Gold price update — July 2026: dollar gold up, sterling gold down

The headline figures

July 2026 was a quiet month with a sharp dip in the middle of it. The GBP gold price opened at £3,041.07 per troy ounce, reached £3,126.49 on 3 July, fell to £2,950.04 on 16 July and finished the month at £2,999.03. Peak to trough that is a swing of about 5.6% inside four weeks, which is a useful reminder that a valuation is a snapshot of a particular day, not a standing figure.

Source: the exchange-rates.org United Kingdom daily gold series, retrieved 6 August 2026. Translated into the per-gram figure that matters to a seller, the 31 July close of £2,999.03/oz is about £96.42 per gram of fine gold, and the July average of £3,042.90/oz is about £97.83 per gram. Those are pure-metal figures, not buyer rates, the difference is explained in spot price versus scrap price.

Sterling did most of the work

This is the part most monthly round-ups skip, and it is the part that actually explains a UK seller’s month. Gold is priced globally in US dollars. In dollar terms July was a modest up month: gold closed 31 July 2026 at $4,038 per ounce, up 0.57% on the month and about 22% above where it stood a year earlier (Fortune, 31 July 2026).

Over the same month sterling firmed from $1.3280 on 1 July to $1.3481 on 31 July, an increase of about 1.5%, with a July average of $1.3384 (exchange-rates.org GBP/USD history, retrieved 6 August 2026). A stronger pound buys more dollars, so the same dollar-denominated ounce converts into fewer pounds. Roughly speaking, a 0.6% rise in dollar gold set against a 1.5% rise in sterling leaves the GBP price slightly lower, which is what happened.

The practical takeaway is that if you follow gold headlines written for a US audience, you will sometimes see a rising market on a day your own valuation is flat or lower. Neither number is wrong. We covered the mechanism in more detail in sterling, the dollar and your gold.

What moved the market

The month turned on the Federal Reserve meeting of 29 July 2026. The Fed held its target range at 3.50%–3.75% for a fifth consecutive meeting, but the vote was divided: Cleveland’s Beth Hammack, Dallas’s Lorie Logan and Minneapolis’s Neel Kashkari all dissented in favour of a 25 basis point rise, and Chair Kevin Warsh removed forward guidance, saying markets had already done a good deal of the tightening (Kiplinger live coverage, 29 July 2026). Gold rose on the announcement and crested $4,100 the following day (Yahoo Finance, 30 July 2026).

Before that, the first three weeks of July were dominated by a resilient dollar and firm real yields, which is a straightforward headwind for a metal that pays no income. Reporting on 29 July also noted gold-backed ETF outflows of $8.9bn in June, cutting holdings by 74 tonnes to 4,047 tonnes, partly offset by China’s central bank adding just under 15 tonnes in a twentieth consecutive month of buying (Capital.com, 29 July 2026). That tension, funds selling while official reserves keep buying, is a fair description of the whole of 2026 so far.

Geopolitics stayed in the background rather than the foreground. Middle East tension and higher oil prices featured in month-end market commentary, and on 31 July silver traded briefly above $59 on news that the United States had paused airstrikes (Yahoo Finance, 31 July 2026). None of that is a forecast. It is simply what the month contained.

Where silver went

Silver had the harder month, as it usually does when sentiment softens. The GBP silver price opened July at £44.667 per troy ounce, peaked at £46.695 on 3 July, bottomed at £41.203 on 16 July and closed the month at £42.718, a fall of about 4.4%. The July average was £43.822/oz (exchange-rates.org United Kingdom daily silver series, retrieved 6 August 2026).

That close is about £1.37 per gram of fine silver, or roughly £1.27 per gram of metal content in sterling (.925) before any refining allowance. Silver moves further than gold in both directions because roughly half its demand is industrial, a point we set out in what drives the UK silver price and in the Q2 2026 silver update.

Per-carat context for the July close

Most people do not own fine gold. They own 9ct, 14ct, 18ct or 22ct jewellery, and the useful question is what the metal inside it was worth at the end of July. The table below applies standard UK finenesses to the 31 July fine-gold figure of £96.42 per gram.

What it means if you are deciding whether to sell

Two things are true at the same time, and both matter. Gold in July 2026 was lower than in June and a long way below its January 2026 peak, which Capital.com puts at $5,608.35 on 29 January 2026. It was also about 22% higher in dollar terms than twelve months earlier (Fortune, 31 July 2026). A drawer of unwanted 9ct chain sold in July 2026 still cleared materially more than the same chain would have done in mid-2025.

What nobody can tell you is what happens next, and you should be wary of anyone who claims otherwise. The Fed itself split three ways in July. The honest position is that a market with a divided central bank, ETF selling and steady official buying is a market with a genuine two-sided argument in it. Waiting for the top is a strategy that only ever looks obvious afterwards, and the same is true of selling into a dip.

The practical route is unchanged: get an indicative figure, in writing, dated, and then decide with a real number in front of you rather than a headline. If you are weighing up where to sell rather than when, the honest maths on pawnbrokers versus postal buyers and how to sell gold safely by post are the two pieces worth reading first.

What we are doing on our side

Our indicative per-gram rates are published with the date they were reviewed, and they are exactly that: indicative. Your firm offer is set after an XRF assay against the precious-metal market rate on the day your parcel is inspected, and it depends on inspection, weight, purity, hallmarks, stones, condition and that day’s rate. You see the written figure before you decide anything, and if you decline, the items come back to you free of charge. If you accept, payment goes out by Faster Payments within one working hour of acceptance, usually within 30 minutes during working hours.

The longer view sits on the gold price history chart, which shows every month back to 2011. A single month, in either direction, is a small feature on that line.

Common questions

Related guides

Reference pages

• Gold price today, UK rates
• Silver price today, UK rates
• UK gold hallmark guide
• How we value gold