Live tracker · Precious metals
The silver spot price is $64.50 an ounce as of 11 September 2026, 37.5% below the record $103.19 close of January 2026. In the 49 months since 1968 when the S&P 500 fell more than 5%, gold averaged 0.0% and silver -2.2%, so silver does part of gold's crisis job and charges more for it. Live spot is written in at build time and refreshed when you load the page, and the history comes from the LBMA London fixes.
Quoted by the live spot market 704 monthly closes since January 1968
Silver spot, US dollars per troy ounce
the live spot market, retrieved 2026-09-11. One troy ounce is 31.103 grams
Where that sits on 59 years of monthly closes
Live prices
6 readings, each carrying the date of the number it holds. The live quote and the LBMA closes come from different days and different sources, so any card comparing one against the other says which two dates it used rather than leaving you to assume they match.
Silver, spot
$64.50/oz+66.2% since the Aug 2025 close of $38.80
The live number, fetched when this page was built and written straight into the HTML. Silver trades around the clock, so a quote is only ever as good as the timestamp beside it.
12-month range of monthly closes
$46.18 to $103.19Sep 2025 to Aug 2026 LBMA closes
Silver ran 2.2 times its own low inside this window, which is why a single 52-week band says almost nothing about where the price belongs. The low came in Sep 2025 and the high in Jan 2026.
Against the record close
-37.5%record $103.19 on 31 January 2026
Silver closed at $103.19 in January 2026, the highest month in the record. The $35.52 it reached at the top of the Hunt brothers corner in February 1980 then took until March 2011 to beat, which is 31 years and the longest any high has stood in this series.
Year to date
-10.4%against the 31 December 2025 close of $71.99
A live quote measured against a published year-end close, which are two different days from two different sources. The comparison is honest as long as the page says that out loud.
Latest LBMA monthly close
$70.26/oz31 August 2026, the last published fix in our series
The auditable half of this page. Every historical figure on it is measured from the LBMA London fixes rather than from the live feed, and the fixes run four months behind today.
Silver volatility, times gold
2.09xthe trailing 120 months of LBMA closes to Aug 2026
Silver has run at 31.9% annualised against gold's 15.3% over the last 10 years. That gap is the reason a silver position behaves like a leveraged version of a gold one rather than like a cheaper version of it.
Sources: LBMA monthly fixes for the history and the live spot market for the live quote, retrieved 2026-09-11. Volatility is annualised from monthly log returns
The long record
Every monthly close since January 1968 on a logarithmic axis, because a series running from $1.31 to $103.19 renders its first 30 years as a flat line on any other scale. The dashed rule is the $35.52 peak of February 1980, which silver spent 31 years underneath.
LBMA silver price, monthly close, US dollars per troy ounce
Live spot
$64.50Turn on the recession shading to see the pattern the rest of this page quantifies. Silver falls into US downturns in a way gold does not, because a recession takes away the factories behind 58% of silver demand, a share gold has never had.
Source: LBMA Silver Price (London auction, USD/oz), refreshed 2026-09-09. Recession dating from the NBER business cycle committee
Download the silver price CSVDrivers
Silver is the only precious metal that is also a bulk industrial input, and almost everything unusual about its price comes from that one fact. Gold is bought to be held and silver is bought to be used up, which puts a manufacturing cycle underneath a monetary asset and gives the price two engines that do not always pull in the same direction.
| Driver | Weight | How it works | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial demand | 58% of 2025 demand | Solar cells, electrical contacts, brazing alloys and electronics consume silver and do not give it back, so a manufacturing slowdown removes buyers that gold never had in the first place. | Solar installation forecasts, semiconductor and vehicle production, and the manufacturing PMI in China and the United States. |
| Byproduct supply | 74% of 2025 mine output | Roughly three quarters of mined silver comes out of lead, zinc, copper and gold operations that are not run for silver, which means a higher silver price barely changes how much gets produced. | Base metal capital spending, because new silver supply mostly arrives as a side effect of somebody else's zinc mine. |
| The investment bid | The swing factor | Coin, bar and ETF buying is the part of demand that can double in a quarter, and it lands on a float that industry has already spent most of, which is how a modest flow of money produces a move like January 2026. | ETF holdings, COMEX registered inventory, and the premium dealers charge over spot on retail coins. |
| Real yields and the dollar | Shared with gold | Silver pays no income, so a positive real yield on a Treasury raises the cost of holding it in exactly the way it does for gold. This is the monetary half of the metal. | The 10-year Treasury yield against trailing CPI, and the Federal Reserve dot plot rather than the rate decision itself. |
| The gold price | 0.71 correlation since 1968 | Silver's monthly moves track gold's more closely than they track anything else we have tested, at a beta above one, so most of what happens to silver on a given day is gold happening harder. | The gold price itself, and the gold to silver ratio when you want the relationship expressed as one number. |
Demand and supply shares from the Silver Institute World Silver Survey 2026, published April 2026. Correlation computed on this page from LBMA monthly closes
Of those 5 inputs the gold price explains most of any given day, because silver's monthly returns correlate 0.71 with gold's at a beta above one and nothing else we have tested comes close. If the question underneath your search is really about the metal on the other side of that number, the gold price today tracker carries the live gold quote, what moved it, and whether buying near a record has historically been a mistake.
Why supply cannot answer a price spike
Only 26% of the silver mined in 2025 came from mines run for silver, with the rest arriving as a byproduct of lead, zinc, copper and gold operations whose owners size production against those metals instead. A silver price that triples therefore does almost nothing to bring new supply forward, which is why a squeeze in silver resolves through the price rather than through the mines.
Where the ratio fits
The gold to silver ratio compresses both metals into one number and stands at 67.6 on the quote at the top of this page. It is a useful shorthand and a poor timing tool, and the gold to silver ratio tracker takes it apart properly instead of repeating a shortened version here.
What we found in the data
Silver behaves like a leveraged version of gold rather than a cheaper one, and the record puts numbers on that instead of adjectives. Across all 701 months since April 1968 silver has run at 32.9% annualised volatility against gold's 19.0%. The multiple has widened rather than settled, at 2.14 times over the last five years against 1.74 times across the whole record.
Annualised volatility of monthly log returns, four windows
Every window we tested puts silver above gold, and the shorter the window the wider the gap, which matters because a reader sizing a position today is living in the short window rather than in the 59-year average.
Silver and gold from April 1968, both rebased to 100
Dollars per ounce cannot share an axis here, because gold has never traded below silver and the silver line would sit flat on the floor for the whole 59 years. Both series are rebased so April 1968 reads 100, which puts the shape of each path in view. Gold finishes at 117 times its starting price and silver at 29 times, so the metal that moves harder is also the one that has compounded less over the full record. Annualised, that is 6.3% a year for silver against 8.5% for gold since 1968.
The part that decides outcomes
Silver fell 90.0% from $35.52 in February 1980 to $3.57 in February 1993, and it took 31 years to get back to the old price without adjusting for inflation. Gold's deepest fall over the same 59 years was 61.8%, from September 1980 to August 1999, and it took 27 years to recover. Both are bad, and only one of them wipes out nine tenths of a position.
In the typical month gold loses ground silver loses more, though not dramatically more. Across the 320 months gold closed lower, gold's median fall was 2.5% and silver's was 3.4%, which is a multiple of 1.37. The damage is concentrated in the tail rather than spread across ordinary months, which is exactly why a volatility figure of 32.9% understates how a silver position actually feels to hold.
Silver's deepest drawdown
-90.0%February 1980 to February 1993
Gold's deepest drawdown
-61.8%September 1980 to August 1999
Months moving more than 10%
130 to 51Silver against gold, out of 700 months. At 15% the split is 56 to 16
What we found in the data
Both, and the split is smaller than the demand figures suggest. Across all 700 months since April 1968 silver's monthly returns correlate 0.71 with gold and only 0.18 with the S&P 500, against gold's 0.04. The monetary link dominates in every decade we tested. The industrial link shows up as a small, stubborn premium over gold rather than as the second personality the 58% demand share implies.
Correlation of monthly returns to the S&P 500, by decade
Silver's equity correlation exceeded gold's in all 6 decades with enough data to test. The margin runs from 0.07 in the 1970s to 0.20 in the 1990s, which is the industrial half showing through consistently enough that we would not call it noise. The effect stays small, though, because silver's own equity correlation never once reached 0.33 while its correlation to gold sat between 0.58 and 0.79 in every decade we tested.
What we were looking for was silver switching between an industrial regime and a monetary one, with some decades reading like copper and others like gold, and the table does not show it. Even in the decade where the two links sit closest together the gold link runs 2.3 times the equity link, so the industrial half of silver reads as a persistent tilt rather than as a second mode the metal moves into. That is a null result on the more interesting hypothesis, and it is worth saying plainly, because the demand split invites a story about regimes that the price series does not support.
| Decade | Months | Silver to gold | Silver to S&P | Gold to S&P | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1970s | 120 | 0.65 | 0.04 | -0.03 | +0.07 |
| 1980s | 120 | 0.74 | 0.26 | 0.13 | +0.13 |
| 1990s | 120 | 0.58 | 0.09 | -0.11 | +0.20 |
| 2000s | 120 | 0.75 | 0.23 | 0.15 | +0.08 |
| 2010s | 120 | 0.79 | 0.15 | -0.01 | +0.16 |
| 2020s | 80 | 0.74 | 0.32 | 0.13 | +0.19 |
Sources: LBMA monthly fixes and the Shiller S&P Composite series spliced to FRED. The two sides use different conventions: the metal figures are a single fix on the last trading day while the index is a monthly average of daily closes up to September 2016, which carries about half a month of lag and biases any correlation between them slightly toward zero. Decades with fewer than 24 months are excluded, which drops the partial 1960s
Average monthly change in the 49 months the S&P 500 fell more than 5%
The decade correlations understate the thing a holder actually cares about, so we cut the record a second way and looked only at the 49 months since 1968 in which the S&P 500 fell more than 5%. Those months averaged -7.9% on the index, 0.0% on gold and -2.2% on silver. Gold finished higher in 24 of them and silver in 21, so the two metals point the same way about as often and simply travel different distances when they do. The worst of those months was October 2008, when the index fell 20.4%, gold fell 17.4% and silver fell 28.4%.
What follows for anyone holding metal as a hedge is that silver does part of gold's job and charges more for it. If the reason for owning either is what happens in the quarter equities fall apart, this table is the argument for gold carrying that role and silver being sized as the growth position it actually behaves like. Our gold vs the S&P 500 tracker takes the equity comparison further, across every rolling 10-year window rather than the single months isolated here.
Long history
Silver has produced two enormous decades and three flat ones. That is the return profile of a small market that occasionally attracts a lot of money, rather than of an asset compounding steadily. Anyone quoting a long-run figure has to say which era they mean, so this table publishes the window instead of a single number.
| Decade | Start | End | Low | High | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960s | $1.96 | $1.79 | $1.56 | $2.50 | -4.4% |
| 1970s | $1.91 | $32.20 | $1.31 | $32.20 | +32.6% |
| 1980s | $35.28 | $5.22 | $5.05 | $35.52 | -17.4% |
| 1990s | $5.21 | $5.33 | $3.57 | $6.37 | +0.2% |
| 2000s | $5.26 | $16.99 | $4.14 | $19.62 | +12.4% |
| 2010s | $16.29 | $18.05 | $13.82 | $48.70 | +1.0% |
| 2020s | $17.89 | $70.26 | $13.93 | $103.19 | +22.8% |
Source: LBMA monthly closes. The 1960s cover 24 months and the 2020s 80 so far. Past performance does not predict future results
Gold ran the same decades to a different rhythm, and this page stops at silver rather than setting the two records side by side, because gold price history already covers every decline over 20% since 1968 and how long each one took to recover.
Timeline
9 dated events, each carrying the close it produced, the move that month and where silver stood a year later, so the story and the number cannot drift apart.
June 1968
The Treasury stops redeeming silver certificates
Redemption of silver certificates for bullion ended on 24 June 1968, which closed the last formal link between the dollar and silver and left the price to the market for the first time since the 1930s. Silver finished the month at $2.50 and then spent three years falling, reaching the lowest close in this entire record in October 1971.
December 1979
The Hunt brothers corner the silver market
Nelson and William Hunt spent 1979 accumulating a third of the world's deliverable silver, and the December close of $32.20 came after a 69.5% gain inside a single month. That remains the largest one-month rise in the 700-month record, and no month since has come within twenty points of it.
March 1980
Silver Thursday and the collapse of the corner
The exchanges raised margin requirements, the Hunts failed to meet a call on 27 March 1980, and silver closed the month at $13.49 after losing 62.0% of its value. Gold fell 22.4% over the same weeks, which is the clearest single illustration on this page of what the extra volatility actually costs when a position goes wrong.
February 1993
Silver bottoms at $3.57 after a 13-year decline
The February 1993 close of $3.57 sat 90.0% below the February 1980 peak and arrived 13 years after it, which is the deepest drawdown either metal has recorded since the market was freed. Anyone holding from the top waited until March 2011 to get their money back in nominal terms, and inflation over those 31 years leaves that recovery well short of whole.
October 2008
Industrial demand stops in the credit freeze
Manufacturers stopped ordering as credit markets seized in October 2008, and silver fell 28.4% while gold fell 17.4% and the S&P 500 fell 20.4%. Silver traded like an industrial commodity that month rather than like money, which is the distinction the second study on this page measures across the whole record.
April 2011
Silver reaches $48.70 on a retail buying wave
A wave of retail and ETF buying carried silver to $48.70 at the end of April 2011, within a few percent of the 1980 high, before it gave back 29.7% over the following six months. The price did not close above that level again until October 2025, which is 14 and a half years of waiting for anyone who bought the top.
March 2020
Factories close and silver falls to $13.93
Industrial demand stopped almost overnight when factories shut in March 2020, and silver closed at $13.93 after falling 18.9% while gold finished the month effectively unchanged. Silver then rose 72.3% over the following twelve months as the recovery trade took hold, which is the same asymmetry running in the other direction.
February 2021
The Reddit silver squeeze fades inside a quarter
A retail campaign organised on Reddit pushed silver sharply higher in the first days of February 2021, and the month still closed at $26.69 with most of the move already gone. Six months later the price sat at $24.05. That is what a squeeze looks like when buying pressure arrives without any change in what the metal is worth to the people who use it.
January 2026
Silver closes January 2026 at a record $103.19
Silver gained 43.3% in January 2026 alone, closing at $103.19 after a run that had taken it from $38.80 the previous August. That close beat the $48.70 of April 2011 and every other month in the series, and the snapshot at the top of this page measures the live price against it rather than against anything written here.
Our view
Every entry below carries the day it was written. A tracker with one undated opinion sitting under live data is the failure mode this page was built to avoid, so an old note here reads as an old note instead of passing for current thinking.
· latest
Silver has spent five months between roughly $65 and $80 after January took it to $103.19, which is the first quiet stretch since the run began in the middle of last year. The level matters less than the fact that silver has held on to more than half of a move most people read as a squeeze.
Retail premiums on IRA-eligible silver coins have not come back down since January, and at every dealer we checked they still sit above where they were a year ago. On a $50,000 purchase the gap between a 6% and a 15% premium is $4,500, which is larger than most of the price moves people are trying to time.
Six months on from the record, silver has given back a bit over a quarter of the January close while gold has held most of its own gain. That divergence is the ordinary behaviour of the two metals rather than a signal about either, and the volatility study further up this page is the reason to expect it.
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
Silver carries a much higher premium over spot than gold does, because the same dollar buys far more coins and each one costs the dealer the same to store, insure and ship. On a $50,000 purchase the difference between a 6% and a 15% premium is $4,500, which is larger than most of the price moves anyone is trying to time and larger than a decade of custodian fees. Before the spot price on this page matters to your account, that number has to be settled.
Ounces per $10,000 at spot
155Before any premium, at $64.50 an ounce
Typical premium range
6% to 20%IRA-eligible silver, bar at the low end and single coins at the high end
Minimum fineness for an IRA
0.999Set by section 408(m), with the American Silver Eagle exempted by statute
Common questions
How this page is built
History uses the LBMA London silver fixes at monthly close, which is 704 observations from January 1968 to August 2026. The live figure is written into this page at build time, so the number sits in the HTML before any script runs, and it is refreshed from the same source when you load the page. Every chart is server rendered and stays readable with JavaScript turned off. Correlation and volatility use monthly log returns, while the changes printed on the cards use simple percentage changes so a reader can check one against a price table.
The monthly series ends 31 August 2026 while the live quote carries today's date. Every period change is measured against the closest published close and labelled with the month it actually used. Drawdowns are peak to trough on monthly closes and are not adjusted for inflation, which makes every recovery on this page look faster than it was in purchasing power.
Sources
The full dataset is available as a silver price CSV, and our methodology covers how every figure here is checked. Corrections go to the editorial team and are logged publicly.
Gold IRA Digest is an independent publisher. This page is information rather than 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.