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What is my silver worth?

Sterling, coin, Britannia and fine silver at the live silver price — including why small silver items are often worth less than the trouble of selling them.

Item 1

Everything on the scale, including any stones.

By far the most common. "STER", "STG" and "925" all mean this.

Grams to subtract for anything that is not metal. Leave at zero if there are none.

g

The price used

Waiting for the live price.

A buyer quoting from their own spot figure? Put it here, per troy ounce, and every number below recalculates against it.

$

Melt value of the silver

Waiting for a live price. Nothing is shown until there is one, because a figure from an unknown time ago would be worse than none.

Sterling, coin and fine silver

Almost all silver jewellery is sterling: 92.5% silver with copper making up the rest, stamped 925, STER, STG or STERLING — all four mean exactly the same thing. Older continental pieces are often 800, Scandinavian ones 830. Britannia silver is 958 and appears mainly on British work. Fine silver at 999 is bullion rather than jewellery, because it is too soft to wear.

The arithmetic is identical to gold: weight, times fineness, times the per-gram silver price. A 40 gram sterling bangle holds 37 grams of pure silver. What differs is the scale of the answer — silver trades at a small fraction of gold, so a piece that feels substantial in the hand may hold only a few pounds or dollars of metal.

The awkward truth about small silver

Silver is the one metal where the melt value of a typical piece is frequently less than the effort of selling it. A sterling ring weighing 3 grams contains under 3 grams of silver. At most spot prices that is a single-figure sum before the buyer takes a margin, and many buyers set a minimum weight below which they will not deal at all.

This cuts the other way for tableware and flatware, where the weights are large. A canteen of sterling cutlery can run to several kilograms, and there the metal value is real money. It is also where the melt-versus-resale question bites hardest: a complete, named, matched service is usually worth considerably more intact than melted.

Watch for plate. EPNS, "silver on copper", A1 and nickel silver all contain either a microscopic layer of silver or none whatsoever, and no refiner will buy them. Nickel silver in particular has no silver in it at all — the name describes the colour.

Common questions

What is 925 silver worth?

925 is sterling — 92.5% silver — so one gram of it contains 0.925 grams of pure silver. At a silver price of $66 per troy ounce that is about $1.96 of metal per gram, or roughly $19.60 for a 10 gram piece. A buyer pays a percentage of that figure rather than all of it.

How much is sterling silver worth per gram?

Sterling is 92.5% silver, so one gram of it contains 0.925 grams of pure silver. At a spot price of $69 per troy ounce that is about $2.05 of metal per gram. A buyer pays a percentage of that.

Is 925 silver worth anything?

Yes, but often less than people expect. 925 is genuine sterling silver and has real metal value by weight — the issue is that jewellery-sized pieces weigh very little. A 5 gram pendant holds about 4.6 grams of silver. Tableware and flatware, weighing hundreds of grams, are where the value adds up.

Will a buyer take silver plate?

Not for scrap. EPNS, silver plate and nickel silver contain too little silver to recover economically, and refiners do not buy them. They may still have value as objects to a collector or dealer, which is a different market entirely.

Not an appraisal, and not an offer. This is arithmetic applied to a weight and a purity you entered, at a market price fetched a few minutes ago. It has not seen the item. An appraisal is a qualified opinion of value from someone who has the piece in front of them, and nothing on this site is a substitute for one.

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