How Much Gold Is in Fort Knox?

Every family has a box in the attic with packing tape across the lid, Grandma’s handwriting on top and a rule that nobody opens it. Everyone is sure the good silver is in there. Nobody has looked since the 1970s. Fort Knox is that box, with 147 million ounces of gold inside and a 20-ton lid. It’s even checked the same way: since 2008, inspectors have mostly made sure nobody peeled the tape.

Fort Knox holds 147,341,858.382 troy ounces of gold, about 4,583 metric tons, according to the Treasury’s gold report for September 30, 2026. That’s a little more than half of the US government’s gold. At about $3,997 an ounce (October 24, 2026) it’s worth about $589 billion, but the Treasury carries it on its books at $42.22 an ounce, or $6.2 billion. No visitors are allowed. Outsiders last saw the vault in 2017.

How much gold is in Fort Knox?

The Treasury’s monthly gold report lists the Fort Knox Bullion Depository at 147,341,858.382 fine troy ounces. The same number, down to the last thousandth of an ounce, was in the report for June 30, 2017, and it is still there today. That is either a sign of excellent security or the world’s most stubborn spreadsheet, and it’s probably the first one.

In metric terms that’s about 4,583 tonnes. Gold is so dense that the whole pile would fit in a cube about 20 feet on a side: the footprint of a two-car garage, stacked to the height of a two-story house. A little more than half of all US government gold is in it. The rest is at the Mint in Denver and West Point, plus a small amount at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The gold sits in bars about 7 inches long, 3.5 inches wide and 1.75 inches thick, each holding about 400 troy ounces, roughly 27 pounds. That works out to about 370,000 bars. Hire one person to carry them out, one bar a minute, eight hours a day, five days a week, and the job takes about three years.

Most of the bars aren’t pure gold. They’re coin bars, melted from the gold coins Americans had to turn in in 1933 and 1934, and they keep the coins’ 90% alloy. In the Mint’s 2011 bar schedules, about 64% of the bars were between 89.9% and 90.1% gold, and only about 17% were 99.5% or better. So Grandpa’s $20 gold pieces are probably in there, just not in a shape he’d recognize.

Here is the number that surprises people most. At about 4,583 tonnes, this one building holds more gold than the entire official reserve of every country on Earth except the United States. Germany, the world’s second-largest holder, has about 3,350 tonnes. Fort Knox has about 1.4 times that, behind one door. Germany keeps its gold in three cities on two continents. Kentucky uses one building and a parking lot.

What is the gold in Fort Knox worth?

It depends which price you ask. At the October 24, 2026 market price of $3,996.90 an ounce, the gold in Fort Knox is worth about $589 billion. On the Treasury’s books it’s worth $6.2 billion, because the government still values its gold at $42.2222 an ounce, the official price set by law in 1973. The market price is about 95 times the book price.

Both numbers are real, and both are small next to the national debt. The debt grows by about $6.57 billion a day. At the Treasury’s own price, it adds the value of all the gold in Fort Knox in about 23 hours, roughly the time between one morning’s coffee and the next. At the market price it takes about 90 days: the whole cube, every coin bar and every bar of pure gold, matched by new borrowing in one season. By the time summer vacation’s over and the kids are back in school, it’s been borrowed again.

Split evenly, Fort Knox holds about 0.43 ounces of gold for each American, worth about $1,717. That’s a little less than half a Gold Eagle each, which you are not allowed to collect.

How did the gold get to Fort Knox?

By mail. The Mint says the first gold was moved to the depository “by railroad in January 1937, shipped by the United States Postal Service.” The Post Office was chosen because it was “the only agency that could accept the liability if any assets were lost.” Between January 11 and June 17, 1937, 39 trains with 215 cars carried about 4,909 tonnes of gold from the Philadelphia Mint and the New York Assay Office to Kentucky. The Treasury was billed fourth-class postage plus insurance. Fourth class was the parcel post rate, the one people used for books and mail-order catalogs.

The trains came with decoys, and soldiers with machine guns escorted the Army trucks that carried the gold to the vault. The building that received them cost $560,000, about $13.5 million in today’s dollars. At the $35 official price of the time, that was the price of 16,000 ounces of gold, about a hundredth of one percent of what it was built to hold.

A second wave in 1940 and 1941 brought about 8,048 more tonnes. At its peak in 1941, Fort Knox held about 12,956 tonnes, close to three times what it holds now. Most of the difference left in the 1950s and 1960s, when foreign governments traded their dollars for American gold at $35 an ounce, which is the story of the Bretton Woods system. So the vault now holds less gold than the first five months of mail deliveries brought in.

What else is stored in Fort Knox?

Gold, mostly, but not only. After Pearl Harbor, the Library of Congress sent the signed Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of Magna Carta there for safekeeping. They left Washington by train on December 26, 1941, and came back on October 1, 1944. The Library had asked for about 40,000 cubic feet of space. The Treasury first offered 10 cubic feet, about the size of a chest freezer, and was talked up to 60.3. The founding documents of the United States spent the war in a space smaller than a walk-in closet.

Hungary’s Crown of St. Stephen, kept in US custody after the war, waited there until 1978. From 1955 the government also kept a stockpile of opium and morphine in the building, about a year’s supply of the country’s legal painkillers. According to the depository’s Wikipedia entry, today’s non-gold residents include ten 1933 Double Eagle gold coins, a 1974-D aluminum cent and twelve gold Sacagawea dollars that flew on the space shuttle in 1999. Most attics hold an exercise bike and a box of old tax returns. This one holds a penny that was never released, coins worth millions each, and twelve dollars that went to space and are still the least valuable thing on the shelf.

Has Fort Knox ever been audited?

Yes, but not lately in the way most people picture it. The real audit work happened between 1974 and 1986.

In 1974, after a book claimed the vault had been secretly emptied, letters poured into Congress and the Treasury did something it had refused to do for decades: it opened the door. For once, somebody was allowed to open the box in the attic. On September 23, 1974, about a dozen members of Congress and about 120 reporters walked in. The Mint’s director cut the tape on a compartment, and a congressman held up a 27-pound bar. It was worth about $65,000 then. The same 400 ounces is worth about $1.6 million today.

The visit wasn’t the audit. The audit came with it. The Government Accountability Office helped plan and observed an inventory of the Fort Knox gold that year, picked 3 of its 13 compartments, and reported no differences from the records; assays came back within the Mint’s tolerances. In 1975 the Treasury set up a committee to count about 10% of the government’s gold each year. By September 30, 1986, about 92% of it had been counted, weighed or assayed by the committee or by the GAO. Then the counting mostly stopped, because the gold had been checked and sealed and very little had turned up wrong.

Since then, the Treasury’s Office of Inspector General has audited the Mint’s gold schedule every year. From 1993 to 2008 it counted bars, checked melt numbers and fineness, and weighed and assayed a statistical sample in compartments that hadn’t been audited before. Since 2008 it has mainly inspected the seals on all the sealed compartments, at Fort Knox, Denver and West Point, to confirm that nobody has opened them. Its reports have given the gold a clean opinion every year. That is the attic-box check: the tape’s still on, so everything inside is presumed to be exactly what the box says.

Into the weeds: what a vault seal actually is

After a compartment is counted, it is closed with tape designed to show tampering, hot wax at both ends and a card signed by three government representatives. Opening or sealing one takes three people: someone from the facility, someone representing the Mint’s director, and someone from the Inspector General’s office. The seals let each year’s inspectors accept the earlier count without opening the compartment again. As of September 30, 2010, the government’s deep-storage gold sat in 42 sealed compartments across the three Mint sites, and no gold had moved since 2008.

Who has been inside Fort Knox?

Very few people. The Mint says “no visitors are permitted into the facility,” and that “only one president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and one Congressional delegation in 1974, have been inside the vault.” Roosevelt visited in 1943. On August 21, 2017, in a visit the Mint’s page doesn’t mention, the Treasury Secretary toured it with Kentucky officials, the first Treasury Secretary to visit since 1948. He held a bar, announced that the gold was safe, and left.

Getting in is designed to be hard even for the people who work there. The vault door is 21 inches thick and weighs about 20 tons, and it sits on a 100-hour time lock. Several staff members each dial their own part of the combination, and the Mint says “no one person knows all the procedures to open the vault.” Most families keep the Wi-Fi password on a sticky note on the fridge. Fort Knox split its code up on purpose, so nobody can open the door alone, not even the person who wrote the note.

Is the gold still in Fort Knox?

The question came back in February 2025, when the President said, “We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there.” The Treasury Secretary answered that “we do an audit every year,” and that the report for September 30, 2024 showed the gold all there. Two bills followed: one in the House on June 6, 2025, and the Gold Reserve Transparency Act in the Senate on November 19, 2025.

The bills would require a full audit and inventory of all US gold within nine months, an outside auditor every five years after that, and an accounting of any leases or swaps of the gold over the past 50 years. The Senate bill was sent to the Banking Committee. In May 2026 the President said he still wanted to visit, to see “if the gold is there, which I’m sure it will be.”

Here is the skeptic’s case, and it’s a fair one. A seal check is not an audit. The last time inspectors weighed and assayed a large share of the bars was in the 1970s and 1980s, almost all of it by government employees. Nobody outside the government has assayed the whole pile, and a seal can only tell you that nobody opened the door since the last count, not that the last count was right.

The answer: the records are unusually boring, and in auditing, boring is good. The GAO watched the 1974 count, and about 92% of the gold was checked by 1986 with assays that matched. Three different offices have to be present to break a seal. And the ounce count hasn’t moved by a thousandth since at least 2017.

The gold is almost certainly there. It just hasn’t been proven to the standard a coin shop would ask of you. A dealer will weigh and test your one-ounce coin before paying for it. The Treasury hasn’t done that to its 147 million ounces in about 40 years.

Can you visit Fort Knox?

No. The depository sits on the Army’s Fort Knox post in Kentucky, and visitors aren’t allowed into the depository grounds. The building is guarded by the US Mint Police. For almost everyone since 1937, the granite outside has been as close as it gets.

Outside the US: other countries’ gold vaults

• Germany: the Bundesbank moved 674 tonnes home to Frankfurt between 2013 and 2017, 374 tonnes from Paris and 300 from New York, and it finished three years early. By the end of 2017 about 51% of Germany’s gold was in Frankfurt, 37% at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 13% at the Bank of England.
• United Kingdom: the Bank of England’s vaults in London hold gold for the UK and for many other central banks, which is why so much of the world’s official gold is counted in London rather than at home.
• Canada and New Zealand hold no official gold at all. Our article on how much gold there is has the table for thirteen countries.

The one vault you can audit yourself

Fort Knox is the taped box in the attic. Everyone trusts the tape, and the tape is probably right. The coins in your own drawer are the box you’re allowed to open: you can count them, weigh them and test them with a magnet, no congressional delegation required. Fort Knox needs a 20-ton door, a 100-hour time lock and three signatures to check its gold. You need a kitchen scale and a free Saturday.

Sources

• Fort Knox holdings and book value, September 30, 2026: US Treasury, Status Report of US Government Gold Reserve (FiscalData).
• Construction, first shipments “shipped by the United States Postal Service,” bars, visitors and the vault procedures: US Mint, Fort Knox history.
• The 1937 and 1940–41 shipments, the vault door and time lock, the 1941 documents, other stored items and the 2011 bar fineness figures: United States Bullion Depository, Wikipedia.
• The 1974 visit: Numismatic News, Gold all there when Ft. Knox opened doors.
• Audit history, the seals and the 42 compartments: GAO, testimony GAO-11-768T, June 23, 2011. A recent Inspector General audit: OIG-23-003.
• The 2017 visit: Coin World, Treasury secretary pays visit to Fort Knox gold.
• 2025–2026 statements: Forbes, May 10, 2026. The bills: H.R. 3795 and S. 3218; Coin World, Senate proposal calls for audit of nation’s gold.
• Germany: Bundesbank, Bundesbank completes gold transfers ahead of schedule, 2017. Germany’s reserves: World Gold Council data for the second quarter of 2026, via our article on how much gold there is.
• Gold at $3,996.90 an ounce on October 24, 2026: gold-api.com. National debt growth of about $6.57 billion a day: Treasury Debt to the Penny, as used on this site.

Worked out here, for checking: 147,341,858.382 oz × 31.1035 g = 4,582.8 tonnes; ÷ 19.32 g/cm³ = 237 m³, a cube 6.19 m (20.3 ft) on a side. × $3,996.90 = $588.9 billion; book value $6,221,097,412.78 (= $42.2222 an ounce); ratio 94.7. 147.34 million ÷ 400 = 368,355 bars; ÷ 480 a day = 767 working days ÷ 260 = 2.95 years. Debt $75,995 a second × 86,400 = $6.566 billion a day: $6.22 billion takes 22.7 hours, $588.9 billion takes 89.7 days. Per American: ÷ 342,916,055 = 0.43 oz, $1,717. 4,582.8 ÷ 3,350.3 = 1.37 (Germany). Building: $560,000 × 334.4 ÷ 13.9 (CPI-U) = $13.5 million; ÷ $35 = 16,000 oz, 0.011% of today’s holdings. 1974 bar: 400 oz × $3,996.90 = $1.6 million.

Questions people actually ask

How much gold is in Fort Knox?

147,341,858.382 troy ounces, about 4,583 metric tons, according to the Treasury’s gold report for September 30, 2026. That’s a little more than half of the US government’s gold.

How much is the gold in Fort Knox worth?

About $589 billion at the October 24, 2026 price of $3,996.90 an ounce. The Treasury carries it on its books at the official price of $42.2222 an ounce, or about $6.2 billion.

Has Fort Knox ever been audited?

Yes. The GAO observed an inventory in 1974, and by 1986 about 92% of the government’s gold had been counted or assayed and sealed. The Treasury’s Inspector General audits the gold every year, and since 2008 that check has mainly been an inspection of the seals.

When was the last time Fort Knox was opened?

The last widely reported visit was on August 21, 2017, when the Treasury Secretary toured the vault with Kentucky officials. Before that, the vault was opened to members of Congress and reporters on September 23, 1974.

Can you visit Fort Knox?

No. The US Mint says no visitors are permitted into the Fort Knox Bullion Depository. Only one president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and one congressional delegation, in 1974, have been inside the vault, according to the Mint.

Is the gold still in Fort Knox?

The Treasury reports the same 147,341,858.382 ounces every month, and its Inspector General’s yearly audits have found no problems. Skeptics point out that no outside auditor has weighed and assayed the whole pile in decades, and bills introduced in 2025 would require one.

How many gold bars are in Fort Knox?

About 370,000, if each bar holds about 400 troy ounces, as the US Mint says. Most are coin bars about 90% gold, melted from US gold coins turned in during the 1930s.

How much does a Fort Knox gold bar weigh?

About 27 pounds. Each bar is about 7 inches long, 3.5 inches wide and 1.75 inches thick and holds about 400 troy ounces of gold.

Who owns the gold in Fort Knox?

The US Treasury. The US Mint, a Treasury bureau, runs the depository and guards the gold. It is not the Federal Reserve’s gold, though the Treasury has issued gold certificates to the Federal Reserve Banks against its gold.