What is spot price?

The short answer

Spot price is what one troy ounce of a metal is trading for on the international market right now. It is the number a coin’s melt value is calculated from, and it is not the price a dealer will pay you for a coin.

Reference prices

Silver: $64.38/ozt, based on spot prices at 23 September 2026 19:59 UTC
Gold: $4,283/ozt, based on spot prices at 23 September 2026 19:59 UTC
Platinum: $1,753/ozt, based on spot prices at 23 September 2026 19:59 UTC

Where the number comes from

Spot is the price for immediate delivery of refined metal in wholesale quantity, quoted in US dollars per troy ounce. It is set by continuous trading between banks, refiners, miners and funds, and it moves for as long as those markets are open — through the night, and every day except the weekend.

Nobody publishes an official spot price. What you see quoted is the last traded price, or a benchmark taken from it, so two sources can show figures a few cents apart at the same moment. For working out what the metal in a coin is worth, that difference does not matter.

A troy ounce is not an ounce

Precious metal is weighed in troy ounces. One troy ounce is 31.1035 grams; the ounce on a kitchen scale is 28.3495 grams. A troy ounce is the heavier of the two by about a tenth, so treating one as the other overstates what you have by that much. What a troy ounce is covers the unit and the coin weights that use it.

Every metal weight in this catalogue is in troy ounces, for exactly this reason. A 1964 Washington quarter holds 0.1808 troy ounces of silver, and that figure multiplied by the spot price is the whole melt calculation.

Why spot is a ceiling

A coin’s melt value is its metal content times spot. That is the most the metal in it is worth, and it is the right number to start from, but it is not an offer. A dealer buys below spot and sells above it, and the gap between the two is the business. Can I sell my coin for spot price explains why the answer is almost always no.

What the gap is depends on the metal, the form it is in and how much of it you have. Treat melt value as the benchmark you judge an offer against, rather than the price you expect to be handed.

Why a melt figure carries a date

Spot moves every few seconds, and a static page cannot follow it. So every melt figure states the price it was worked at and the time that price was read, and each melt value page carries a table of what the same coin comes to at other prices either side of it.

Look up today’s spot price, find the nearest row, and read the answer off it. If you want the exact figure, the arithmetic is on the page: troy ounces times price per troy ounce.