What you actually pay for physical gold: dealer premiums by country

Spot gold is one number the whole world quotes. What you actually hand over at a dealer is always higher, and how much higher depends entirely on where you're standing. That gap is the premium, and it's the part of the cost that the headline price never shows you.

We track live retail quotes from bullion dealers across a set of markets and compare each one, converted to US dollars per troy ounce, against live spot. Here's what that looked like on a single day.

The premium, by country

Representative quote for a standard investment bar (or the closest pure-bullion product), as of 2026-07-12, spot around $4,120/oz:

Two more patterns sit underneath that table. Small bars cost more per gram than large ones: in Indonesia a 100-gram bar carried about 8.5%, while a half-gram bar ran past 15%. And jewelry costs far more than bullion: Indian 22-karat jewelry sat above 20%, and a Hong Kong ornament piece cleared 21%, against roughly 8 to 13% for pure bars in the same markets.

Where the markup comes from

Line the premiums up against how each country taxes gold and most of the spread explains itself.

India charges a 15% import duty on gold plus 3% GST. A pure 999 bar at +13.5% is essentially the tax stack, with dealer margin thin on top because competition is fierce. The jewelry premium climbs further because a separate 5% GST applies to making charges, and lower-karat pieces carry proportionally more labor.

Japan applies a flat 10% consumption tax to gold, with no investment-bullion exemption. A retail premium of 11% is that tax plus a slim dealer spread, and it barely moves from month to month because the tax is doing nearly all the work.

China sits near zero because gold traded on its main exchange as investment metal is effectively free of value-added tax, as long as it isn't withdrawn for fabrication. There the benchmark is the market itself, so it trades at spot.

Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Indonesia have no tax worth speaking of on investment-grade bars. Malaysia exempts investment precious metals outright, Hong Kong has no sales tax at all, and Indonesia levies only a 0.25% advance income tax on bullion purchases. Their 6 to 10% premium is therefore almost pure market structure: refining, fabrication, logistics, insurance, and the dealer's cut. That is also why the premium grows as bars shrink. Turning metal into a stamped one-gram bar costs about the same in labor as a one-ounce bar, so the fixed cost lands harder on the smaller unit.

For the macro forces that move the underlying spot price these premiums sit on top of, see what actually drives the gold price.

Why this matters for a buyer

The headline gold price tells you almost nothing about your entry cost. A buyer in China and a buyer in India face the same world price and pay wildly different amounts for the same metal. Anyone comparing gold across borders, or weighing bullion against a paper claim, is really deciding how much premium and tax to swallow. For the difference between owning metal and owning a claim on it, see paper vs physical gold.

Premiums move, too. They widen when local demand spikes or import channels tighten, and they compress when dealers undercut each other. That makes a live premium a better read on local physical demand than the spot price, which is set globally and knows nothing about the queue at a shop in Mumbai or Jakarta.

How we measure it

For each market we take the dealer's live local-currency sell price, normalize it to a per-gram figure, convert to US dollars per troy ounce using a live exchange rate, and compare against live spot. Premium is the percentage the local price sits above spot. Markets where a fresh local-currency reference was not available at capture time are held out rather than shown with a stale conversion.

The country index and the underlying per-dealer quotes are available through the physical prices endpoint:

GET /v1/physical/IN

The response returns each dealer quote with its premium_over_spot_bps already computed, so you can rank markets, watch a premium move over a day, or rebuild the table above yourself. Physical dealer prices require the Physical tier or higher; the pricing page has the details.

So a premium is a small number that carries a lot: the tax regime, the market structure, and how badly people locally want metal, all folded into one figure. Spot gets the headlines. But if you're the one buying, the premium is the number you pay.