Silver Calculator: Sterling, Coin & Fine

Sterling · coin silver · fine silver

Enter the weight and the fineness. This tells you what the silver inside is worth at today’s spot price — flatware, jewelry, scrap or bullion.

Melt value calculator

Scrap Silver Calculator

Sterling, flatware, jewelry, bullion — what the silver in it is worth today.

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Weight

Unit Silver is priced per troy ounce (31.1035 g). A kitchen scale gives you grams — use grams.

Purity / hallmark No hallmark at all usually means silver-plated, which has almost no melt value. “EPNS”, “A1”, “Silver on copper” and “nickel silver” are all plate or base metal, not silver.

This piece is weighted / filled Candlesticks, knife handles and some trophy bases are filled with pitch, cement or resin. The filler is most of the weight and is worth nothing. We’ll show the metal-only range instead.

Buyer payout estimate Silver refining margins are wider than gold’s: the same weight is worth far less, so the fixed cost of handling it eats a bigger share.

Melt value Pure silver content at spot

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This is metal value, not collector value. Antique flatware, a maker’s mark like Tiffany or Georg Jensen, an early American coin-silver spoon or a complete service can be worth several times its melt — and melting it destroys that forever. Melt value is the floor, not the price. If the piece is old, marked or matched, have it looked at first.

Figures are an estimate for information only, not an offer to buy or sell and not investment advice.

The fineness marks you will meet

.925 — sterling. The usual standard for flatware, hollowware and jewelry. Often stamped 925, STERLING or STER.
.900 — coin silver. The old US coinage standard, and the mark on a lot of nineteenth-century American flatware.
.999 — fine silver. Modern bullion bars and rounds.
.958 — Britannia, and .800, common on continental European pieces.

Silver plate is not silver. EPNS, “silver on copper”, A1 and similar marks mean a microscopically thin layer over base metal. The recoverable silver is close to nothing regardless of how heavy the piece feels — refiners generally will not take it.

Weigh the silver, not the object

This is where estimates go wrong. A “sterling” candlestick is usually a thin silver shell filled with pitch or plaster and weighted with a steel rod; a knife with a sterling handle has a stainless blade cemented into it. Weighing the whole thing can overstate the silver several times over. Weigh what is actually silver, or expect the buyer to.

How the number is worked out

Weight is converted to grams with exact definitions, multiplied by the fineness, and priced against a live spot quote shown with its timestamp. If the quote is stale or the cross-check fails, no number is shown at all. The full set of guards is in the methodology.

What a buyer will offer

Less than melt, always — refining, assay and handling all cost money, and margins on silver are proportionally wider than on gold because the metal is worth less per gram. Antique or maker-marked silver frequently sells for well above melt to someone who wants the object rather than the metal, and melting it destroys that value for good.

Knowing the metal is worth $X is half the job; the other half is who pays closest to it. Where to sell silver coins goes through the dealers, the marketplaces and the auction houses, and shows where each one takes its cut — including the postal insurance rule that caps a lost bag of bullion at $15.

Holding US coins? Coin melt value uses their statutory weights. Bag of pre-1965 change? Use the junk silver calculator. Gold instead: gold calculator.