Gold and silver price by year, 1913 to today

Gold and silver price by year: the full table

US dollars per troy ounce, yearly averages. *2026 is the spot price on Oct 24, 2026, not a yearly average. Gold before 1968 is the official US price; silver before 1970 is the US Geological Survey’s yearly value.

Why gold sat at $20.67, then $35, for decades

For the first half of this table, gold’s dollar price was not a price in the everyday sense. It was a definition. The Gold Standard Act of 1900 made a dollar a fixed weight of gold, which worked out to $20.67 an ounce. The Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 changed the definition, and the next day the price was $35. The government then held it there for more than thirty years, like a store that prints the price on the box and refuses to discuss it.

A free market price came back in 1968, when London began trading gold beside the official price, and the official link ended on August 15, 1971, when the US stopped swapping gold for dollars with other governments. Americans could not legally own gold bullion again until December 31, 1974. The story of 1971 and what gold did in the 1970s are told in full elsewhere on the site.

So read the early years carefully. When the gold column shows $35 in 1950 and $35 in 1965, gold did not stand still while everything else moved. The dollar moved, and the law kept the gold price from saying so. That is also why this page shows no gold-silver ratio before 1970: both metals had prices managed by the government, so a ratio would only measure the law.

Is gold higher now than in 1980, after inflation?

Yes, for gold, and only recently. Gold averaged $615 in 1980, which is $2,496 in today’s dollars. The first year whose average beat that, after inflation, was 2024. Someone who bought at the 1980 average waited decades to come out ahead in what the gold could actually buy. The January 1980 peak, $850 on the London fix, is about $3,450 in today’s dollars, and the spot price of $3,997 on Oct 24, 2026 is above it.

This is the bear case for my own position, and silver makes it better than gold does. Silver averaged $20.63 in 1980, $83.72 in today’s dollars. The best yearly average since then, after inflation, was 2011, at $52.22. Its record close of $48.70 on January 18, 1980 is about $198 in today’s dollars, and even the January 29, 2026 record of $121.67 fell short of it (the guide to the 2026 spike explains that one). A metal can be a store of value over a century and still go nowhere for forty years. Both are true, and the table shows both.

Starting years matter more than anything else here. Pick 1980 and gold looks slow; pick 2000, when it averaged $279 ($542 in today’s dollars), and it looks brilliant. The gold vs inflation chart runs the same comparison from four different starting years so you can see how much the choice decides.

What was silver worth in 1964?

About $1.29 an ounce. The US Treasury still sold silver at about that price, which kept it nearly flat from 1963 to 1966, and that is the reason 1964 is the famous year: at $1.29, the silver in a quarter was worth almost exactly 25 cents. Once silver rose above that, coins were worth more melted than spent, so the Mint took the silver out from 1965. The 1964 quarter calculator shows what that quarter’s silver is worth today, and the guide to when coins stopped being silver covers thirteen countries.

What these averages leave out

A yearly average is one number for 365 days of prices, so it hides the spikes: 1980 and January 2026 both looked far wilder day to day than any average shows. The last row is a spot price, not an average. The price index has its own limits, which the article on whether CPI is accurate takes seriously. And these are prices for an ounce of metal, the spot price; coins and bars cost more, by the amount the premium calculator works out. Nothing here says where prices go next.

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