The metal nobody covers

If you search for advice on selling gold, you will drown in it. Search for advice on selling palladium and you will find almost nothing useful, despite the fact that palladium wedding bands, bars, and estate pieces turn up in Orange County safes and jewelry boxes all the time. Palladium had a genuine moment in jewelry, particularly in men's wedding bands, as a lighter, cheaper alternative to platinum, and those pieces are now reaching the point where their owners want to sell them.

We buy palladium, along with gold, silver, and platinum, as a core part of our desk, not an afterthought. The same process that applies to our gold buying applies here: you describe the piece, we make a real offer, and payment is same day. But the numbers behind a palladium offer are computed differently enough that they deserve their own explanation.

Spot price versus melt value: the first honest distinction

The spot price you see quoted for palladium is the price of one troy ounce of pure, exchange-deliverable metal. No piece of jewelry is that. Melt value, the number that actually matters for your item, is spot multiplied by the item's weight and its purity.

Purity is where hallmarks come in. Palladium jewelry is most commonly marked Pd950, meaning 95 percent palladium, usually alloyed with ruthenium. You will also see Pd500, a 50 percent alloy that was used in some lower-cost pieces, and occasionally 950 Pall. or similar stamps. The difference is enormous: a Pd950 band contains nearly twice the payable metal of a Pd500 band of identical weight. Bars and rounds are typically .9995 fine and marked as such. So the melt arithmetic is: weight in troy ounces, times fineness, times spot. That number is the ceiling for any metal-value offer, and no honest buyer will pretend otherwise.

Two practical warnings about reading your own pieces. Hallmarks on older or resized bands are sometimes worn, partially struck, or removed entirely during sizing, so the absence of a stamp does not mean the absence of palladium; it means the metal has to be tested. And weight on a kitchen scale is a useful estimate but reads in grams, not troy ounces; there are about 31.1 grams to a troy ounce, and confusing the two is the single most common arithmetic error sellers make before contacting anyone.

Why palladium spreads are wider than gold spreads, and why that is not a trick

Here is the part sellers deserve to have explained rather than obscured. An offer on gold, with gold sitting in record territory above $4,400 an ounce in 2026, can run close to melt because gold is the most liquid metal on earth: every refiner takes it, settlement is fast, and the price a buyer receives is nearly the price on the screen. Palladium is different in three specific ways.

Fewer refiners handle it. Palladium requires specialized refining, fewer facilities accept small lots, and refining charges per ounce are higher. That cost comes out of the middle of the trade.
The price is more volatile. Palladium's market is thin and industrially driven, dominated by automotive demand. It can move sharply between the day we buy and the day we settle with a refiner, and a rational buyer prices that risk in.
There is almost no resale market for the jewelry itself. A gold piece may be worth more than melt to a jewelry buyer. Palladium jewelry almost always goes to the refiner, so melt is not just the ceiling, it is the destination.

The practical consequence: a fair palladium offer sits a noticeably larger percentage below melt than a fair gold offer does. A buyer who quotes you a gold-style spread on palladium either does not understand the metal or is planning to renegotiate later.

How we test and price palladium

Testing matters more with palladium than with gold, because palladium, platinum, and white gold look alike and are routinely confused, in both directions. Sellers have been underpaid for platinum mistaken for palladium and overpromised on white gold mistaken for something rarer.

Our process is the same whether we come to you or you ship insured via FedEx. We verify the hallmark first, then confirm it with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis, which reads the actual elemental composition of the piece without damaging it. We weigh everything on calibrated scales in front of you, apply the fineness, and compute melt against that day's spot. Then we show you the offer and the spread explicitly: here is the melt value, here is what we can pay, and here is why the gap is the size it is. If a piece has value beyond metal, a signed designer band, for instance, we price that instead, the same way we treat watches and estate jewelry as more than their materials.

One more note on mixed lots, because palladium rarely travels alone. Estate situations tend to produce a drawer containing a palladium band, some gold chains, a platinum setting, loose coins, and perhaps a watch. We evaluate all of it in one sitting, metal by metal, with the arithmetic shown for each, and pay one combined amount the same day. That is considerably less friction than selling four categories of item to four different specialists, and it is precisely what a desk that buys watches, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, diamonds, coins, and bullion exists to do.

Get a palladium offer in Orange County

If you have a palladium band, bars, or estate pieces anywhere in Orange County, the process takes minutes to start: describe the items on our get a quote form, including any hallmarks you can read and a weight if you have a kitchen scale. We reply in under 24 hours. From there, we either come to you, we serve the whole county from Fullerton, details on our Orange County buying page, or you ship fully insured. Either way, payment is same day by wire, Zelle, or cash, and you will see the melt math before you decide anything.