Where does silver come from?

Silver is mined almost everywhere and is the main product almost nowhere. On this page silver production means mine output of silver metal, unless refined or recycled silver is named. In 2025 Mexico mined 6,300 tonnes, 24% of the world's 26,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). Peru followed at 14% and China at 13%, then Bolivia at 5.8% and Chile at 5.4%, with Poland, Russia and United States close behind. Output outside the 14 countries listed separately came to 17%, and world mine production changed +3% from the previous year.

The single most important fact about silver supply is that it is a by-product. The Silver Institute's annual survey put primary silver mines at 26% of world mine production in 2025, a record low, against 29% from lead-zinc mines, 28% from copper mines and 16% from gold mines (Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026). That has a consequence most commodities do not share: silver supply barely responds to the silver price. A lead-zinc mine sets its production rate on the economics of lead and zinc, and the silver it recovers arrives regardless. When silver doubles, primary silver mines can push a little harder, but they are too small a share of the total to move the balance quickly, and when silver halves, by-product output does not fall.

The geology follows two families. Epithermal veins form where hot fluids rise through fractures near the surface above volcanic arcs and deposit silver sulfides and sulfosalts in the top kilometer of crust; that is the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico, the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes and the historic districts of Nevada and Idaho. The second family is silver locked inside base-metal sulfides: the sediment-hosted lead-zinc beds of Australia and China, the copper-silver shale of southwest Poland, the volcanogenic lenses of Peru and Sweden, and the copper porphyries of Chile, from which silver is recovered in the refinery rather than at the mine.

Reserves, the part of identified deposits that could be mined economically at the time of the estimate, were 610,000 tonnes in 2025, with Peru holding 18%, Russia 15% and Australia 15% (USGS MCS). Those reserves are mostly silver contained in deposits that will be mined for something else, so the figure describes a co-product inventory rather than a set of silver mines waiting to be built.

The silver export table (HS 7106, silver unwrought, semi-manufactured or in powder form) mixes three quite different activities: shipping metal out of mines, moving bullion between vaults, and exporting industrial silver in grain, sheet and powder. In 2024 China was the largest exporter with 16% of the world's $33.5 billion, followed by United Kingdom at 10% and Mexico at 9.2% (CEPII BACI). United States and India were the largest importers, each taking about a sixth of world imports, with United Kingdom and Hong Kong next.

Reading the two lists together shows what silver actually is. Mexico appears high in exports because it mines silver. The United Kingdom appears high in both directions because London holds the vaults that underpin the wholesale market, and bars move in and out as prices and lease rates shift. Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates are trading gateways. India is the world's great physical buyer, importing bullion and grain for jewelry, silverware and, increasingly, solar and electronics manufacturing, and its import duty creates a domestic premium that can pull metal in or push it back out. The United States imports for industry, for coin blanks and for exchange-approved vaults in New York. Because the same bar can cross a border twice in a year, silver trade values overstate how much new metal exists.

Silver has a London benchmark and a New York futures market, linked by arbitrage. The LBMA Silver Price is set once each business day at noon London time in an electronic auction, in which participants submit orders until buying and selling balance; the result in US$/troy oz is the reference for physical contracts, mine sales and refiners' invoices. It launched on 15 August 2014, replacing the London silver fixing that a small group of banks had run since the nineteenth century, and it is administered by ICE Benchmark Administration. Wholesale trading itself is loco London, meaning unallocated metal held in London vaults, and it is settled in 1,000 oz good delivery bars.

In the United States the COMEX silver contract, ticker SI, trades 5,000 troy oz lots quoted in US$/troy oz and delivers 1,000 oz bars into approved New York vaults. Futures normally trade above spot by roughly the cost of interest and storage, and when that relationship breaks, as it does when tariff worries or vault shortages pull metal across the Atlantic, bars are flown between London and New York to close the gap. The Shanghai Gold Exchange quotes a yuan price, and India's exchanges price against landed cost including duty. Lease rates, the cost of borrowing metal in London, are the market's stress gauge: they sit near zero in normal conditions and spike when unallocated holders want physical bars.

The series charted here is Handy & Harman, New York. In August 2026 it averaged $65.4/troy oz, up 71% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The highest monthly average was $92.1/troy oz in January 2026; adjusted for US inflation the real record was $156.4/troy oz in January 1980, at the end of the attempted corner that broke in March 1980, and the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $0.9/troy oz in January 1960. Mines are price takers twice over: they sell concentrate at the silver value of the contained metal minus refining charges, and the concentrate buyer decides how much of the silver is payable at all.

Because most silver arrives as a by-product of lead, zinc, copper and gold mining, the supply curve is close to vertical in the short run. A rally does not call forth much new metal, and a collapse does not remove much, so shocks are absorbed almost entirely by price and by above-ground stocks. It also means silver supply is hostage to other markets: a wave of zinc mine closures or a copper strike cuts silver output even when silver is expensive.

Silver paste screen-printed onto photovoltaic cells carries the current off the cell, and there is no equally conductive substitute in production at scale. Solar has become one of the largest industrial uses of silver, so annual installation volumes in China, India, Europe and the United States now feed directly into the balance. Cell makers cut silver loading per watt every year through finer lines and copper plating research, so demand growth is the product of rising installations and falling intensity.

Silver is the best electrical and thermal conductor of any metal, so it appears in contacts, switches, relays, conductive inks, brazing alloys, membrane switches and multilayer ceramic capacitors, and in the electrical architecture of vehicles, which use more of it as they add electronics. This demand is dispersed across thousands of products in small quantities, which makes it price-insensitive: a switch contains cents of silver and cannot easily be redesigned to contain less.

Silver is bought as a store of value as well as an input, and investment demand is the swing factor in most price moves. Exchange-traded funds holding physical bars, retail coin and bar purchases in the United States, Germany and India, and futures positioning together decide whether investors are absorbing metal or releasing it. Because the investment market is small in dollar terms compared with gold's, a modest flow of money produces a large move in price.

Silver trades with gold most of the time and amplifies it. The same forces that lift gold, falling real interest rates, a weaker dollar, monetary and geopolitical anxiety, lift silver more in percentage terms, and hurt it more when they reverse. Traders watch the ratio of the two prices as a rough gauge of whether silver is cheap or expensive relative to its usual relationship, and large moves in the ratio often mark turning points in investor appetite.

The wholesale market runs on unallocated claims against bars in London and New York vaults. When holders convert claims into metal, or when bars are shipped to another jurisdiction, the free float shrinks and the cost of borrowing silver rises sharply. Because industrial buyers need physical bars on a schedule, a squeeze in the borrowing market feeds through to the spot price quickly, and it can occur while total reported stocks still look comfortable.

India is the largest physical buyer and the most price-sensitive. Its purchases rise when the rupee price falls and stall when it spikes, and its import duty creates a domestic premium that signals whether the country is pulling metal in. Indian households also sell back silverware and jewelry when prices are high, which adds recycled supply at exactly the moment the market is tight and acts as a brake on rallies.

How silver is produced depends on what the mine is looking for. At a primary silver mine, epithermal vein ore is mined underground, crushed and ground, and treated either by cyanide leaching, which dissolves silver as it does gold, or by flotation into a silver-rich concentrate. Older Mexican and Bolivian operations used the patio and pan amalgamation processes, and before them simple smelting of rich surface ore; the modern equivalents are Merrill-Crowe zinc precipitation for leach solutions and conventional flotation for sulfide ore.

At a lead-zinc mine, silver reports to the lead concentrate, and it is recovered inside the lead smelter. Molten lead bullion is treated by the Parkes process, in which zinc is stirred into it; silver and gold prefer the zinc and rise as a crust that is skimmed, distilled to drive off the zinc and cupelled to leave doré. At a copper mine, silver dissolves into the anode during electrolytic refining and settles as anode slime at the bottom of the cell, together with gold, selenium and tellurium; the slime is treated separately. In both cases the silver is a credit on someone else's invoice.

Doré from all these routes goes to refiners, who part gold from silver by electrolysis in the Moebius or Balbach-Thum cells and cast the result into 1,000 oz good delivery bars for the wholesale market, or into grain, sheet and shot for industry. Recycled silver enters the same refineries from three streams: industrial scrap such as spent brazing alloy, electrical contacts and photographic and X-ray fixer; jewelry and silverware, which comes back when prices are high; and, in growing volume, end-of-life solar panels and electronics, though recovery from those is still limited.

Silver is unusual in being both an industrial commodity and a monetary metal, and industry now takes the larger share. The Silver Institute put industrial applications at 58% of total silver demand in 2025, with photovoltaics alone accounting for 17% of world demand and more than a quarter of the industrial total, ahead of electrical and electronic components, brazing alloys and solders (Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026). Jewelry and silverware are the next largest uses, concentrated in India, China, Thailand and Italy, and net physical investment in bars and coins makes up much of the rest.

The properties behind those uses are simple. Silver has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any element and the highest optical reflectivity, and its oxide still conducts, which is why silver contacts do not fail when they tarnish. It is also an effective biocide, used in wound dressings and antimicrobial coatings. Photography, once the largest single use, has collapsed to a small share as film gave way to digital sensors, and the market absorbed that decline over two decades. Unlike gold, a large part of the silver ever mined has been consumed and dispersed in products too dilute to recover.

Mining is spread across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia, but refining and vaulting are concentrated. A relatively small number of accredited refiners, in Switzerland, Germany, the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, China and Australia, produce the good delivery bars that the wholesale market accepts, and the LBMA's good delivery list decides whose bars can settle a London trade. That accreditation, rather than geography, is what makes a bar fungible.

The physical market runs through vaults rather than ports. London vaults hold the unallocated metal behind the loco London market and the stock backing most European exchange-traded funds; New York vaults hold COMEX-eligible and registered stocks; Zurich, Singapore, Shanghai and Mumbai hold regional inventories. Bars move between them by air freight when price differences, tariffs or lease rates justify the cost, and those flows can be large enough to drain one center while filling another. United Kingdom appears near the top of both the export and import tables in 2024 for exactly this reason (CEPII BACI).

The chokepoints are financial and regulatory rather than physical. A shortage of free-floating metal in London, rather than a shortage of silver in the world, is what produces spikes in lease rates and in the spot price. Tariff decisions on bullion entering the United States redirect bars across the Atlantic. Indian import duty governs the largest physical demand. Sanctions have removed some Russian refiners' bars from the accepted lists. On the mine side, the risk is indirect: because silver is a by-product, a labor dispute in Peruvian copper or an environmental shutdown in Chinese lead-zinc removes silver from the market for reasons that have nothing to do with silver at all.