Gold market hours

Checked 26 August 2026, 19:40 UTC. This page is rendered fresh on every visit, so the status above is the status now.

Spot gold has no single exchange and no opening bell. It trades over the counter between banks, brokers and dealers spread across every major financial centre, and the market is "open" whenever enough of them are quoting. In practice that produces a single continuous week: it starts on Sunday evening in Asia and runs until Friday evening in New York, with one short pause each day.

The weekly schedule

All times UTC. Your local equivalents shift twice a year with daylight saving, which is why the market's own calendar is kept in UTC rather than any one city's clock.

That works out at roughly 118 trading hours a week and about 47 closed. Hours drift by an hour relative to local clocks when the United States and Europe change to and from summer time on different dates, so treat the edges as approximate — accurate enough to tell a closed market from a broken feed, which is the judgement that matters.

The three sessions

Liquidity is handed westward around the world through the day. The three centres overlap rather than queue neatly, and the character of trading changes with each.

The busiest window of the day is the London–New York overlap, roughly 12:00 UTC to 16:00 UTC, when both centres are trading at once and most American economic data is published. Spreads are tightest then and moves are largest. The quietest is the gap after New York closes and before Asia is fully awake — a thin patch where a modest order can move the price more than its size suggests.

Why there is a one-hour break

The pause at 21:00 UTC each weekday is a settlement and rollover window: the trading day is closed off, positions are rolled to the next value date, and platforms reset before quoting resumes an hour later. It is the closest thing the spot market has to a daily close, and it is what the "previous close" figure on our gold price page is measured against.

Futures, and other gold markets

Spot is not the only gold market, and the others keep their own hours. COMEX gold futures in New York trade on the CME's electronic platform for most of the day with a short daily halt of their own; the Shanghai Gold Exchange runs its own day and night sessions; and the LBMA benchmark auctions happen at two fixed moments rather than continuously. Prices across these venues track each other closely through arbitrage, but they are separate markets with separate calendars — so a quote that looks stale on one may simply belong to another.

Holidays

Because spot gold is decentralised, it does not close for any single country's public holiday: if London is shut, New York and Asia are still quoting. What changes is depth rather than availability — on a major holiday in a big market, liquidity thins noticeably and spreads widen. Exchange-traded gold is different, and follows the holiday calendar of whichever exchange it trades on.

How this site reports a closed market

A price that has stopped moving can mean two entirely different things, and conflating them is how sites end up showing a green arrow on a two-day-old number. We separate them: when the market is shut, the figure is labelled as the last close and its direction colour is removed, because no move is happening. When the market is open but the feed has not updated for more than fifteen minutes, that is a fault and it is flagged as one. You can see both states on the gold price page, and the reasoning behind them in our methodology.