Understanding melt value

Melt value is the dollar value of the pure metal in a coin or bar, calculated against the current spot price. It's the floor underneath every piece in your stack — what the metal alone is worth if you ignored the design, the mint, the rarity, and the dealer markup.

This article covers the formula Gold Silver Ledger uses, why it's simpler than the formula you may have seen on other precious metals sites, and where melt value shows up across the app.

For the broader picture of how each inventory item is tracked, see How holdings work in Gold Silver Ledger.

For the special case of pre-1965 US fractional silver, see How junk silver melt value is calculated — junk silver uses a different formula and gets its own article.

For any standard product in the app, the melt value of one piece is:

melt value = weight × spot price

That's the entire formula. Two inputs, one number out. No purity multiplier. No gross-versus-fine adjustment. No fractional math.

The reason it stays this simple is the way the catalog records weight. The "Weight" shown next to any product in Gold Silver Ledger is already the pure metal content of the piece, not the gross physical weight.

A 1 oz American Gold Eagle in the catalog has a weight of 1.000 oz — meaning one troy ounce of pure gold — even though the actual coin weighs slightly more than that because of the copper and silver alloyed into the 22-karat blend.

The fine-weight conversion is baked in at the catalog level, so it doesn't need to happen again in the formula.

If you've used another precious metals tracker or a spot calculator, you may have seen the formula written as weight × purity × spot.

That version assumes you're feeding it the gross weight of the piece — the full physical weight, alloy and all — and applying the purity multiplier to extract just the pure metal portion.

Gold Silver Ledger doesn't store gross weight. The catalog stores fine weight directly. So the purity multiplier would be redundant: applying 91.67% to a number that's already had 91.67% applied to it would undercount the metal.

Purity is still shown on every item — it's a useful piece of context, especially for distinguishing 22-karat coins from 99.9% bullion-grade pieces, and even more so for junk silver, where it tells you what fineness the underlying coin actually is. But it's display information, not part of the calculation.

A handful of concrete cases using current spot benchmarks (~$4,700 per ounce for gold, ~$80 per ounce for silver):

The same arithmetic scales up cleanly when you hold more than one. Ten Silver Eagles at $80 spot have a combined melt value of 10 × 1.000 × $80 = $800.

The app does this summation automatically across every view — the totals on the dashboard, the metal-level current value in group view, and every analytics breakdown all roll up from the same per-item calculation.

You'll see melt value in a few places:

Melt value moves with spot. When the gold price ticks up, every gold item's current value climbs with it; when silver dips, every silver holding follows. The page updates as new spot data flows in, so the numbers you see are live within a few minutes of the most recent fetch.

Three numbers travel together for every held item, and it's worth being precise about which is which.

Gain or loss is Current Value − Purchase Price. If you bought a coin for $90 when its melt value at the time was $80, you paid a $10 premium.

If silver doubles and the coin's current melt value is $160, your gain is $70, the $60 from spot appreciation plus the closing $10 of the premium you originally paid, if the dealer marketplace prices it at pure melt — in practice premiums move too, which is its own conversation in Recorded spot vs. live spot: what each one does.

Pre-1965 US dimes, quarters, half dollars, Morgan dollars, and Peace dollars don't use the standard formula. They use face value × multiplier × spot instead, because junk silver was minted by face value in an era when the silver content varied by denomination, but rolls and bags were measured in dollar terms.

A pre-1965 dime, for example, has a face value of $0.10 and a junk-silver multiplier of 0.715, so its melt is $0.10 × 0.715 × spot — at $80 silver, that's about $5.72 per dime. The full math, all six junk-silver entries in the catalog, and the multipliers for each are covered in [How junk silver melt value is calculated].

Melt is the floor, not the ceiling. A few real-world cases where it understates what a piece is worth:

The dashboard, the analytics page, and the holdings views all use melt value as the current-value baseline, since it's the one number that can be calculated objectively and consistently across every product.

If you want to track market premiums for specific numismatic pieces separately, the nickname and reference fields on each item are good places to note them.

See Adding a nickname to a specific item and Adding a user reference (serial number, storage location).