Live tracker · Precious metals
The gold to silver ratio is 67.6, which means one ounce of gold buys 67.6 ounces of silver at current spot prices, against a 50-year average of 63.7. The ratio has closed above 100 in only 3 of the 701 months since 1968, and all of those came after 2020.
Updated on every page load 701 monthly observations since April 1968
Ratio right now
Gold $4,363.10 and silver $64.50 per troy ounce.
Spot as of Sep 11, 2026, 12:39 PM EDT
Where that sits on 58 years
Live prices
Gold and silver spot, the ratio they make, and the three series that move it. Each card says what the number is doing and why a page about the ratio carries it.
Gold, spot
$4,363.10/oz+27.2% since Aug 2025
The numerator. Gold sets the level the ratio is measured from, and it moves on real rates and central bank demand.
Silver, spot
$64.50/oz+66.2% since Aug 2025
The denominator, and the volatile half. Roughly half of silver demand is industrial, which is why it behaves unlike gold in a downturn.
Gold to silver ratio
67.6-23.5% since Aug 2025
One number holding both. It rises when gold outruns silver and falls when silver catches up.
Real 10-year yield
1.45%as of 2026-07-31
Gold's opportunity cost. When a Treasury pays a positive real yield, holding metal that pays nothing costs more.
S&P 500
7,686+19.0% since Aug 2025
A proxy for the industrial cycle. Silver tracks factory demand in a way gold never has, so equity weakness usually widens the ratio.
Silver volatility, times gold
2.09xtrailing 10 years
Silver has run at 32% annualised against gold's 15%. That gap is the mechanism: the ratio widens in a sell-off and collapses in a rally without either metal doing anything strange.
Sources: LBMA fixes, Shiller and FRED for the S&P and CPI series, US Treasury for the 10-year, against the live spot market. Volatility is annualised from monthly log returns
The long record
Every monthly close since April 1968, against the 63.7 long-run average. Switch the range or turn on the recession shading, and hover any point to read it.
Gold price divided by silver price, monthly close
Today
67.6The dashed rule is the 63.7 average, which is the figure worth carrying rather than the 16 to 1 a dealer will quote you.
Source: LBMA Gold Price (PM London auction, USD/oz) and LBMA Silver Price (London auction, USD/oz). Live prices from the live spot market. Retrieved 2026-09-11
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Over the last 10 years silver has run at 32% annualised volatility against gold's 15%, which is 2.09 times as much. Nothing else on this page explains as much of the ratio's behaviour, because a number made of two prices moves mostly on whichever price moves more.
Annualised volatility of monthly returns, trailing 10 years
Why the gap exists
About half of silver demand is industrial, so it carries factory risk that gold does not, and the investable float left over once industry takes its share is small enough that a modest flow moves the price a long way.
What follows from it
The ratio widens when everything is being sold and narrows when everything is being bought, which makes it closer to a risk gauge than to a valuation of either metal, and explains why it spikes in recessions and collapses in manias.
Any two assets priced against each other read the same way, and ounces of gold per bitcoin is the same construction on a record 46 years shorter, which is why that page spends most of its length on what 11 years of overlap cannot settle.
Every US recession since 1969
Peak to trough, NBER dating, measured on the LBMA monthly closes at each end. The exception is 1981 to 1982, when the ratio was already falling out of the Hunt brothers collapse and a recession could not lift it.
| Recession | Start | Peak | End | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1969 to 1970 | 19.7 | 22.7 | 22.7 | +15.6% |
| 1973 to 1975 | 34.5 | 42.4 | 41.4 | +20.0% |
| 1980 | 18.5 | 39.1 | 38.9 | +110.3% |
| 1981 to 1982 | 47.7 | 55.4 | 45.7 | -4.2% |
| 1990 to 1991 | 76.7 | 98.6 | 92.7 | +20.9% |
| 2001 | 59.5 | 66.5 | 66.5 | +11.8% |
| 2008 to 2009 | 56.5 | 80.6 | 67.0 | +18.7% |
| 2020 | 93.7 | 115.5 | 111.0 | +18.5% |
Sources: NBER business cycle dating, LBMA monthly closes. Past performance does not predict future results
How to read it
Every gold dealer quotes the 16 to 1 ratio of the bimetallic era as if it were a gravitational constant, but that number held because governments fixed both metals by law rather than because the market chose it. Silver was demonetised in 1873 and the ratio never went back, so the useful reference is the distribution of the last 701 months rather than a figure from a monetary system nobody has used in 150 years.
Where the 701 monthly closes landed
32% of months, 223 of 701
Silver is expensive against gold, which was common before 1985 and has been rare since, though January 2026 touched 48.3 when a squeeze took silver to $103 an ounce in the space of two months.
52% of months, 368 of 701
This is the working range, and more than half of the last 58 years sits inside it, which is why a reading here tells you far less about what to buy than the premium a dealer quotes on the day does.
16% of months, 110 of 701
Gold is expensive against silver, and readings above 100 have happened in only 3 months out of 701, each time during a liquidity event rather than a change in what either metal is worth. The ratio fell back within a year on all of them.
What we found in the data
We sorted every month since 1968 by the ratio it started at, then measured what each metal did over the following twelve months. Above 85 silver's median gain was 25.9% against gold's 12.8%, and below 40 the order reverses. Between 40 and 70 the two are close enough that the ratio is telling you nothing worth acting on.
What it does not tell you is timing. The 1991 reading above 98 took years to unwind, and every band here contains months that went the other way. Sample sizes are on each bar.
Starting over 85, silver ahead in
47 of 66Starting under 40, silver ahead in
46 of 156Median 12-month return, by the ratio you started at
Long history
The 2000s broke the pattern and the 2020s resumed it. Anyone quoting a long-run average has to pick which era they mean, which is why we publish the window rather than a single number.
Every extreme since 1968
Six turning points, each with what the ratio did over the following year. The reversion is real. The timing is not something this table can give you.
| Month | Ratio | 12m later | What was happening |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 1979 | 15.9 | 38.0 | Hunt brothers cornered silver. The all-time low, and it more than doubled inside a year |
| February 1991 | 98.6 | 85.7 | Gulf War and a silver bear market. The slowest reversion in the record |
| April 2011 | 31.5 | 52.9 | Silver reached $48 and gave most of it back. Buying silver here was the wrong side |
| March 2020 | 115.5 | 70.5 | Covid liquidity event. The all-time high, unwound in twelve months |
| April 2025 | 102.5 | 62.7 | Tariff shock. Silver went from $32 to $103 over the nine months that followed |
| January 2026 | 48.3 | Not yet | Silver peaked at $103.19. Lowest ratio since 2012 and the reason it sits near average today |
Source: LBMA monthly closes. Past performance does not predict future results
Timeline
Every entry carries the ratio at that monthly close and where it stood six months later, so the story and the number cannot drift apart.
August 1971
Nixon closes the gold window
The dollar stops converting to gold at $35 an ounce and both metals begin trading freely for the first time since 1934. The ratio spends the rest of the decade finding a level with no government fixing it.
January 1980
The Hunt brothers corner silver
Two Texas oil heirs accumulate a third of the world's deliverable silver and drive it to $50 an ounce. The ratio hits 15.9 in December 1979, the lowest monthly close on record, then more than doubles once the exchange changes its margin rules and the corner collapses.
February 1991
Gulf War, and silver's long bear market
Gold holds near $363 while silver sits under $4, an eight-year low. The ratio reaches 98.6, and unlike every later spike it takes years rather than months to unwind. This is the case against treating reversion as a timing tool.
September 2008
Lehman fails
Both metals fall in the scramble for dollars, but silver falls further because industrial buyers stop ordering. The ratio moves less than the headlines imply at the monthly close, then widens to 80.6 by the following March.
April 2011
Silver reaches $48
A retail buying wave takes silver within a few percent of its 1980 high and the ratio down to 31.5. Silver gives back more than half of it inside a year, and the ratio is back above 50 within twelve months. Buying silver at a low ratio was the wrong side of this one.
March 2020
Covid liquidity event
Factories close, industrial silver demand stops, and everything liquid gets sold to raise dollars. The ratio reaches 115.5, the highest monthly close in the record, and is back under 80 within six months as the recovery trade takes hold.
April 2025
Tariff shock
Gold runs to $3,302 on trade and safe-haven demand while silver stalls near $32. The ratio touches 102.5, the third-highest close on record and the second above 100 since 2020.
January 2026
Silver squeezes to $103
Silver more than triples over nine months and closes January at $103.19. The ratio collapses to 48.3, its lowest since 2012, then settles back into the sixties over the following quarter. This is the reversion the 2025 reading implied, and it took nine months.
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 ratio has held between 60 and 70 since March, a 10-point band, after the six months before it ran 35 points wide. Nothing in the record has been narrower since the six-month window that closed in February 2025. After a run that carried the ratio from 102 in April 2025 down to 48 in January 2026, a quiet half-year is the more interesting fact. It usually means neither metal is being driven by anything except the other.
January's squeeze left silver premiums above gold's at every dealer we checked, and they have not come back down. If you are acting on a ratio near its average, that spread is the cost of acting, and it is larger on silver than the ratio move you are chasing.
Six months on from the squeeze, and reading the record as it stood that week, silver had given back about a third of the move. The 2025 reading above 100 resolved the way the historical record said it would, and it took nine months to do it, which is the part the record cannot tell you in advance.
Written by the Gold IRA Digest Editorial Team. Opinion, labelled as opinion, and never a recommendation to buy or sell either 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
Silver carries a higher premium over spot than gold does, because the same dollar buys far more coins and every coin costs the dealer the same to handle. On a $50,000 purchase the difference between a 5% and a 12% premium is $3,500, which is more than a decade of custodian and storage fees combined. A ratio sitting near its long-run average is not the thing that will decide your outcome. The quote will.
Ratio move you are chasing
6.2%Distance from the 50-year average today
Spread you would pay
5% to 12%Typical dealer premium range on IRA-eligible silver
Common questions
How this page is built
The ratio is gold divided by silver, both in US dollars per troy ounce. History uses the LBMA London fixes at monthly close, 701 observations from April 1968. The live figure is written into this page at build time, so the number is in the HTML before any script runs, then refreshed in your browser on load. Every chart is server rendered and works with JavaScript disabled, which is also why they are readable to the assistants that quote them.
Forward returns are simple price changes with no dealer spread, storage cost or tax applied, so real outcomes in an IRA are worse than these figures by the size of the spread. Recession windows use NBER peak-to-trough dating, and volatility is annualised from monthly log returns of the same LBMA series the chart draws from.
Sources
Full dataset available as CSV. 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.