A Guide For Pricing Gold Jewelry At Home

What is my gold jewelry worth? How much is 14k gold worth?

These are common questions people ask themselves when they own gold jewelry pieces. If you’ve found yourself wondering what your gold jewelry is worth, you’ve come to the right place!

Read on as we outline exactly how to price gold jewelry at home. You can always get an official appraisal from a jeweler, however there are steps you can take to price gold jewelry on your own. In fact, there are three key components necessary to calculate the cost of gold jewelry: karats, weight, and value. Once you’ve gathered the data required, you can plug those values into a formula and find out what your gold jewelry is worth.

Let’s have a look at the steps you’ll need to take to price your gold jewelry at home.

First: How Many Karats Is It?

First thing’s first, you’ll want to know what karatage you are working with. Gold jewelry pieces have hallmarks, or stamps, which notate karatage or gold purity. If you need to, grab a magnifying glass and examine the jewelry. Do you see any numbers or lettering? If not, keep looking. The karatage of the ring will be a number followed by “k” or “kt” for example “10K,” or “14Kt”.

Did you find it? Great! If not, you may find a larger number which represents the gold purity of the ring. Gold purity hallmark examples include 585, 417 and 750. What do these numbers mean? Essentially, gold purity numbers are percentages, and to convert them to decimals you simply add a decimal one digit from the right.

This means that 585 becomes 58.5%, which is the amount of pure gold in the jewelry piece. The higher the number/percentage, the more pure gold in the jewelry, the greater value.

Confused? No problem! Read our guide for detailed information on identifying gold jewelry stamps.

In some cases, you may not find a stamp and there are several reasons why:

1. The stamp rubbed off
2. The stamp is illegible
3. The jewelry item has been resized or altered, and the stamp was removed in the process.
4. The gold jewelry is not real gold

If you’re unsure about whether your gold jewelry is real, here are some tips for how to test gold jewelry at home. If you’re positive the gold is real gold, then it’s smart to take it to a jeweler to determine the exact caratage.

Once you’ve got the exact karatage ironed out, it’s time to weigh your gold jewelry.

Second: How Much Does The Gold Jewelry Weigh?

What’s weight got to do with it? Well, you will want to know how much gold you’re working with, right? Right.

As a rule of thumb: gold jewelry is weighed by the gram, and pure gold is weighed by the ounce.

When you know how many grams of gold you’re working with, you’ll be able to compare it to the market value for gold. How do you weigh gold jewelry? You’ll have to buy an accurate jewelry scale online for around $10. Remember to buy a scale that weighs in grams, not ounces, otherwise you’ll have to convert the weight.

Once you have a scale, individually weigh each piece of gold jewelry. Now that you’ve got the weight in grams (if not, use Google’s unit converter to convert ounces to grams), let’s calculate the value of your gold jewelry.

3. Lastly, Calculate The Value Of Gold Jewelry

Ready to find out what your gold jewelry is worth? Now that you’ve done all the legwork, the rest is just plugging in numbers into a gold calculator or formula.  Either use a gold value calculator online, or insert your values into the equation below:

Weight of gold jewelry x gold purity / 24 = Grams of pure gold

Let’s break down each part of that equation to help you better understand what each value means:

• Weight of gold jewelry: the weight in grams of your gold jewelry item. Example: you have a piece of gold jewelry that weighs 5 grams.

• Gold purity: To accurately value your gold jewelry, you need to know how much pure gold is in each item. To calculate this variable, remember that 24 Karat gold is pure gold, and each karat value smaller will contain less increments of pure gold.

Example: You have 5 grams of 18k gold.

• 24: You are dividing by 100% of pure gold, which is 24 karats.

If we plug each figure into the equation, it looks like this:

5 x 18 / 24 = 3.75

If you have 5 grams of 18k gold jewelry, then you own 3.75 grams of pure gold. Not too complex is it? Once you break down what each value means, you can see how karatage, weight and purity determine the overall value of your gold.

Now, what can you do with this information? You know how many grams of pure gold you have in each jewelry piece, but how do you put a price on that?

You’ll now need to research the...

Current Market Price For Pure Gold

Knowing what you’ve got is the first step. Next, you’ll need to know the value of your item against the current market price for pure gold.

Remember: market value for pure gold is measured in ounces. Ready for another formula? Great! Once you’ve got your trusted price of pure gold in ounces, convert it to grams and plug in the values below:

Total grams of 24k gold X current price of gold per gram = value of your gold jewelry

And that’s it! Follow these steps and you’ll have a solid grasp of what your gold jewelry is worth. Ready to sell your gold jewelry? Keep in mind that gold values shift daily, so it’s a good idea to appraise your gold jewelry from home a few times to get an average.

Bottom line, you can expect to get anywhere from 70-90% of the value you calculated for your gold jewelry.