Asian gold
Selling 22ct & Tola Gold in the UK: What Your Asian Gold Is Really Worth
If you've got a drawer full of 22ct bangles, a wedding set that's barely been out of its box, or a few tola coins tucked away for a rainy day, you're sitting on some of the most valuable scrap gold there is. Asian gold — the deep-yellow 22 carat pieces bought across the UK's South Asian and Middle Eastern communities — is worth noticeably more per gram than the 9ct chains most British high-street shops are used to buying. The trick is knowing your real number before anyone makes you an estimate, because that's what stops you being paid 9ct money for 22ct gold.
Why 22ct sells so close to its melt value
22 carat gold is 91.7% pure — a fineness of 0.9167, with just a small amount of alloy added for durability. That high purity matters when you sell. A refiner looking at a clean, clearly-marked 22ct bangle knows almost exactly what they're getting: easy to test, easy to melt, easy to refine, with very little waste. There's no guesswork and no expensive separation of odd alloys.
Because the risk and effort are low, the payout is high. Where a pawnbroker might offer 50–65% of melt on a mixed bag of tangled 9ct, a decent online mail-in refiner will often pay 85–90% on well-marked 22ct, and specialists sometimes more. The metal is doing the talking. So the single biggest factor in what you walk away with is picking a buyer who pays a fair percentage of melt — not one who quietly downgrades your carat.
The tola: getting the unit right
Plenty of Asian gold is bought and talked about in tolas rather than grams, especially coins and heavier pieces. One tola is 11.6638 grams. That's not a rounding you want to fudge, because a small error repeated across a whole set adds up to real money.
Here's a worked example. Say you have a 22ct coin sold as "1 tola". That's 11.6638 g of 22ct gold. The pure-gold content is 11.6638 × 0.9167 ≈ 10.69 g of fine gold. To get a per-gram melt figure you take the spot price, divide by 31.1035 (the grams in a troy ounce), and multiply by the fineness. Watch that number: a troy ounce is 31.1035 g, not the 28.35 g avoirdupois ounce used for food and post. Mixing the two up understates your gold by nearly a tenth, and it's a mistake — or a trick — worth catching.
Valuing sets, bangles and coins piece by piece
A wedding set isn't one lump of gold — it's a collection, and it should be valued as one. Weigh and value each item on its own, then add them up. This matters because not everything in a "22ct" set is actually 22ct. Clasps, safety chains and screw fittings are sometimes a lower carat, and mixing them in can drag a lazy valuation down. Keep like with like.
- Bangles: usually solid and consistent — weigh each, they're often your heaviest pieces.
- Necklace-and-earring sets: value each component; earrings may have lower-carat posts.
- Coins: confirm the carat and whether they're sold by tola or gram, and check if any are collectable rather than pure scrap.
A typical 5–6 tola wedding set lands somewhere around 58–70 grams of gold. At 22ct that's a substantial sum, so it's worth the ten minutes to weigh each piece properly on decent scales rather than accepting a single eyeballed figure for the lot.
What gets deducted — and what never comes back
Two things reduce what a scrap buyer pays, and it helps to expect them. First, stones. Any gemstones, kundan work, or enamel are not gold, so their weight is deducted. If a piece has meaningful diamonds or genuine antique value, don't scrap it at all — get it appraised separately first, because you may be throwing away money selling it by weight.
Second, and this catches a lot of people out: the making and labour charges you paid at the counter never come back on a scrap sale. When you bought that bangle, a big chunk of the price was craftsmanship — the intricate work, the design, the retailer's margin. A refiner is buying metal, not artistry. They pay for the gold content and nothing else. That's not a con; it's simply the difference between retail jewellery and scrap value. It's also the strongest reason to sell heirloom or beautifully-made pieces to a jeweller or private buyer who'll pay for the craft, and only scrap the plain, broken or unwanted items.
Getting the best price on your Asian gold
Put simply: your 22ct gold is clean, high-purity, and easy to sell, which means you should be paid near the top of the range — not fobbed off with a rate meant for tangled 9ct. Get everything weighed piece by piece, keep the carats separated, know your melt value going in, and treat any "offer" that ignores your number with suspicion. If part of the value is in stones or craftsmanship, protect that by selling those pieces differently.
Before you hand anything over, it's also worth understanding the tax side — most people selling personal jewellery won't owe anything, but it pays to check where you stand, especially with larger sets or coins. Our guide on how much gold you can sell without tax in the UK covers the chattels exemption and legal-tender coins. And if you want to sanity-check the per-gram figures for each carat, the breakdown in gold price per gram by carat shows exactly how 22ct compares to 18ct and 9ct. Know your number first, and your Asian gold will pay what it's genuinely worth.
All figures are estimates of melt value, never offers. Not financial or tax advice.