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Pawnbroker vs Gold Dealer vs Online Buyer: Who Pays the Most in the UK?
You've got gold to sell, and the same pile can fetch wildly different sums depending on who you take it to. The high-street shop that's quick and easy is almost always the one that pays least. So where does your gold actually get the best price in the UK? Let's compare the four main routes head to head.
The four routes at a glance
Every offer you get should be judged as a percentage of your item's melt value, the raw worth of its pure gold content at today's spot price. Here's how the main buyer types typically stack up:
| Route | Typical payout (% of melt) | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Pawnbroker | ~50–70% | Fast cash, or a loan when you want the item back |
| High-street / cash-for-gold | ~50–70% | Speed and convenience on small amounts |
| Online mail-in refiner | ~85–90% | Most scrap jewellery, best balance of price and effort |
| Specialist bullion dealer | ~90%+ | Larger lots, coins and bars, top price |
Before you weigh up any of them, get your melt value from our gold calculator so you know the ceiling every offer is being measured against.
Pawnbrokers
Pawnbrokers offer two things: an outright sale, or a loan against your gold that lets you buy it back later. If you only need cash and never want the item again, the sale price is what matters, and it usually lands in the 50–70% range. The loan option is genuinely useful if the piece has sentimental value and you expect to redeem it, but you'll pay interest for the privilege, and if you can't repay, the pawnbroker keeps the item. For a straight sale of scrap, pawnbrokers rarely beat a good online refiner. They're a convenience play: quick, local, no posting, no waiting for a cheque, but you pay for that convenience in a lower percentage. If you go this route, it still pays to know your melt value first, because a pawnbroker's opening figure is exactly that, an opening figure, and there's often room to push it up.
High-street cash-for-gold shops
These are the shops with "we buy gold" in the window and the ones that send you a freepost envelope with a pre-printed cheque. Some are perfectly fair; many rely on customers not knowing their melt value. This is the route where the horror stories come from, gold worth hundreds valued at a fraction of it. There's more on exactly why that happens in our piece on what dealers actually pay. If you use one, know your melt value first and never accept a single lump-sum figure without an itemised breakdown.
Online mail-in refiners
For most people with scrap jewellery, this is the sweet spot. Online refiners typically pay 85–90% of melt, and it's worth understanding why they can pay so much more than the shop down the road:
- Refinery scale. They process huge volumes, so the fixed costs of assaying and refining are spread thin across every gram.
- Low overheads. No prime-location shopfront, no high-street rent, fewer staff. Those savings can go into your payout instead.
- Published rates. The reputable ones list exactly what they pay per gram, per carat, on their website, so you can compare before you commit.
- Insured, returnable parcels. You post your gold in a fully insured, tracked pack, and if you don't like the quote, they return it, also insured.
The trade-off is you wait a few days and you're trusting the post, so only ever use a buyer offering genuinely insured, tracked delivery both ways. Done right, this route consistently beats the high street by a wide margin.
Specialist bullion dealers
If you've got larger quantities, investment coins or bars, a specialist bullion dealer is often the top payer, 90%+ of melt, and legal-tender coins like Sovereigns and Britannias can sell near spot because they're traded as investment products, not melted down. Bullion dealers know exactly what they're handling and price accordingly. For a bag of mixed broken jewellery they may be less interested, but for anything coin-shaped or bar-shaped, or a substantial weight of scrap, they're well worth a quote.
How to compare offers fairly
The trick that ties all of this together is to convert every single offer into a percentage of melt. A shop quoting "£540" and a refiner quoting "£792" mean nothing until you know both are for gold with an £900 melt value, at which point it's obvious one is paying 60% and the other 88%. Here's your comparison routine:
- Get your melt value first, sorted by carat.
- Ask every buyer for a written, itemised quote: price per gram, per carat.
- Divide each total by your melt value to get the payout percentage.
- Sell to the highest percentage from a buyer you trust, not the one who's simply nearest.
Anything meaningfully below 80% for scrap jewellery means you can almost certainly do better. The reason so many people accept less is covered in our explainer on spot price vs realistic payout, which is worth a read before you sell.
There's no single "best place to sell gold" that suits everyone, but there is a best method: know your melt value, get itemised quotes from more than one buyer, compare them as percentages, and refuse to pay a convenience premium you didn't mean to. Do that, and whichever route you choose, you'll walk away knowing you got a genuinely fair share of what your gold is worth.
All figures are estimates of melt value, never offers. Not financial or tax advice.