What 24K gold is worth and how dealers price it
24K gold is an alloy containing 99.9% pure gold by weight — 24 parts gold out of 24. The rest is usually copper, silver, zinc or nickel, added to make the metal hard enough to hold a stone setting and to shift the colour towards yellow, red or white. Because only 99.9% of the weight is gold, the scrap value of a 24K piece is always well below the spot price of the same weight in pure gold.
Look inside the shank of a ring or on the clasp of a chain and you will normally find the hallmark 999 or 24K. In the EU the numeric millesimal mark is standard, so 999 is the mark you are looking for. 24K is typical of investment bars, Asian and Middle-Eastern jewellery and bullion coins. If a piece is unmarked, any serious buyer will test it with acid, an XRF analyser or a touchstone before quoting — never accept a price based on a guess about purity.
Dealers price scrap in three steps. First they weigh the lot on a calibrated scale, deducting stones, springs, clasps and any base-metal parts. Second they multiply the net weight by the fineness to get the fine gold content: 10 g of 24K contains 9.99 g of pure gold. Third they multiply that fine weight by the current EUR spot price per gram and apply their payout percentage.
Typical payout ranges in the EU: high-street jewellers and pawnbrokers pay roughly 60–75% of melt, specialist scrap-gold buyers pay 80–90%, and refiners buying larger lots (100 g and up) will often pay 92–97% minus a refining fee. Postal buyers advertise attractive headline rates but sometimes deduct handling, so ask for the payout as a percentage of melt before you post anything.
Worked example: a 14.5 g 24K chain holds 14.49 g of fine gold. Enter 14.5 g and 24K in the calculator above to see the live melt value in EUR, then move the payout slider to 85% to see what a competitive specialist buyer should offer. Getting two or three quotes on the same day, with the melt figure in hand, is the single most effective way to raise the price you are paid.
Prices move continuously while the London and New York markets are open, so a quote is only valid for a short window. If gold is volatile, dealers widen their margin to protect themselves — which is another reason to check the live figure immediately before you walk in.
Developers can pull the same figure programmatically: 24K gold price per gram API.