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What Dealers Actually Pay for Scrap Gold (vs What Calculators Show)
You've weighed your old chains and broken earrings, run the numbers, and a figure like £672 flashes up. Lovely. Then you walk into a shop and get offered £242 for the same pile. What happened? The gap between the number a calculator shows and the cash a buyer hands over is the single most misunderstood thing about selling gold in Britain, and understanding it is the difference between a fair deal and a fleecing.
Melt value is the ceiling, not the offer
Every honest gold calculator, ours included, shows you the melt value: the raw worth of the pure gold in your item at today's spot price. It's a real, useful number, but it's the theoretical maximum, not a quote. Nobody pays 100% of melt for scrap, because the person buying it has to turn your tangled jewellery back into saleable pure metal, and that costs money and carries risk.
Think of melt value the way you'd think of the "book price" of a used car. It tells you roughly where you stand and stops you being lowballed into oblivion. But the actual money always sits somewhere below it. When you use our gold calculator, treat the result as your anchor: the top of the range you should be aiming for, and the figure every buyer's offer should be measured against.
Why refiners pay a percentage
The discount off melt isn't pure greed. Several genuine costs sit between your ring and a bar of investment-grade gold:
- Assay. The buyer has to verify what's actually in your item. A "9ct" stamp is a good guide, but plating, solder joints and mixed lots all need testing before anyone commits real cash.
- Refining. Melting mixed scrap and separating out pure gold is an industrial process with a real per-batch cost.
- Price risk. Gold moves every second. A buyer who quotes you today carries the risk the spot price drops before they've sold on.
- Margin. Like any business, they need to make something. That's fair; the question is only how much.
Stack those together and you get the discount off melt. The key point: those costs are broadly fixed, so a buyer processing tonnes of scrap can absorb them across a huge volume and still pay you well. A back-street shop buying a few grams a week can't, so they protect themselves by paying you less.
The 50–92% spread, by buyer type
Where your offer lands depends almost entirely on who you sell to. As a rough guide to what UK buyers pay as a percentage of melt value:
| Buyer type | Typical payout (% of melt) |
|---|---|
| Pawnbroker / high-street cash-for-gold | ~50–70% |
| Online mail-in refiner | ~85–90% |
| Specialist bullion dealer | ~90%+ |
| Legal-tender bullion coins (Sovereigns, Britannias) | Near spot |
That's a spread of roughly 50% to 92% for the exact same gram of gold. It's not marginal. On a decent-sized lot, choosing the right route can literally double your money. There's more detail on this in our breakdown of the pawnbroker vs dealer vs online routes, but the headline is simple: convenience is expensive, and the buyers who pay most are usually the ones you post to, not the ones on the high street.
A worked example
Say you've got 40 grams of 9ct gold jewellery. Nine-carat is 0.375 pure. With a spot price of, for the sake of the maths, £60 per gram of pure gold, your melt value is:
40 g × 0.375 × £60 = £900 melt value.
Now watch what the buyer type does to your payout:
- High-street shop at 60%: £540
- Online mail-in refiner at 88%: £792
- Specialist dealer at 92%: £828
Same gold, same day, a £288 difference between the worst and best route. The metal didn't change. Only your choice of buyer did. This is exactly why the melt figure matters so much: without it, you'd have no way of knowing that £540 was a poor deal dressed up as a generous one. For a fuller explanation of why the payout always trails the headline number, read our piece on spot price vs realistic payout.
How to reach the top of the range
Getting 90% instead of 55% isn't luck. It comes down to a few disciplined habits:
- Sort by carat first. Never let a buyer weigh your 18ct and 9ct together and pay the lower rate on the lot. Separate 9ct, 14ct, 18ct and 22ct into piles and get each priced on its own merits.
- Compare at least two mail-in refiners' published per-gram rates. Reputable online buyers publish what they pay per gram, per carat, right on their site. Line up two or three and you'll quickly see who's serious.
- Insist on a written, itemised quote. A legitimate buyer will tell you the weight, the carat, the price per gram and the total in writing. If someone waves a single lump-sum figure at you and won't break it down, walk away.
- Know your melt value before you talk to anyone. Walk in armed. When you already know the ceiling, a 55% offer is obvious the moment it's made.
The trade relies on people not knowing the difference between melt value and a real offer. You now do. Get the melt figure from a calculator, sort your gold by carat, gather two or three written per-gram quotes, and only then decide who gets your metal. Do that, and you'll comfortably land in the top of the range instead of handing a stranger a third of your gold for nothing. For the full end-to-end process, our selling guide walks you through every step.
All figures are estimates of melt value, never offers. Not financial or tax advice.