How the Gold Spot Price Is Set

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

Quick answer: No single exchange sets the spot price of gold. The number you see is a running read of where gold is changing hands right now, and two places do most of that work: the London over-the-counter market, where banks trade metal held in London vaults, and COMEX in New York, where gold futures trade almost around the clock. London adds a twice-daily auction, the LBMA Gold Price, which acts as a fixed reference. Right now spot reads $3,987.20 per troy ounce and the front COMEX contract $3,993.60, a gap of $6.40.

That gap, and the two London auctions, are what this page walks through. If you only want the live number, the gold spot market price is on the home page; if you want the plain definition first, start with what the spot price of gold is and come back.

London: a market without a trading floor

Most of the world's wholesale gold trading is not on an exchange at all. The LBMA describes London as an over-the-counter market, as opposed to an exchange, where members deal with each other directly, principal to principal. There is no central order book that prints one official tick. Instead, dealing banks quote prices to each other and to clients, and the "spot" price is the level at which that trade is happening.

Three conventions turn London's trading into the number that ends up on a screen:

• Where the metal is. The standard delivery location is London itself, known as loco London; in practice that means an account with a clearing bank backed by metal in a London vault.
• When it settles. A spot deal is not instant. Metal and dollars change hands two business days after the trade, on what the market calls the spot date, so a Monday trade settles on Wednesday.
• What is being priced. The LBMA says the generic price in the media refers to one troy ounce delivered loco London on the spot date, paid in US dollars, in Good Delivery bars. Those prices normally reflect the wholesale market.

A Good Delivery gold bar is not something you would carry home. It must hold at least 350 and at most 430 fine troy ounces, at a fineness of no less than 995.0 parts per thousand. So when a news report says gold traded at a given level, it is describing a deal between institutions, in large bars, settling two days later. That is a long way from a one-ounce coin on a dealer's shelf, which is why retail prices sit above spot.

The LBMA Gold Price: two auctions a day

Continuous OTC trading has no single closing number, and many contracts need one. The LBMA Gold Price fills that need. ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA) runs it independently, providing the auction platform, while the LBMA owns the intellectual property. IBA describes the LBMA prices as the global benchmark for unallocated metal delivered in London.

The auctions run at 10:30 and 15:00 London time, and price formation in each one is in US dollars. The LBMA's own guide adds the unit: US dollars per fine troy ounce, with the price also published per gram. The result is one number for the morning and one for the afternoon. Unlike the moving quote, a benchmark stays put once it is published, which is what makes it usable as a reference in a contract or a valuation.

The timeline above shows both auctions in Eastern time, next to the COMEX day and the Shanghai sessions, so you can see which market is awake when each price is struck. The morning London auction lands before New York opens for the day; the afternoon one falls during the US morning.

Keep the two ideas apart. The LBMA Gold Price is a benchmark struck twice a day. Spot is a live quote that moves every second in between. On a calm day the two sit close together; on a fast day the live quote can travel well away from the morning benchmark before the afternoon one is set.

The old London fix, briefly

The auctions replaced a much older arrangement. The LBMA records that the first gold fixing took place on 12 September 1919, at around 11 a.m., with N.M. Rothschild & Sons setting the reserve price, and that all gold traded that day at a single price of 98 shillings and 8 pence per fine ounce. That arrangement, known as the London Gold Fix, ran for well over ninety years. IBA launched the electronic LBMA Gold Price on Friday 20 March 2015, replacing the London Gold Fix established in 1919. The first two auctions that day set $1,171.75 in the morning and $1,183.10 in the afternoon.

COMEX: the US venue for price discovery

London has the metal; New York has the futures. On COMEX gold, the main contract (code GC) is for 100 troy ounces of gold, delivered in bars that must assay to at least 995 fineness from an exchange-approved brand. COMEX has been part of CME Group since CME completed its purchase of NYMEX Holdings in August 2008.

What makes COMEX matter for spot is its hours. Gold futures trade electronically on CME Globex from Sunday through Friday, starting at 5:00 p.m. Central time, with a daily one-hour maintenance pause from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. CT. That covers the hours when London is asleep, so overnight moves in "spot" are mostly moves in the futures market. The contract nearest to delivery, the front month, is the one quote screens lean on. Yahoo Finance's GC=F symbol, for example, pointed at the December 2026 contract on 11 November 2026; the page on gold ticker symbols explains what GC=F and similar codes mean.

A futures price is a price for gold delivered later, not today. So it is never quite the same number as spot, and the difference between the two tells you something.

Spot vs futures: the live basis

The box above subtracts spot from the front-month futures price. As of November 11, 2026, futures sit at $3,993.60 and spot at $3,987.20, a basis of $6.40, or +0.16% of spot.

Why should a contract for later delivery cost more than the metal itself? Think of the alternative. Someone who wants gold in a few weeks could buy it today and hold it. That costs money in two ways: the cash spent on the gold could otherwise earn interest, and the bars must be stored and insured in a vault until the date arrives. A futures seller who commits to deliver later avoids paying the buyer's version of those costs, so the futures price normally carries them. Traders call this the cost of carry, and in a normal market it means futures trade a little above spot, by roughly the interest and storage on the metal over the time to delivery.

Three things change the size of that gap:

1. Interest rates. When short-term rates are higher, financing a gold position for the same period costs more, and the carry widens.
2. Time to delivery. A contract a few days from its delivery month carries only a few days of interest; one months away carries more. When screens switch to the next contract, the basis can jump even if gold itself has not moved.
3. Strain in the physical market. If metal in one place is scarce or hard to move, the usual relationship can stretch or even flip, with futures briefly below spot.

Because the basis follows from interest and time, it is not a forecast. A positive gap does not mean the market expects a higher price later; it mostly prices the cost of waiting.

How quote sites turn all this into "spot"

There is no official spot feed that every site copies. Each data provider builds its own quote, and the raw material can be dealer prices from the OTC market, the front futures month adjusted toward spot, or some mix of the two. The method usually matters only at the margin, but it explains why two screens rarely match to the cent. The only way to know a provider's recipe is to read what it publishes about itself, and many publish very little.

This site keeps its inputs separate rather than blending them. The spot figure comes from a live spot feed and is stamped with its time; the futures figure is the COMEX front month, shown on its own, so the basis between them stays visible. Quotes refresh several times a day, and between refreshes the stamp tells you how old a number is.

Timing also matters. Gold trades nearly around the clock, but not every hour is equally busy, and quotes taken at quiet times move less. The page on when the gold market opens lays out the weekly schedule.

Shanghai: the third pole

London and New York are not the whole story. The Shanghai Gold Exchange runs its own benchmark in yuan per gram, set twice a day in Beijing. Gold imports into China run through a licence system overseen by the People's Bank of China, and the Shanghai price converted to dollars can sit above or below London and New York for long stretches. The page on the Shanghai gold price does that conversion step by step and charts the gap over the past year.

What this page can't tell you

This page can't tell you which way the price goes next, or whether the current basis is wide or narrow by any standard that predicts anything. It describes the plumbing: who quotes, when the benchmarks are struck, and why spot and futures differ. It also can't tell you what any one data provider does inside its own feed, beyond what that provider chooses to publish.

If you are reading about price formation because you are thinking about gold for a retirement account, our page on Augusta Precious Metals sets out what that company lists and who its service suits. Compare what any seller charges with today's gold spot price before you decide anything.

Information, not financial advice. This page does not tell you to buy or sell, and it does not forecast prices. Figures are reference values at the time shown.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Every page a fact on this page came from, marked as the publisher's own page or a page that reports it, with the date we read it.

• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• ice.com (ice.com; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• lbma.org.uk (lbma.org.uk; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• ir.theice.com (ir.theice.com; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• cftc.gov (cftc.gov; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• sec.gov (sec.gov; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• cftc.gov (cftc.gov; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• finance.yahoo.com (finance.yahoo.com; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• en.sge.com.cn (en.sge.com.cn; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)
• faolex.fao.org (faolex.fao.org; the publisher's own page; read 2026-11-11)

Keep reading

• the GC futures contract: contract size, delivery and the warehouse stocks behind COMEX.
• the Shanghai premium: how China's benchmark converts to dollars and why it drifts from London.
• gold trading hours: when each venue is open, in Eastern time.