Most people selling silver have no idea what it is worth
That is not their fault. They inherited a box of flatware and a few coins, and the first offer they get is the only number they have to judge it against. This site exists to give you a second number.
Start where you are
- You do not know what it is. Sterling, plate, or coin silver - the tests are simple and you can do them at home.
- You know what it is. Work out the melt value, and learn when a piece is worth more intact than melted.
- You are ready to sell. What each kind of buyer pays, and the questions that separate a fair offer from a bad one.
What this site is
I ran an online precious metals buying business for eighteen years. People mailed me their silver and I sent them a check. I saw what arrived, what it was really worth, and how often the person sending it had been quoted something insulting somewhere else first.
I am not buying any more. That is precisely why I can write this. Nothing here is trying to get your metal into an envelope addressed to me, because there is no envelope. What follows is what I would tell a friend who called and said they had found a canteen of grandmother's cutlery in the loft.
What you have
Sterling is not plate, plate is not worth melting, and a coin can be worth many times its silver. Telling them apart takes a magnet, a scale, and about ten minutes.
How to identify itWhat it is worth
Melt value is arithmetic, not opinion: weight, purity, spot price. Once you can do that sum, an offer stops being a mystery and becomes a percentage.
Work out the valueWho pays fairly
Pawn shops, local coin dealers, mail-in buyers and refiners all pay differently, and the gap between the best and worst offer on the same lot is not small.
Compare the buyers
The one number that matters
Every offer you receive is a percentage of the metal's melt value. Buyers rarely put it that way, because saying "we pay 70 percent" invites the question of who pays 85. But that is what an offer is, and once you know your melt value you can convert any quote into that percentage in a few seconds.
-
Weigh it in troy ounces
Not grams, and definitely not the postal scale's pounds. One troy ounce is 31.1 grams. Silver is priced per troy ounce everywhere in the trade, so working in anything else guarantees confusion.
-
Multiply by the purity
Sterling is 92.5 percent silver. United States coins dated 1964 and earlier are 90 percent. Plate is zero for these purposes, whatever it weighs. That gives you the actual silver content.
-
Multiply by spot
The spot price is public and moves all day. Silver content times spot is your melt value - the theoretical maximum, before anybody's margin.
-
Divide the offer by that number
An offer of 620 dollars against a melt value of 800 is 77.5 percent. Now you have something to compare, and something to negotiate with.
Why the offer is worse when the market is moving
This is the part nobody explains, and it is the single most common reason people believe they were cheated when they were not.
When a buyer quotes you a price, they are committing to a number for metal that will not physically reach them for several days. In that window the market can move against them, and on a volatile week it can move a long way. So they widen the spread - the gap between what they pay you and what they can sell for - to cover that risk. The quote gets worse, and from where you are standing it looks like greed.
Sometimes it is. Often it is arithmetic. The practical consequence is the same either way: if silver is swinging hard this week and you are not in a hurry, waiting for a calmer stretch is worth real money. That is advice a buyer has no incentive to give you.
What this site will never do
No fear pitches about currency collapse, no invented urgency, no "prices may never be this high again". If a page here tells you to wait, it is because waiting is better for you. Where a link earns a commission, it is labeled, and the ranking method is written down so you can check it against what you find.