Where does gold come from?

Gold is mined in more countries than almost any other metal, and no single country dominates the way Chile does copper or Australia iron ore. Production on this page means mine output of gold metal in tonnes, not refined or recycled gold. In 2025 China mined 380 tonnes, 12% of the world's 3,300 tonnes (USGS MCS). Russia and Australia followed closely, the top five countries together mined 40% of the total, and production outside the top ten accounted for 40%, spread across 13 countries. World mine output changed not available for a ten-year span in this source over the ten years to 2025.

The map reflects two kinds of geology. Most large deposits are orogenic: gold carried by hot fluids into fractures in ancient crust during mountain building, which explains the greenstone belts of Western Australia, Canada's Abitibi, West Africa's Birimian rocks in Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, and the goldfields of Siberia and China's Shandong province. South Africa's Witwatersrand, which supplied a large share of all gold ever mined, is different: ancient river gravels that concentrated gold more than two billion years ago and were later buried kilometers deep. The second kind is young: epithermal and porphyry deposits along volcanic arcs in Nevada, the Andes, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where gold is often a by-product of copper mining.

Reserves, the part of known deposits that could be mined at a profit under conditions at the time of the estimate, were 66,000 tonnes in 2025. Australia held 20%, with Russia and South Africa next (USGS MCS). Reserves are only a fraction of the gold that has already been mined and still exists above ground in bars, coins and jewelry, and that stock, not new mining, is what makes the gold market unlike other commodities.

The export table for gold (HS 7108, unwrought and semi-manufactured gold) does not show where gold is mined. It shows where gold is refined, vaulted and traded. In 2024 Switzerland was the largest exporter, with 18% of the world's $587.7 billion of gold exports (CEPII BACI), and United Arab Emirates and Canada were next. Switzerland has the largest refining capacity in the world and turns doré from mines and scrap from jewelry into bars of 999.9 fineness. The United Kingdom hosts the London vaults that back the LBMA market, Hong Kong is the gateway to mainland China, and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai) is the trading hub for gold from Africa and South Asia. Each of them imports and exports far more gold than it mines, which is none.

Importers show where gold is bought. Switzerland was the largest importer in 2024, taking 19% of world imports (CEPII BACI), and the largest flows in physical terms run from London and Switzerland to China, India, Turkey (Türkiye) and the Gulf. Mine countries appear lower in the table because much of their output is shipped as doré, an unrefined alloy, and refined elsewhere before it is counted again as an export of the refining country.

Gold has two reference prices and they are linked by arbitrage. The LBMA Gold Price is set twice a day, at 10:30 and 15:00 London time, in an electronic auction run by ICE Benchmark Administration in which banks and traders submit orders until buying and selling balance, and the result in US$/troy oz is the benchmark for mine sales, central bank transactions and most physical contracts. It replaced the London gold fix in March 2015, which had been set by a small group of banks since 1919. The London market itself trades loco London, meaning unallocated gold held in London vaults, in 400 oz good delivery bars.

In the United States, the COMEX Gold contract (ticker GC) trades 100 troy oz lots quoted in US$/troy oz and can be delivered in 100 oz or kilo bars into approved New York vaults. Futures carry a premium over spot equal to interest and storage cost, and when the premium diverges, as it did in early 2025 when tariff fears pulled metal into New York, bars are flown across the Atlantic to close it. The Shanghai Gold Exchange sets a yuan benchmark that usually trades at a premium to London when Chinese demand is strong and a discount when it is weak, and Indian import duties create a separate local premium.

The series charted here is London PM fix. In August 2026 it averaged $4,411/troy oz, up 31% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The nominal high was $5,020/troy oz in February 2026; in inflation-adjusted terms the record was $4,809/troy oz in February 2026, and the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $35/troy oz in January 1960. Mines are price takers: they sell doré to refiners at the London price minus refining and transport charges, and a mine's margin is the gap between that and its cost per ounce.

Gold pays no interest, so its main cost is the yield given up by not holding bonds. When real yields, meaning bond yields minus expected inflation, fall, that cost shrinks and gold tends to rise; when real yields rise, gold tends to fall. The dollar works alongside this: gold is priced in dollars, and a weaker dollar makes it cheaper for buyers elsewhere and lifts the dollar price. Expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts therefore move gold before the cuts happen.

Central banks hold gold as a reserve asset that carries no counterparty risk and cannot be frozen by another government. After the freezing of Russian reserves in 2022, emerging-market central banks led by China, Poland, Turkey (Türkiye) and India bought at the fastest pace on record, more than 1,000 tonnes a year according to the World Gold Council. Official buying absorbs a large share of annual mine supply and, unlike investor demand, does not reverse quickly when prices rise.

Exchange-traded funds backed by physical gold let investors hold bars without a vault, and their holdings are a visible gauge of western investment demand. Since the first US fund launched in November 2004, inflows during crises such as 2008, 2020 and 2025 have coincided with rallies, and outflows during 2013 and 2021 to 2022 with declines. Bar and coin buying in Germany, India, China and the United States is the retail counterpart and tends to rise when local currencies weaken.

Jewelry is the largest single use of gold, and India and China are the largest markets. Their demand is seasonal, peaking around Indian weddings and festivals in the fourth quarter and Chinese New Year, and price sensitive: when gold rises sharply, jewelry buying falls and recycled gold flows back to refiners, which cushions the price. Import duties in India and the strength of the rupee and yuan shape how much of a dollar rally reaches consumers.

Gold is bought when trust in other assets falls: wars, sanctions, banking failures, sovereign debt worries and disputes over central bank independence have each produced rallies. The effect is strongest when the crisis also lowers expected interest rates. Because the above-ground stock is large and always for sale at some price, these moves are about shifts in who wants to hold gold, not about shortage, and they fade when the risk passes unless rates have also changed.

Mine output responds slowly to price because a new mine takes a decade or more to permit and build, and total mine supply is small relative to the stock above ground. What responds quickly is recycling: high prices bring old jewelry and scrap to refiners within weeks. Mining costs, measured as all-in sustaining cost per ounce, set a floor below which marginal mines close, and rising costs for energy, labor and lower ore grades have lifted that floor over time.

Most gold is mined in open pits from low-grade ore of one to two grams per tonne; the deep mines of South Africa and some Canadian and Australian operations mine higher-grade veins underground, in South Africa's case at depths beyond three kilometers. Ore is crushed and ground, and the gold is dissolved in a dilute cyanide solution, a process called cyanidation, then collected on activated carbon and stripped and plated out by electrowinning. Low-grade ore is treated by heap leaching, stacking crushed rock on a lined pad and dripping cyanide solution through it for months. Refractory ores, where gold is locked in sulfide minerals, must first be roasted, pressure-oxidized or bacterially treated to free the metal.

The product at the mine is doré, a bar of roughly 60% to 95% gold with silver and base metals, which is shipped under guard to a refinery. Refiners melt and chlorinate the doré to remove base metals and silver, then dissolve and electrolytically refine the gold to 999.9 fineness, casting it into the 400 oz good delivery bars used in London, kilo bars used in Asia, or smaller bars and grains for jewelers. Recycled jewelry and industrial scrap enter the same refineries and become indistinguishable from mined gold.

Gold is also recovered as a by-product. Copper anode slimes from electrorefining are a significant source, and some of the largest gold producers are copper mines such as Grasberg. Artisanal and small-scale miners, working alluvial deposits by hand in Africa, South America and Asia, produce a meaningful share of world supply, often using mercury rather than cyanide, and their output reaches the market through traders in Dubai and elsewhere.

Gold is unusual in that most of it is not consumed. The World Gold Council's demand data show jewelry as the largest use, followed by investment in bars, coins and exchange-traded funds, then central bank purchases, with technology, mainly electronics connectors and dental work, taking a small share of under 10% (World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends). Jewelry in India and China alone represents a large fraction of world demand, and much of it is bought as a store of wealth as well as ornament.

Because gold does not corrode and is easily recovered, nearly all the gold ever mined still exists, held in vaults, jewelry boxes and central bank reserves. That stock is many decades of mine output, which is why the price behaves like a currency or a financial asset rather than like an industrial metal, and why annual mine supply, however large, is a small part of what is available for sale.

Mining is dispersed but refining and trading are concentrated. A few large refineries in Switzerland, together with plants in Australia, South Africa, the United States, Hong Kong, the UAE, India and China, process most of the world's doré and scrap into good delivery bars, and the LBMA's good delivery list determines which refiners' bars are accepted in London and at central banks. Switzerland was the largest gold exporter in 2024 with 18% of world export value (CEPII BACI), a position that reflects its refineries rather than any mines.

The physical market runs through vaults rather than ports. London vaults, operated by the Bank of England and commercial custodians, hold the gold behind the LBMA market; New York vaults hold COMEX stocks; Zurich, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Dubai hold regional stocks. Gold moves between them by secure air freight, and the flows reverse with price differences: bars go east to China and India when Asian premiums are high and return to London when western investors buy. Chinese imports pass mainly through Hong Kong and Shanghai under a licensing system, and India's imports are shaped by customs duty.

The chain has few physical chokepoints but several policy ones. Export bans or royalty disputes in producing countries, sanctions that exclude Russian bars from London and New York after 2022, tariff decisions on bars entering the United States, and licensing of imports into China and India each redirect flows. Artisanal gold from conflict areas in Africa and South America enters the market through traders in the Gulf and refiners with weaker controls, which is why responsible-sourcing rules from the LBMA and the OECD are a supply-chain issue in their own right.