Precious Metals Guide

If you've inherited a drawer of jewelry, found a coin tin in the attic, pulled the gold pins from a stack of dead motherboards, or you're staring at a bag of sterling flatware wondering if it's worth more than the box it's in — this hub is for you. Precious metals are their own corner of the scrap world: tighter spreads, different units, different buyers, and enough room for a first-time seller to leave 20% of the value on the counter if they walk in cold.

The four categories below cover the whole arc — what makes a metal "precious," how purity ladders work, who actually buys, and what moves the headline number. For today's live spot, the gold price and silver price pillars carry the per-troy-ounce ticker plus the karat-by-karat refiner-payout math. A 14K wedding band in a $2,500/toz gold market is roughly $1,000 of recoverable metal; the gap between that number and what you actually get paid is what the rest of this hub is about.

Why precious metals are a different game from scrap

Walk into a scrap yard with copper pipe and you'll get paid by the pound off a posted board, with grade-driven discounts that take a 60–90% chunk of spot. Walk into a coin shop with a sterling tea set and the math changes in every direction at once. The unit is a troy ounce — about 9% heavier than the regular avoirdupois ounce on your kitchen scale — and the entire industry, from the LBMA fix in London to the buyback prices on bullion-dealer websites, quotes per troy ounce in USD.

The buyer changes too. Industrial scrap flows yard → processor → mill. Precious metals flow seller → coin shop or refiner → recovery → bullion bank or jeweler. The stops are fewer, the margins are tighter, and the payout factor sits in the 80–98% range for clean material going to a reputable refiner — versus 60–90% for industrial scrap. Refiners can run a slimmer spread because their per-ounce dollar value is high enough that a 2% margin still covers the assay, the loss in melt, and the carry.

The third difference is what determines the payout. Scrap yards grade on shape, alloy, and contamination. Refiners grade on fineness — the fraction of pure metal, expressed as karat (10K, 14K, 18K, 24K) for gold or as a thousandths mark (925 for sterling, 999 for fine silver) for silver. The number of nines on the stamp drives almost every dollar of the offer. A clean 18K class ring (75% pure gold) and a 10K class ring (41.7% pure gold) of the same weight are paid wildly different numbers off the same spot. Sort before you sell — see the karat and hallmark walkthrough for the identification details.

How this guide is organized

Each category answers a different stage of the question "what do I have, and what's it actually worth?" If you're brand new and not sure what's even precious in the pile, start with Basics. If you know the karat marks and just need to find a buyer, jump to Refining & Selling.

If your pile is inherited jewelry, the highest-leverage read is grades and purity — most of the value-or-not call is in the karat stamp and the magnet test. If your pile is a sort of unknown items — coins mixed with costume jewelry mixed with maybe-sterling flatware — start with basics and the identification tests before you waste a trip. If you're holding bullion or recognized coins (American Eagles, Maples, Krugerrands), market and spot is where the premium-vs-spot conversation lives — and it's a conversation, not a fixed number.

What you actually sell precious metals to

Five buyer types cover almost every transaction. Each makes sense in a different range and pays a different fraction of spot.

• Local coin shops — the default for jewelry, sterling, and recognized coins under about $1,000 of melt value. Cash same day (or check over a state-mandated threshold), payouts typically 80–92% of spot equivalent for clean karat gold and sterling. The trade-off is a slightly thinner number than mail-in for the convenience of walking out paid. Call two or three before driving — intra-metro spreads of 5–10% are normal.
• Mail-in refiners — the right call for any lot worth more than about $5k. Pay 92–98% of spot for clean material once the assay clears, but you wait 5–14 days and you're trusting the chain of custody on insured shipping. Reputable refiners post their fee schedule and assay turnaround up front; if those numbers aren't on the site, find a different refiner.
• Jewelers — pay best for wearable pieces with resale value (designer signed work, branded watches, antique pieces in original condition). For pure scrap karat gold without a story, jewelers usually pay scrap-equivalent or a touch under because they're not in the recovery business; they're in the resale business.
• Pawn shops — generally don't. Pawn shops are built around collateralized loans, not melt-value buying. Their offers on jewelry typically run 40–65% of spot equivalent because their model assumes you might not redeem. Use them for emergency cash, not for fair-value selling.
• Online bullion dealers (APMEX, JM Bullion, Money Metals, Kitco) — the best lane for recognized bullion coins and bars. Live buyback quotes posted on the site, ship-and-pay flow, 95–99% of spot for American Eagles or Maples in good condition. Less competitive on raw scrap karat or sterling — that's a refiner's job, not a bullion dealer's.

The refining and selling category walks through how to vet each one — what credentials to ask for, what a fair fee schedule looks like, and where the red flags live.

Industrial scrap vs. precious metals — side by side

The cleanest way to see the gap is in a table. The same person can sell both lanes — copper one weekend, grandma's silver the next — but the playbook is not transferable.

The in-between cases are real and they confuse first-time sellers. Catalytic converters carry platinum, palladium, and rhodium but sell through a specialized auto-recycler channel, not a coin shop or a regular yard — see the auto-recycling category. Electronics scrap — circuit boards, gold-plated pins, RAM fingers — has trace gold but the recovery economics only work at volume; the e-waste category covers when it's worth pulling out and when it's just a yard load.

Where this hub fits in the wider site

For live numbers, the two precious-metal pricing pillars carry the spot ticker and the karat-by-karat math: today's gold price and today's silver price. The four industrial pricing pillars — copper, aluminum, brass, and stainless steel — handle the per-pound conversation if your pile is mixed with non-precious metal.

The sibling guide silos pick up where this one stops. The selling guide covers the cross-cutting practical side — documentation, ID requirements, taxation, logistics — that applies whether you're selling copper or gold. The industry guide is where refiner profiles and buyer-side macro context will live as we expand. The auto-recycling guide is the right read for catalytic converters and any precious-metal content trapped in vehicles. The e-waste guide covers the electronics side — when gold-plated scrap is worth pulling and when it's just landfill diversion. And the scrap guide is the seller's map for the industrial side, useful when your inheritance includes both grandma's sterling and grandpa's pile of copper.

Frequently asked questions