into the market until the Washington Agreement on Gold capped those sales the following month, and the price began a run that lasted 12 years.
August 2011
The post-crisis peak at $1,813
Gold closed August 2011 at $1,813.50 after the US credit rating downgrade and the first European debt crisis. It lost 9.1% over the following year and kept sliding to $1,060 by December 2015. Anyone who bought that month waited until July 2020 to see the price again, which is the case against treating a record as a guarantee.
August 2020
Covid takes gold through $1,900
The Federal Reserve had cut to zero and was buying Treasuries, which put the real 10-year yield on our measure at minus 0.6%, and gold closed August 2020 at $1,957.35. The metal then lost 12.3% over the following two years as nominal yields climbed back, which is the clearest single illustration of the real-rate mechanism on this page.
April 2025
Tariff shock takes gold to $3,302
Trade policy and central bank buying pushed gold to a $3,302.05 close in April 2025, up 43% on the $2,307 close a year earlier. The World Gold Council was reporting a third consecutive year of official-sector purchases above 1,000 tonnes. The metal added another 43% over the twelve months that followed.
February 2026
The record monthly close at $5,222
February 2026 closed at $5,222.30, the highest monthly close the LBMA record had produced up to that point, and March gave back 11.8% of it in a single month. That correction is the reason the last published close sits below the record while the live quote at the top of this page carries a later date than either of them.
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. An old note here is visible as an old note rather than passing for current thinking.
· latest
The question in our inbox every week is whether buying near a record is a mistake, and the record of monthly closes says the opposite of what people expect. Months that closed above every month before them were followed by a median 12-month gain of 30.2% against 4.2% from every other month. That is momentum rather than a promise, and the two worst outcomes in the whole study came from record months in 1980.
March 2026 took 11.8% off the price in one month and the coverage treated it as the top. Gold has spent 157 of its 701 months within 5% of a record close, which makes a correction of that size inside a run ordinary rather than a turn. Nothing in the drawdown record separates the two in advance.
Premiums on IRA-eligible one-ounce coins widened again through the second quarter while spot went sideways. The price a buyer actually paid rose even in the months this chart shows as flat. Check the quote against the spot figure at the top of this page before you sign anything.
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 means if you hold metal in an IRA
The figure at the top of this page is the interbank spot price, and it is not what you would pay. A dealer selling you an IRA-eligible bullion coin adds a premium over spot to cover minting, distribution, insurance and margin. On a $50,000 purchase the gap between a 3% premium and an 8% premium is $2,500. That is more than most of the month-to-month moves this page charts, and it is the number a self-directed IRA buyer has the most control over.
Everything after the purchase is a smaller number. A custodian charges an annual maintenance fee, and a depository charges a storage fee that depends on whether the metal is segregated or commingled. Both together usually run less per year than a single point of premium on the original order. Check the quote against the spot price above before you worry about anything else.
Spot, this page
$4,363.10Interbank price for one troy ounce, before any premium
Premium you would pay
3% to 8%Typical dealer range on IRA-eligible one-ounce gold coins
Purity an IRA requires
99.5%Section 408(m), with a statutory exemption for the American Gold Eagle
Common questions
How this page is built
The history is the LBMA London gold auction at monthly close, 701 observations in US dollars per troy ounce from April 1968 to August 2026. Those files are committed to this repository, so the build needs no network and produces the same page twice. The live quote is fetched while the site is being built and written into the HTML before any script runs, and every chart here is readable to an assistant that executes no JavaScript for the same reason.
Record months are months that closed above every month before them, and the first observation is excluded because it has nothing behind it to beat. Forward returns are simple price changes with no dealer premium, storage cost or tax applied, so a real outcome inside an IRA is worse than these figures by the size of the spread. Drawdowns are measured against the running peak of the same monthly series, and the real yield is the 10-year Treasury constant maturity minus trailing 12-month CPI.
Sources
Live spot checked on 11 September 2026, from the live spot market. The monthly series was last pulled from the LBMA on 9 September 2026. Full dataset available as the gold price CSV, with the running peak and the drawdown alongside the price. 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.