14k gold price per ounce

A troy ounce is 31.1035 grams. The avoirdupois ounce used for food and post is 28.3495 grams. Precious metals have always been quoted in troy, so every spot price you see anywhere, on this site or any other, is per troy ounce.

If you weigh gold on a kitchen scale set to ounces you are reading avoirdupois, and your gold will appear to be worth about 9.7% more than it is. This single confusion is behind a lot of disappointed sellers, and it is entirely avoidable: switch the scale to grams and let the arithmetic happen afterwards.

The two units share a name and nothing else. They are not a rounding difference or a regional variation. A troy ounce is a genuinely different quantity, and the gap on a full ounce of 14k is real money.

31.1 grams of 14k is more gold than most people have. A typical wedding band runs 4 to 7 grams, a light chain 3 to 5, a substantial signet ring 8 to 12. Reaching a troy ounce usually means most of a jewellery box, or one heavy chain of the kind that was fashionable in the 1980s.

That ounce holds 18.14 grams of fine gold, because 14k is 58.33% pure. The rest is copper, silver and zinc, and it has essentially no resale value. When a refiner quotes you on an ounce of 14k, they are quoting on those 18.14 grams and discarding the rest of the weight.

In the United States the scrap trade runs on pennyweight, not ounces or grams. A pennyweight is 1.555 grams, and there are 20 to a troy ounce. If a counter quotes you a number that looks far too low against the per gram price, check which unit it is in before you argue: a per pennyweight figure is roughly 1.55 times the per gram figure, not 31 times it.

Outside the US, grams dominate almost everywhere. The ounce becomes the useful unit only at dealer scale, where lots are consolidated, shipped and insured by the ounce, and where the per ounce spread is how the trade actually talks about margin.

There is no separate market in 14k. The spot price is set for fine gold per troy ounce, and every other figure on this site, per gram, per pennyweight, per kilo, is that number multiplied by 0.5833 and divided into the unit you asked for. Nothing is added or lost in the conversion.

So if a buyer offers you a better rate per ounce than per gram for the same metal, the difference is in their margin, not in the gold. Convert both quotes to the same unit before comparing them and the better offer becomes obvious immediately.