Market guide: This article explains valuation factors. It is not a customer testimonial, completed transaction, promise or appraisal.

Almost every dispute over a gold offer comes down to one misunderstanding: the seller is thinking about the sticker weight of a piece, and the buyer is thinking about the weight of the pure gold inside it. Those are two different numbers, and the gap between them is the entire calculation. A 14-karat chain that reads 20 grams on the scale does not contain 20 grams of gold. It contains a little over eleven. Everything a fair buyer does is an attempt to find that eleven-gram figure and then price it against the market.

Karat is the fineness scale, and it is a ratio out of 24. Pure gold is 24 karat. The alloys people actually own are stamped below that: 22-karat is 91.7 percent gold, 18-karat is 75 percent, 14-karat is 58.3 percent, and 10-karat is 41.7 percent. European pieces skip the karat word and stamp the decimal directly, so 750 means 18-karat, 585 means 14-karat, and 375 means 9-karat. The first thing a buyer does is confirm that stamp is honest, because a stamp is a manufacturer's claim, not a guarantee, and plating carries the same numbers.

The second number is net precious-metal weight, and the unit matters more than sellers expect. Gold trades by the troy ounce, which is 31.10 grams, not the 28.35-gram avoirdupois ounce your kitchen scale assumes. Many buyers weigh in pennyweight instead, abbreviated dwt, where one troy ounce is 20 pennyweight and one pennyweight is about 1.555 grams. None of these units is a trick on its own, but a quote given in pennyweight and compared against a price you looked up per gram will look wrong until you convert. Ask which unit the buyer is using before you compare anything.

Now the market price. The published gold price is the spot price for one troy ounce of pure, refined gold in bulk on a commodity market. Your jewelry is neither pure nor refined nor bulk, so spot is a ceiling, never the offer. To move from spot to your metal, the buyer multiplies spot by your fineness and by your weight in troy ounces. Spot times 0.583 times weight gives the raw pure-gold value of a 14-karat piece. That figure is what the gold is worth as a commodity the instant it is melted, before anyone is paid to do the melting.

That last clause is where the margin lives. A buyer is not a charity converting your chain to cash at cost. The piece has to be tested, aggregated with other lots, shipped to a refiner, assayed, and refined, and the refiner keeps a cut. The buyer also carries the price risk between the day they pay you and the day they settle with the refiner, during which the market can move against them. The offer is the pure-gold value minus all of that. A transparent buyer will tell you the percentage of the metal value they are paying rather than hiding it inside a single lump number.

The honest range on that percentage is wide and depends entirely on volume and on who you are dealing with. A refiner buying kilos at a time can pay very close to the metal value because their per-ounce cost is tiny. A retail counter turning over small lots has higher overhead per piece and pays less. There is no single correct percentage, which is exactly why getting more than one quote is the only reliable defense. What you are checking is not whether a buyer takes a margin, because everyone does, but whether the margin is reasonable for the amount of metal you are selling.

Weight has to be measured on a scale that is legal for trade, and in most jurisdictions that means a scale certified by the state's weights-and-measures authority. A legitimate buyer weighs your gold in front of you and lets you read the display. If a piece has stones, the buyer either removes them and weighs the metal alone or estimates and deducts the stone weight, because you are not being paid gold rates for a sapphire. Clasps, spring rings, and any steel pins get deducted for the same reason. Watch the deductions as closely as you watch the price.

Mixed karats are the last complication and the easiest place to lose money. If you hand over a bag of 10-karat, 14-karat, and 18-karat pieces together, a lazy buyer will test one item, assume the whole bag is the lowest karat found, and pay you 10-karat rates for your 18-karat ring. A careful buyer sorts by karat, weighs each group separately, and prices each at its own fineness. Sort your own gold by stamp before you go, keep the groups in separate bags, and you make it obvious when someone is trying to average you down to the cheapest metal in the pile.

When you strip away the vocabulary, a gold offer is four numbers multiplied and then reduced once: fineness, weight, spot, and margin. If a buyer can show you all four and let you check the two you can verify yourself — the stamp and the weight — the quote is auditable and you can decide on the facts. Our own gold process follows exactly that sequence, and you can read how a private Orange County evaluation is structured on our sell gold page before you bring anything in. A buyer who will not break the number down is asking you to trust arithmetic you are not allowed to see.

One habit protects you through all of it: know your own weight and karat before you walk in. A cheap gram scale and a look at the stamps under a loupe cost almost nothing and tell you within a rough range what your gold should be worth as metal. You do not need to match a professional assay. You only need enough to recognize an offer that is priced at half the metal value, which is a conversation to end rather than negotiate. The seller who arrives already knowing roughly what the pile weighs is nearly impossible to lowball.

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