Every silver object carries two numbers. The first is what the metal is worth if you destroyed the object. The second is what someone will pay to own it intact.
The first number is easy to calculate and we are going to teach you exactly how. The second is where all the interesting things happen.
Spot: the floor, and only the floor
Spot is the global market price for one troy ounce of pure silver. Nobody sells you physical metal at spot — it is the reference number everything else is quoted against.
The internationally recognised benchmark is the LBMA Silver Price. It is set once each business day at 12:00 London time, in US dollars per fine ounce, through an electronic auction administered independently by ICE Benchmark Administration. It replaced the London Silver Fixing in 2014, a ritual that had run continuously since 1897 and for most of that time involved a small number of men in a room agreeing on a number twice a day.
The troy ounce, which has nothing to do with Troy
Here is the trap that catches almost everyone.
A troy ounce is about 31.10 grams. The ounce on your kitchen scale is about 28.35 grams. The troy ounce is roughly 10% heavier. Weigh silver on a kitchen scale set to ounces, multiply by spot, and your answer is about 10% too generous.
It gets better. A troy pound is twelve troy ounces, not sixteen — which makes a troy pound lighter than a regular pound, despite the ounces being heavier. Precious metals run on an entirely separate measurement system that most of the world abandoned centuries ago and the bullion trade simply never got around to leaving.
And no, it is not named after the Trojans. The name most likely comes from Troyes, a market town in northeastern France whose medieval trade fairs were significant enough that their weight standard outlived them by roughly eight hundred years. There is no horse involved.
Actual silver weight: the one formula worth memorising
Spot is quoted for pure silver. Sterling is only 92.5% silver, so a sterling piece contains less silver than it weighs.
Actual silver weight = total grams × purity ÷ 31.1035
Worked through on a 68 gram sterling fox:
- 68 × 0.925 = 62.9 grams of actual silver
- 62.9 ÷ 31.1035 = 2.02 troy ounces
- At $30 spot, that is roughly $61 of metal
Notice what happened. A piece weighing 68 grams holds about 2 troy ounces of silver, not the 2.19 you would get by ignoring purity. Anyone quoting gross weight as though it were silver content is either careless or optimistic on their own behalf.
If you would rather not do arithmetic, United PMR — an actual refinery — publishes a sterling silver scrap calculator that takes grams, troy ounces or pennyweight. Use it on anything you own.
Just understand what it is telling you. That is a refiner's scrap figure: the number you would get from someone who intends to melt the object into a puddle. It is, by design, the lowest number that piece will ever be worth to anybody.
Now forget that number
Melt value is a floor, and a floor is the least interesting part of a building.
Nothing sells at melt. Even a plain generic round trades a few dollars over spot, because somebody had to refine it, strike it, ship it and stock it. That gap is the premium, and on anything with artistry in it the premium is not a markup — it is most of the object.
What premium is actually buying
Labour that cannot be repeated cheaply. A detailed cast animal required a sculptor, a mould, a pour, cleanup and hand finishing. That work is priced into the object permanently, and the cost of commissioning it today would be considerably higher than when it was made.
A maker's name. The single largest multiplier on figurine prices. A silver rhinoceros is a silver rhinoceros; a Buccellati silver rhinoceros is a different market entirely, and the two are not competing for the same buyer.
Genuine scarcity. This is the one worth dwelling on. Mints strike rounds by the million and will strike more tomorrow — supply responds instantly to demand. A workshop that produced four hundred of something in 1974 and closed in 1981 is not producing more, ever. The supply of that object is now fixed and can only shrink, because objects get lost, damaged and occasionally melted by people who only knew the first number in this article.
Subject. Demand attaches to the thing depicted, not the gram weight. Dragons, cats, owls and anything a specific community collects will outrun a generic bowl of identical mass.
Completeness and condition. Intact detail, no repairs, original patina, and — for sets — every piece present. A five-piece service missing its sugar bowl is worth a fraction of a complete one.
Why premiums tend to climb
Three forces push in the same direction over time.
Supply only decreases. Every year a few more pieces are damaged, lost, or sold to a refiner by an estate in a hurry. Nothing replenishes the pool.
Attribution improves. Marks get catalogued, reference material gets digitised, and pieces that sat unidentified for decades get correctly attributed. A figurine sold as "unmarked silver animal" in 1998 and identified as workshop work in 2026 did not change — the information around it did.
The floor rises underneath. When spot climbs, melt value climbs with it, which lifts the base the premium is stacked on. Metal appreciation and collector appreciation are separate engines that happen to be bolted to the same object.
The honest caveat, stated once: premium is the part of the price with no guaranteed floor. Damage a piece badly enough, or watch a maker fall out of fashion, and you are back to the metal. But note what that actually means — your downside is capped at the melt value, which is more than almost any other collectible can say. Drop a porcelain figure and you own nothing. Drop a silver one and you still own two ounces of silver.
How to sanity-check any listing, including ours
Take the gram weight and the stated purity. Run the formula. Compare against the day's spot.
Two minutes of arithmetic tells you precisely how much of the price is metal and how much is everything else — and then you can decide, with actual numbers in front of you, whether the everything-else is worth it to you. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes it will not.
What should worry you is not a large premium. It is a seller who makes the calculation difficult.
- About the LBMA daily auction prices — how the benchmark is set and published.
- Sterling silver scrap calculator — melt value by weight and purity.
- Units of weight calculator — for converting between grams, troy ounces and pennyweight without swearing.
Every listing we publish states weight in grams and troy ounces, and purity separately, so you can run this yourself without asking us. We would rather you knew exactly what you were paying for the metal and exactly what you were paying for the sculpture.