Gold bar 500 g or Gold bar 1 kg: which is the better buy today?
Gold bar 500 g and Gold bar 1 kg are the same object at two sizes — 999.9 gold from an LBMA refinery, with the weight on the stamp — and Gold bar 1 kg holds 2.00 times the gold of Gold bar 500 g: 1000.00 g against 500.00 g. The metal costs the same per gram in both; what differs is how much of the price is the making rather than the gold, and the small one always carries more of it.
| coin | Gold bar 500 g | Gold bar 1 kg |
|---|---|---|
| fine gold | 500.00 g | 1000.00 g |
| gross weight | 500.00 g | 1000.00 g |
| purity | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt |
| length × width | 80 × 48 mm | 116 × 51 mm |
| thickness | 6.75 mm | 8.75 mm |
| face value | none — a bar is not money | none — a bar is not money |
| struck | LBMA Good Delivery | LBMA Good Delivery |
The prices come from the feed, and the feed has not answered yet.
Gold bar 500 g — Half a kilo, sixteen ounces: a vault size, bought for the premium, which is close to the kilo’s, and sold whole.
Gold bar 1 kg — The kilo bar, cast: thirty-two ounces of gold at the smallest premium on this site, and the size at which a dealer’s margin is a telephone call.
Both are 999.9 fine gold, cast or minted by a refinery on the LBMA Good Delivery list — PAMP, Valcambi, Argor-Heraeus, Heraeus, Metalor — and stamped with their weight and a serial: the same object at two sizes, and nothing between them but the number on the stamp.
What decides between them is not the gold, which costs the same per gram in both, but what is paid per bar: the minting or the casting, the assay card, the shop’s margin. Spread over 500.00 g the small one carries far more of it per gram than the big one does over 1000.00 g — which is why Gold bar 500 g is nearly always the dearer gold, and why it is bought anyway: it sells in smaller pieces, in one go.
So the comparison is the premium. Whichever of the two a dealer asks less for above its metal is the cheaper gold that day — and that changes shop by shop and day by day, which is what the numbers above are for.