COMEX Gold, Explained

By the Gold Spot Market editorial team · Updated November 11, 2026

Quick answer: COMEX is the metals exchange inside CME Group, and its flagship gold product is the GC futures contract: an agreement to deliver 100 troy ounces of gold in a named month at a price fixed today. At the last update on November 11, 2026, the front-month futures price was $3,993.60, while the gold spot market price stood at $3,987.20. Those are two different series, so the gap between them is rarely zero. This page covers the contract behind the futures number, how a contract turns into a bar in a vault, and how to read the warehouse stock figures that turn up in headlines.

Gold spot $3,987.20 per troy ounce · COMEX front month $3,993.60 · as of November 11, 2026 at 20:23 UTC · spot from gold-api.com, futures from Yahoo Finance

What COMEX is and who owns it

The name COMEX is a trademark of Commodity Exchange, Inc.. On August 22, 2008, CME Group announced that it had completed its acquisition of NYMEX Holdings, and that deal brought both NYMEX and COMEX into the group. When you see "CME gold" and "COMEX gold" in the same article, they refer to the same market.

Gold futures in the United States are older than that merger. As Mises Wire recounted in a 2024 anniversary piece, gold futures opened on COMEX and four other American exchanges on December 31, 1974, the same day an executive order from President Ford lifted the 1933 ban on private gold ownership. That is a secondary account; no CME page covering the launch could be read for this page.

COMEX is one of three reference points this site follows, alongside the London over-the-counter market and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Our explainer on how the gold spot price is set shows how the three fit together across a 24-hour day.

The contracts COMEX lists for gold

The table draws its specifications from COMEX's own filings with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and, where those filings say nothing, from a broker's published spec sheet. CME Group's own spec pages did not respond when this page was researched, so the prose below names the source of each point.

GC, the standard contract, lives in Chapter 113 of the COMEX rulebook under the commodity code GC. One contract covers 100 troy ounces of gold. The metal must assay to at least 995 fineness and come from a brand the exchange has approved. It can be delivered as a single 100-ounce bar or as three 1-kilo bars, and each bar must have its weight, fineness, bar number and brand mark incised on it. These rules come from a filing COMEX made in February 2024. The current rulebook chapter could not be fetched, so an amendment made after that filing would not show here.

The broker MetroTrade lists the minimum price step for GC as $0.10 per ounce, worth $10.00 per contract. It names February, April, June, August, October and December as the active delivery months, and it describes GC as physically delivered. Those three points are secondary: they come from a broker's help page rather than from CME.

Micro Gold, code MGC, is a tenth of the size. MetroTrade lists it as 10 troy ounces, with each $0.10 step worth $1.00, physically delivered and listed in the same months as GC.

The smallest contract works differently. COMEX's filing for 1-Ounce Gold futures, code 1OZ, places it in Chapter 131 with a contract size of one troy ounce and financial settlement, so no metal is delivered at the end. It was listed for trade date Monday, January 13, 2025, and it moves in steps of $0.25 per ounce.

COMEX also lists a Gold Kilo contract, code GCK in Chapter 114, for one kilogram bar, or 32.15 troy ounces, at a minimum of .9999 fineness. It matters on this page mainly because its rule text is the clearest delivery description we could read, as the next sections explain.

When COMEX gold trades

COMEX's filing for the 1-ounce contract gives the gold-complex schedule on CME Globex in Central time: trading opens at 5:00 p.m. CT, Sunday through Friday, with a daily maintenance period from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. CT. MetroTrade gives the GC version of the same pattern, Sunday 5:00 p.m. CT through Friday 4:00 p.m. CT with a 60-minute halt. In other words, the market runs almost all week, broken by one quiet hour each afternoon and a closed weekend. Our guide to when the gold market opens converts these hours to Eastern time and lines them up with London and Shanghai.

How a futures price becomes a bar in a vault

A futures contract is a promise, not a parcel of metal. The buyer, called the long, agrees to take gold in the delivery month; the seller, the short, agrees to provide it. Most of the price you see quoted is simply the level at which those promises are changing hands.

For a promise to end in metal, the gold has to be the right kind and in the right place. COMEX's 2024 filing requires a chain of custody: gold has to reach an exchange-approved depository by an approved carrier, coming directly from an approved producer, an assayer or another approved depository. Once it is there, the depository can issue a warrant, and each warrant references the serial number and the approved producer of every bar it covers.

The warrant is what actually moves at delivery. In the plain-language account given by metalcharts.org, a secondary explainer, a warrant is a document of title created in the exchange's electronic system, and when a contract goes to delivery the short must present one, so a physical delivery is in effect a transfer of that title.

The clearest step-by-step text we could read is the Gold Kilo rule, not GC's own delivery rule, which was not readable. Under that rule, the seller hands the Clearing House a notice of intention to deliver by 1:00 p.m. on the intent day, the Clearing House assigns the delivery to eligible buyers the same day, and only warrants registered in the electronic delivery system can be delivered. The delivery day is the day the long's clearing member receives the warrant, and the settlement price on the last trading day is the basis for the delivery. Read those steps as the pattern COMEX uses for its kilo contract, not as a quotation of the GC rule.

Registered and eligible gold

Two words carry most of the confusion in COMEX stock headlines. In COMEX's own 2020 filing, eligible gold is gold that is acceptable for delivery against the contract but for which a warrant has not been issued, and registered gold is eligible gold for which a warrant has been issued. The World Gold Council puts it in similar plain terms: registered metal has a receipt from an approved warehouse, and eligible metal meets the standards with no receipt issued.

So a bar that sits in an approved vault and meets the standard counts as eligible. When a warrant is issued for it, the same bar counts as registered and can be used to settle a contract. By those definitions, the two categories together make up the exchange-grade gold in COMEX's vaults.

Each depository must report its exchange-grade inventory, eligible and registered, to the exchange every day. The filing says inventory levels at all approved depositories are published daily on the exchange website, and that an independent inventory audit is required each year. That publication is CME Group's daily metal warehouse stocks report. BullionStar, writing about 2016, described it as a "Metal Depository Statistics" report posted each afternoon New York time as an Excel file called Gold_Stocks, with each depository's total split into registered and eligible. The aggregator metalcharts.org says CME releases one depository report per business day per metal, typically around 4:00 PM CT, covering the previous day. We do not republish that report; read it on CME Group's site, where the numbers are the exchange's own.

The same 2020 filing shows how COMEX itself uses the categories. It counts deliverable supply only from gold in exchange-approved depositories, and in that filing it discounted 50% of eligible gold, against a monthly average of 6,574 contracts' worth of registered gold from March 2017 to February 2020 and a deliverable supply of about 45,897 contracts. The approved gold depositories it listed included Brinks, Delaware Depository, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Malca-Amit, Loomis and the Bank of Nova Scotia; the list is dated and may have changed.

A few habits help when a headline quotes these figures. First, check whether the number is registered, eligible or the total, because a story can swap between them. Second, remember that, by the definitions above, gold can count as registered or eligible without leaving the vault; the category follows the paperwork. Third, note the date of the report the story used, since the file is replaced every business day.

The 2025 tariff inflows, dated

In late 2024 and early 2025, worries about US tariffs drew a wave of gold into COMEX vaults. The World Gold Council framed it as the threat of tariffs moving the gold market. These are the dated figures as the publishers reported them: