Today's current silver price is influenced by various factors, similar to the gold market with geopolitical tensions and rising inflation, but more importantly, the driving factors that control the silver market are the industrial silver market in manufacturing and heavy machinery. The physical silver supply in the earth has been diminishing due to recent mining efforts, making the total available above-ground supply much shorter than industrial demand. The silver spot price is mainly found by looking at the COMEX market, which represents the silver futures bid and ask price in the United States Dollars. Around the world, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) runs a market for institutional market makers to be able to trade silver using the LBMA silver price in British Pounds. Given these commodity exchange markets, traders around the world are then able to calculate the live silver spot price and trade both physical silver bullion and paper silver contracts. Silver is known to have more a more volatile trading day due to the lower price per ounce, and higher ounce volume traded than any other precious metals.
Silver has been used as an anti-bacterial agent and store of value for many centuries, making it a great metal to be used for interchanging currency, as it was in the United States up until 1964. All coinage was made of 90% Junk Silver, and still holds great intrinsic value, being valued by multiples of the original face value. Immediately after the United States decided to make silver coinage into copper-nickel-clad coinage, the value of silver started to rise exponentially. In 1965, the price of silver was around $1.40 per troy ounce, rising to $5 per troy ounce coming into 1975. Silver started to rally in 1979, with the Hunt Brothers coming from the stock market, creating a silver squeeze bringing the all-time silver price to $49.45 on January 18th, 1980. Adjusted for inflation this was a remarkable run for silver, which inevitably came crashing down to around a settle point of around $5-7 per troy ounce for the next 25 years. The next historic silver run came after the 2008 financial crisis, making the silver spot price run from $8 per troy ounce to a close high of $49.21 per troy ounce, which like history - repeated itself and came to another stable level of $15 per troy ounce. More recently, silver prices and silver products have been incurring a physical silver premium, especially for bars and coins weighing below 100 ounces due to the manufacturing cost. The current spot price of silver is based on a 4-year run since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic and recently broke the $30 per troy ounce barrier in 2024. The silver price history and silver price chart above date back to these early events, and keep track of the live silver price updated every 10 seconds.
Often, when people refer to spot silver price, they are referring to the silver futures market, determined by the current value of all troy ounces being traded in either the LBMA or COMEX markets. Investors purchase "paper silver" or ETFs that represent the opportunity to buy or sell 1000 troy ounce bars, called "COMEX Bars". These are called silver futures contracts. Similarly, gold also had contract markets where investors could track the live gold price determined by the buying and selling of gold futures. Live silver prices change rapidly, depending on market needs for manufacturing, as well as general supply and demand shocks that happen due to geopolitical turmoil. Spot prices for both physical and futures can be determined using the silver price chart seen above.
Silver is often traded in larger sizes than gold bars due to the price per ounce being significantly lower. Most commonly, silver bars come in the format of 1 oz bars, 5 oz bars, 10 oz bars, 1 kilo bars, and 100 oz bars. Popular refiners and assayers for silver bars include the Royal Canadian Mint, Engelhard, Johnson Matthey, and Sunshine Mint. Bars for silver have a significantly lower premium than rounds and sovereign mint-backed coins due to their bulk-style investment strategy. The hard part for silver investors is that silver is the least dense price per ounce for any precious metal, making storage a common issue.
Silver coins are a very common way to invest in silver bullion products, coming in 1 troy ounce size and backed by sovereign mints. Buying 20-25 coins usually comes in tubes, and boxes of silver coins come in quantities of 500, called the "Monster Box". The most popular silver coins are Austrian Silver Philharmonics, Australian Silver Kangaroos, American Silver Eagles, Canadian Silver Maple Leafs, Mexican Silver Libertads, and British Britannia. Each is backed by legal tender and is eligible due to its .999 silver fineness and accreditation status.
The current price of Silver can be found by looking at the chart above. Live silver prices are re-calculated every 10 seconds according to the spot price. Silver rates for grams and kilos can be found by dividing by 31.1 grams (Gram price) or multiplying by 32.15 (Kilo price).
The live silver price chart opens Sunday at 6 PM EST, to Friday at 5 PM EST. Many different markets spot prices are pulled from but the most common on the COMEX market is USD based in the United States, and the LBMA bullion exchange denoted in British pounds. The Daily Price of silver is based on the market makers' bids and asks that trade in the market during market hours.
Silver is measured by Troy ounces which are the standard for precious metals, denoted as 31.1 grams. You can read more about how many grams are in an ounce here and calculate how many ounces of silver you have using the formulas given. The daily price of silver is denoted by 1 troy ounce.
Investors commonly track the gold-to-silver ratio to keep up on current price trends between the two precious metals so they can swap positions between them. Gold and silver have not always moved in parallel even though many investors view them as constants. You can calculate the gold-to-silver ratio by dividing the spot price in USD for gold by the spot price in USD for silver. Historically the ratio is around 60-70, with the lowest being 32.29 in 2011, and the highest being 119.76 in 2020.
Silver has a high premium price per coin due to the manufacturing, design, and minting cost of small-sized silver, specifically 1 oz silver coins such as the American Silver Eagle. In recent years, silver premiums have risen to all-time highs due to the largest manufacturing costs cited by global physical silver shortages by the US Mint and Royal Canadian Mint.
The easiest way to sell silver bullion and physical precious metals is to sign up for a pure marketplace account, where we offer a "stock-exchange" experience for physical metals. You can sign up here for free today and get access to portfolio tracking tools and liquidity for your coins and bullion.
The All-Time high price of silver spot was $49.45 on January 18th, 1980, when the Hunt Brothers created Silver Thursday, the largest short squeeze and subsequent price reduction in silver of all time. The Hunt brothers had a background in the stock market, bringing knowledge of Silver price fluctuations to the market value. Ultimately it caused many retail-level investors, including coin shops and coin investors to lose returns on their investments.
