10k gold price per gram

The US will not let anything below 10 karat be sold as gold. That is why so much American jewellery sits exactly on 10k rather than below it: it is the cheapest a manufacturer can go while still printing the word gold on the tag. In the UK the floor is 9k, and across much of continental Europe it is 8k, which is why imported pieces sometimes carry a stamp that would be illegal on a domestic one.

The stamp to look for is 417, occasionally 416. Both mean the same thing. A piece marked 10K without numerals is equally valid, and older American work often uses only the letters.

This is the one place where the lower karat is the better product. Gold is a soft metal, and the alloy metals mixed into 10k are harder than the gold they replace. A 10k ring holds an edge, resists scratching and survives daily knocks better than the same ring in 14k or 18k. Class rings, work bands and cheaper chains are 10k for exactly this reason, not only for cost.

The trade off is colour and skin contact. At 58% base metal the yellow is noticeably paler and more brassy, and there is far more copper, zinc and often nickel against your skin. If a ring has ever turned a finger green or set off a rash, 10k is the usual culprit.

Refining costs are largely fixed per lot rather than per gram of gold recovered. Processing a kilo of 10k costs a refiner roughly what processing a kilo of 18k costs, but yields 41.7% gold instead of 75%. That fixed cost is spread over less metal, so the percentage offered on low karat scrap is often a few points below what the same buyer offers on 14k or 18k.

Some high street jewellers decline 10k altogether, or price it so poorly that it amounts to the same thing. If you are quoted well under the payout range below, it is worth calling a dedicated gold buyer or a refiner rather than accepting it. On small quantities the difference may not justify the trip; on 50 grams or more it usually does.

10k is the karat most often faked, because the margin between a plated piece and a solid one is widest at the bottom of the range. A piece marked 10K GP, 10K GF, 10K RGP or 10K HGE is plated or filled, not solid, and is worth close to nothing as scrap regardless of what the calculator says.

Weigh stones out of the total as well. A 10k setting with a large synthetic stone can be half stone by weight, and you are paid for the metal only.