Gold to silver ratio today

$4,595.82 ÷ $68.24 = 67.35spot gold ÷ spot silver, both per troy ounce

The gold to silver ratio is the oldest comparison in the precious metals market: how many ounces of silver it takes to buy one ounce of gold. It is not a price, and nobody quotes it — it is simply one price divided by another, which is why it moves whenever either metal does.

How the ratio is calculated

Take the spot gold price, divide it by the spot silver price, and make sure both are quoted in the same currency and the same unit. That is the whole calculation. Because both sides carry the same units, they cancel: the ratio is an identical number computed in dollars, euros, pounds or rupees, which is part of why it travels so well as a shorthand.

The figure above uses the live spot prices from XAUTicker — the same two numbers shown on our gold price page, so the ratio here and the prices there can never disagree.

The past year

Measured from daily closing prices over the past year, the ratio has moved like this:

Over that period the ratio has moved ▼ −23.98%, from 88.59 to 67.35 — which is to say gold has lost ground to silver over the year. These are our own figures, paired day by day from the gold and silver closing series; any day missing one of the two metals is dropped rather than filled in.

Why the ratio moves

Gold and silver are only half the same asset, and the ratio is a measure of that difference.

Gold is almost purely monetary. Very little of it is consumed; it is bought to be held, by investors and increasingly by central banks, and its price answers mainly to real interest rates, the dollar and demand for safety — the forces set out in what moves the gold price.

Silver leads a double life. It carries the same monetary history and much of the same haven appeal, but roughly half of its demand is industrial — electronics, solar panels, brazing alloys, medical uses — which ties it to the manufacturing cycle in a way gold is not tied. The silver market is also far smaller in value, so the same flow of money moves its price further.

Put those together and the pattern is fairly consistent: in a scare, money reaches for gold first and the ratio rises, often sharply. In a broad recovery, with industrial demand firm and investors willing to take risk, silver tends to outrun gold and the ratio falls. The ratio is therefore less a fact about gold than a rough read on which of those two moods the market is in.

What the ratio has looked like historically

For most of recorded history the ratio was not discovered by a market at all — it was set by law. Bimetallic coinage systems fixed it by statute, and the United States Coinage Act of 1792 put it at 15 to 1, a figure roughly in line with what earlier monetary systems had used for centuries.

Once both metals floated freely in the twentieth century, the ratio became a market price of its own and its range widened enormously. It has spent long stretches in the region of 50 to 80, spiked well above 100 during acute market stress — most visibly in March 2020 — and dipped toward the low 30s at moments of exceptional silver strength, as in early 2011. The practical lesson is that "high" and "low" mean nothing without a stated period: a reading that looks extreme against the past year may be unremarkable against the past fifty.

How traders read it

The ratio is used in two broad ways. Some investors treat it as a relative-value gauge — the reasoning being that when it reaches an extreme, the cheaper metal has more room to catch up — and some act on that by swapping metal for metal rather than moving in or out of cash, which is what a "ratio trade" means. Others use it more loosely as a sentiment reading, in the way described above: a rising ratio as a sign of defensiveness, a falling one as a sign of appetite.

We report the number and its history; we do not recommend either use. Nothing here is investment advice, the ratio has no fair value we can point to, and a relationship that has reverted before is under no obligation to revert again. Our twice-daily digest notes where the ratio sits with each edition, and the gold price page carries it live alongside the prices it comes from.