Scrap Silver Calculator – What Your Silver Is Worth as Melt
Old jewellery, worn coins, a drawer of sterling cutlery — every silver item sits on top of a simple number: the value of the pure silver inside it. Weigh the piece, read its purity stamp, type in the silver price you are working from, and this page turns that into a melt value with every step shown — plus the more realistic figure a dealer is likely to offer once a discount comes off.
Your silver
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The melt value
The working, line by line
How to read this
Melt value is the ceiling, not the quote. It is what the metal alone is worth at the price you entered, before anyone’s costs come off. A dealer still has to test, refine and resell the silver, so real offers land under melt — that is what the discount line is for. Set it to 0 to see the raw metal figure, then try 10, 20 or 30 percent to see the range of offers you are actually likely to hear.
- Melt value = (weight × purity ÷ 31.1035) × price per troy ounce — pure silver first, then troy ounces, then price.
- Sterling (.925) is the classic example: 100 g holds 92.50 g of silver and 7.50 g of alloy.
- Melt value is deliberately narrow: it leaves out craftsmanship and costs, and a price you type in yourself is not a live market price.
- See where the value sits
- Pairs well with this calculation
- Scrap silver value in three steps
- How the scrap silver calculator works
- Going deeper
- Reading the marks: purity beyond the big four
- Worked examples, checked against the calculator
- Weighing it right, and the ounce trap
- What melt value leaves out, on purpose
- Reading purity marks: what the numbers stamped on silver mean
- Melt value is not the offer: dealer margins and refining costs
- Frequently asked questions
See where the value sits
Two shares decide everything: how much of the item is actually silver, and how much of the melt value survives a dealer’s discount.
Sterling is the classic example: a 100 g sterling piece holds 92.50 g of silver and 7.50 g of alloy, usually copper, added for hardness. Only the silver part is priced by the troy ounce — the alloy rides along for free, which is exactly why purity matters as much as weight.
Why there is no live price on this page — on purpose
Silver prices move every day, and a calculator that quietly baked in yesterday’s price would hand you a wrong number with total confidence. So this page never fetches or invents a price. You bring the current price — from a bullion dealer’s board, a refiner’s buying page or the morning’s market report — and the page does the arithmetic, showing the price it used right in the results. The $31.00 pre-filled above is an example, labelled as one, and nothing more.
Pairs well with this calculation
The neighbours: the same melt maths in gold, and the currency and unit tools that scrap work keeps needing.
Scrap silver value in three steps
Weigh it, read the stamp
Put the item on a scale and find its purity mark — 925, 900, 800 or 999, usually on a clasp, an edge or the back of a handle. A kitchen scale is close enough for an estimate; a jeweller’s scale is better for small pieces.
Turn weight into pure silver
Multiply the weight by the purity to get the pure silver content — 100 g of sterling holds 92.50 g of silver. Then convert grams into troy ounces, the unit silver is priced in, by dividing by 31.1035.
Multiply by the price
Fine troy ounces times the price per troy ounce is the melt value. If you are modelling a sale, take the dealer’s discount off that figure — refining and margin are real costs, and the melt number alone is never the cheque.
How the scrap silver calculator works
melt value = (weight × purity ÷ 31.1035) × price per troy oz
The example on this page. A sterling piece weighing 100 g. Sterling is .925 fine, so the pure silver inside is 100 × 0.925 = 92.50 g. Converted at 31.1035 g per troy ounce, that is 2.974 troy ounces. At the entered price of $31.00, the melt value is 2.974 × $31.00 = $92.19 — the metal alone, before any discount.
Fine silver, by the troy ounce. Ten troy ounces of .999 fine silver hold 9.990 troy ounces of pure silver (the .999 is why it is not quite ten). At $31.00 the melt value is $309.69. Purity this high barely dents the total — which is why bars and rounds track the silver price so closely.
Pennyweight and a dealer discount. Twenty pennyweight of .900 coin silver is 31.10 g gross and 27.99 g fine — 0.900 troy ounces of pure silver. At a $40.00 price the melt value is $36.00, and with a 10 percent dealer discount modelled, the estimate a seller might actually see is $32.40.
The units, exactly. One troy ounce is 31.1035 g. One pennyweight (dwt) is a twentieth of a troy ounce, 1.55517 g, so twenty pennyweight make a troy ounce — the unit old jewellers’ scales still speak. A regular (avoirdupois) ounce, the kind a kitchen scale shows, is lighter: 28.3495 g. This page converts with those exact constants and never mixes the two ounces up.
How the numbers are rounded. The maths runs unrounded from start to finish; only the displayed answers are rounded — money half-up to the nearest cent, weights in troy ounces to three decimals, grams to two. Rounding at the end, never in the middle, is what keeps every line of the working adding back up to the melt value at the top.
Going deeper
The tiny numbers punched into silver are a contract about purity, written in thousandths. 999 means 999 parts in a thousand are silver — fine silver, used for bullion bars and rounds because pure silver is soft. 925 is sterling: 925 parts silver, the rest mostly copper, hard enough for cutlery and jewellery that gets handled daily; the word STERLING or a lion hallmark often sits beside it. 900 is coin silver, the standard of classic coinage — United States dimes, quarters and halves struck before 1965 are 90 percent silver, as are many older European coins. 800 appears on a great deal of continental European tableware and holloware.
The stamps to be careful with are the ones that promise a look rather than a content: SILVER PLATE, EP and EPNS (electroplated nickel silver) mark items with only a skin of silver over base metal. They can weigh a satisfying amount and still hold almost no melt value at all. If an item has no purity stamp, or a stamp you cannot verify, a dealer can test it in seconds — an acid scratch test for a rough answer, an XRF scanner for an exact one. This calculator trusts the purity you give it; getting that number right is the one part of the job no arithmetic can do for you.
Between the melt figure on this page and money in your hand stands a short chain of real costs. The buyer tests the metal, because a wrong purity guess comes out of their pocket. The silver is refined — melted, separated from its copper alloy, brought back to .999 — and refining consumes time, energy and a small slice of the metal itself. The buyer also carries price risk between the day they buy from you and the day the refined bar sells. The discount in this calculator bundles all of that into one honest percentage.
Two practical consequences follow. First, clean, standardised silver — fine bars and rounds from known mints — sells closest to melt, because there is almost nothing to test or refine. Worn jewellery, soldered repairs and mixed lots of tableware sit at the far end, because every gram has to be checked and cleaned. Second, weight should be honest weight: stones, steel springs inside knife handles, and the filler inside weighted candlesticks are not silver and no buyer pays for them. Weigh what is actually metal, model a sensible discount, and the figure on this page will land close to the offers you hear.
Reading the marks: purity beyond the big four
The guide above covers the four purities most sellers meet, 999, 925, 900 and 800, but silver has been stamped to many more standards, and knowing the rest stops two common mistakes: undervaluing a piece stamped with an unfamiliar number, and overvaluing a piece whose mark is not a purity mark at all. The number, wherever it appears, is parts of silver in a thousand parts of metal. A mark of 835, common on older continental European silver, means 835 parts silver and 165 parts other metal, usually copper. A mark of 830 is the older Scandinavian standard, and 800 is the standard that survives in much of continental Europe and in older German and Italian pieces. At the top end, 950 is a French standard for finer silver, and 958 is Britannia silver, the standard once required for much English silver and still used for some prestige pieces: 958 parts silver, which is finer than sterling and correspondingly softer.
Coin silver deserves a note of its own, because its mark is often a date rather than a number. United States dimes, quarters and half dollars struck before 1965 are 900 fine, and many European coins of the same era sit at 800 or 835. A coin’s melt value follows the same formula as any other piece, weight times purity divided by 31.1035 times the price, but coins can also carry a collector premium above melt, which is why the FAQ above warns that melt is a floor for the metal, not necessarily the whole value of the item. Weigh the coin, enter 900 for pre-1965 United States silver coinage, and treat the result as the metal value inside a possibly larger collector value, never as a dealer’s offer for the coin as a collectible.
The marks that are not purity marks are the trap. Letters such as EPNS stand for electroplated nickel silver: a thin skin of silver over a base metal core, with almost no silver by weight. Words such as silver-plated, silverplate or plated mean the same thing, and a piece marked only with a maker’s name and no number may be plated, pewter or a base-metal alloy. None of these belongs in this calculator at a solid-silver purity, because the formula multiplies the whole weight by the purity; entering 925 for a plated tray prices the base metal as if it were sterling and produces a melt value many times the true one. If a piece has no legible number, or carries a plating mark, do not guess a purity. A jeweller’s acid test or X-ray fluorescence assay costs little and settles the question, and the calculator will wait for the tested figure.
Worked examples, checked against the calculator
The examples below were run through this page’s own calculator at the page’s own default entered price of $31.00 per troy ounce, a price you type in yourself and not a live market price, so you can reproduce every figure by typing the same numbers in. Start from the default: 100 g of sterling at $31.00 gives a melt value of $92.19, because 100 times 0.925 is 92.50 g of pure silver, divided by 31.1035 is 2.974 troy ounces, times $31.00 is $92.19.
Scale that piece up. Enter 250 g of sterling at the same $31.00 price and the calculator gives $230.48. The working is the same shape: 250 times 0.925 is 231.25 g of pure silver, divided by 31.1035 is 7.435 troy ounces, times $31.00 is $230.48. The melt value scales exactly with weight at a fixed purity and price, so doubling the weight doubles the value, and the only reason real offers do not scale quite so cleanly is that larger lots are cheaper per gram to assay and refine, which shows up in the discount rather than in the melt figure.
Change the unit instead of the weight. Enter 1 troy ounce of 999 fine silver at a price of $40.00 per troy ounce and the calculator gives $39.96, because 1 times 0.999 is 0.999 troy ounces of pure silver, times $40.00 is $39.96. The missing four cents are the whole point of the 999 mark: fine silver is not quite pure, and on a single ounce the gap is trivial, but on a hundred ounces it is $4.00 at that price, and on a thousand it is $40.00. Bullion dealers price that gap in, which is why fine silver trades at a small discount to the headline price per troy ounce rather than at the headline price itself.
Finally, change nothing but the dealer discount on the default piece. The melt value stays $92.19, and the estimate after discount moves as follows, each figure computed by the calculator from the same $92.19 base.
| Dealer discount modelled | Estimate after discount | What the discount covers, in general terms |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | $92.19 | Raw metal value, before any costs |
| 10% | $82.97 | Testing, refining and a thin margin |
| 20% | $73.75 | A typical retail dealer’s range on small lots |
| 30% | $64.53 | Small, mixed or hard-to-test lots |
The percentages in the right-hand column are illustrative modelling, not quoted dealer rates: real discounts vary by lot size, by how easily the metal can be tested, and by the dealer’s own costs. The table’s purpose is to show the shape of the negotiation, not to predict any particular offer. A seller who walks in knowing both the melt value and the discount range is negotiating from the metal up, which is a much stronger position than negotiating from a dealer’s first number down.
Weighing it right, and the ounce trap
Most melt-value errors are weighing errors, not arithmetic errors, and the commonest is the ounce trap described in the FAQ above: a kitchen scale reports avoirdupois ounces, while silver is priced in troy ounces, and the two differ by almost a tenth. A piece weighing 100 g is 3.527 avoirdupois ounces but only 3.215 troy ounces. Price it as if it were 3.527 troy ounces and you overstate the melt value by 9.7 percent, turning the default $92.19 into about $101.14 before you have even started negotiating. If your scale only shows ounces, check whether it offers a troy mode, marked ozt or dwt; if it does not, weigh in grams, which this calculator accepts directly and which no ounce confusion can touch.
Scale precision matters in the same direction. A kitchen scale that reads to the nearest gram is fine for a 250 g tray, where a gram is less than half a percent, but it is a blunt instrument for a 6 g ring, where a gram is a sixth of the weight. For small pieces, a jeweller’s scale reading to 0.1 g or 0.01 g is worth borrowing, and the habit that costs nothing is taring: weigh any container, pouch or display stand first, zero the scale with it on, and only then add the silver. Weighing a piece still in its presentation box prices the box as sterling, and presentation boxes are heavier than most people expect.
Tarnish, by contrast, barely matters. Tarnish is a thin surface layer of silver sulphide, formed when silver meets sulphur in the air, and it weighs almost nothing; a heavily tarnished piece weighs essentially what it weighed bright. Wear matters more, because a century of polishing genuinely removes metal, but wear shows up in the weight itself: you weigh the piece as it is today, and the calculator prices the metal that is there, not the metal the piece held when it was made. Clean a piece for presentation if you like, but do not clean it in the hope of raising the melt value; polishing removes a little more metal each time and, for collectible pieces, can reduce the collector premium far more than it could ever add to the melt figure.
What melt value leaves out, on purpose
A melt value is a deliberately narrow number: the value of the silver inside, at a price you entered, before anyone’s costs. It leaves out everything that is not silver, and the honest way to use it is to know what those omissions are. It leaves out craftsmanship, which is why a hand-made Georgian spoon and a melted-down spoon of the same weight share a melt value and very different market values. It leaves out collectibility, hallmark rarity and provenance, which is why a rare coin can be worth many times melt. It leaves out the dealer’s costs of testing, refining, insuring and reselling, which is why offers sit below melt and why the discount field exists. And it leaves out taxes and any fees a particular sale might attract, which vary by jurisdiction and by seller and which no single calculator can price.
None of that makes the melt value useless; it makes it a floor and a check. A dealer offering above melt for plain scrap is either paying for something else in the piece, such as collectibility, or has made an error you should understand before accepting. A dealer offering far below melt after a small discount deserves a second quote, because refining costs do not scale that way on ordinary sterling. The strongest use of this calculator is therefore comparative: run the same piece at two or three discount levels, take the figures to two or three buyers, and let the spread between their offers, not any single offer, tell you what the market for your lot actually is. The calculator cannot tell you whether to sell, and it never claims a live price; it tells you what the metal is worth at the price you chose, so that nobody else gets to define that number for you.
Reading purity marks: what the numbers stamped on silver mean
Most silver items carry a mark that states their fineness — the share of pure silver in the alloy, in parts per thousand. Sterling is 925, meaning 92.5% silver and 7.5% other metals (usually copper). Britannia silver is 958. Coin silver in the United States was historically 900. Continental marks include 800, 835, and 900. A mark of 999 or 999.9 means fine silver, essentially pure. The melt value is simply the item’s weight multiplied by its fineness multiplied by the silver price you enter — so a 100-gram sterling item contains 92.5 grams of pure silver, and everything else in the calculation follows from that one multiplication.
Unmarked items need judgement, not guessing. Old flatware, jewellery, and coins were made to the standards of their time and place, and a plausible-looking mark can be a maker’s mark rather than a fineness mark. If an item has no legible fineness mark, do not assume sterling: test it (an acid test or X-ray fluorescence test at a jeweller or dealer) or value it at a lower fineness and treat the result as a floor. The calculator lets you enter any fineness, so you can run both the optimistic and the cautious case and see how much the assumption is worth before you decide.
Melt value is not the offer: dealer margins and refining costs
The melt value is what the silver in an item is worth at the price you enter. A dealer will offer less, and the gap is not a trick — it is the dealer’s business. The dealer must assay or trust the fineness, transport and insure the metal, pay a refiner to melt and purify it, and sell the refined silver at a wholesale price that may have moved by the time the metal is sold. Typical offers for common scrap silver run from roughly 70% to 90% of melt value, with recognisable coins and well-marked sterling at the higher end and mixed, unmarked, or damaged lots at the lower end.
Use the melt value as your negotiating anchor, not your expected cheque. Get more than one offer, ask each dealer what percentage of melt they pay and whether refining or assay fees apply on top, and be wary of any buyer who will not explain the calculation. Items with numismatic or antique value can be worth far more than melt — a rare coin, a signed piece, or a complete set should be appraised as an object before it is ever weighed as metal. When in doubt, the melt value is the floor: never accept less than it without understanding why.
Frequently asked questions
How is the melt value of scrap silver calculated?
Multiply the item’s weight by its purity to get the pure silver it contains, convert that weight into troy ounces by dividing by 31.1035 (the grams in one troy ounce), and multiply by the silver price per troy ounce. For example, 100 g of sterling (.925) at a price of $31.00 holds 92.50 g of pure silver, which is 2.974 troy ounces, worth $92.19 in metal alone. That is exactly the working this page shows, line by line, for whatever you enter.
What do the purity numbers 999, 925, 900 and 800 mean?
They are purities written in thousandths. .999 is fine silver, 99.9 percent pure, the standard for bullion bars and rounds. .925 is sterling silver, 92.5 percent silver with the rest usually copper for hardness — the standard for most silver jewellery and cutlery. .900 is coin silver, the 90 percent standard of classic coinage such as United States dimes, quarters and halves struck before 1965. .800, 80 percent silver, is common on older European tableware. The higher the number, the more of the item’s weight is silver — and weight times purity is what melt value is made of.
Why do I have to type in the silver price myself?
Because this page will not claim a live price it cannot stand behind. The silver price moves every day, and any figure quietly baked into a calculator would be stale by the time you read it — a wrong number delivered with confidence. Instead you enter the current price per troy ounce from a source you trust, such as a bullion dealer’s board or a refiner’s buying page, and the page does the arithmetic with that figure, showing it in the results so the working can always be checked. The $31.00 pre-filled in the calculator is an example, clearly labelled, and nothing more.
What is the difference between a troy ounce and a regular ounce?
A troy ounce is heavier: 31.1035 g, against 28.3495 g for the regular (avoirdupois) ounce your kitchen scale shows — about 9.7 percent more metal in every ounce. Precious metals are priced worldwide in troy ounces, a survival from medieval trade fairs, so scrap silver is always valued by the troy ounce no matter what the item was weighed in. The pennyweight (dwt), still used by many jewellers, is one twentieth of a troy ounce, 1.55517 g. This calculator converts between grams, troy ounces, pennyweight and regular ounces with those exact constants, so the two kinds of ounce never get mixed up.
Why will a dealer offer less than the melt value?
Because melt value is the price of refined silver in bar form, and your item is not there yet. The dealer has to test the metal, melt and refine it back to purity, cover the small losses refining always involves, and still make a margin on the work — all of which comes out of the gap between melt and their offer. Small, worn or mixed lots commonly change hands 10 to 30 percent under melt, while clean fine bars and rounds from known mints sell much closer to it. The dealer discount box in the calculator exists so you can model that gap honestly: compare the raw melt figure with the after-discount estimate before you talk to anyone.
Is every silver item only worth its melt value?
No — melt value is a floor, not a ceiling. It is what an item is worth if it were nothing but metal, and for worn, common or damaged pieces that is roughly where the market prices them. But coins with collector demand, antique pieces, and work by makers people collect can be worth far more than the silver inside them, sometimes many times more, and melting or scrapping such a piece destroys that premium forever. The reverse also holds: silver-plated items, however heavy, contain almost no silver and are worth very little as scrap. If a piece might be old, rare or well made, have it looked at as an object before you sell it as metal.
What if my item has no purity mark?
Do not guess a purity, and do not default to 925. Unmarked silver exists, especially in older and handmade pieces, but so do plated pieces with no mark at all, and the calculator cannot tell them apart from a number you type in. The safe route is a test: a jeweller can run an acid test in minutes, or an X-ray fluorescence assay that reads the composition without damaging the piece. Bring the tested purity back here and enter it in the custom purity field. Guessing 925 for a plated tray overstates the melt value many times over, while guessing low for genuine unmarked sterling understates it; either error makes the figure worse than useless in a negotiation, because it gives you false confidence.
What is the difference between sterling and Britannia silver?
Purity, and therefore softness. Sterling is 925 parts silver in a thousand, the rest usually copper, which hardens the metal enough for cutlery and jewellery that gets handled daily. Britannia silver is 958 parts silver, finer and softer, historically the required standard for much English silver and still used for some prestige pieces. On the same weight at the same price, Britannia holds about 3.6 percent more pure silver than sterling: 100 g of Britannia holds 95.80 g of silver against sterling’s 92.50 g, so at $31.00 per troy ounce the melt values are $95.48 and $92.19. If your piece is marked 958, enter 95.8 in the custom purity field rather than settling for the sterling preset.
Does tarnish reduce the melt value?
Essentially no. Tarnish is a thin surface layer of silver sulphide, and it weighs almost nothing, so a tarnished piece weighs practically what it weighed when bright, and the calculator prices the weight you enter. Wear is different: a century of polishing genuinely removes metal, but that loss is already reflected in the weight, because you weigh the piece as it is today. Do not polish a piece in the hope of raising its melt value; polishing removes a little more metal each time, and for collectible pieces it can damage the collector premium far more than it could ever add to the metal value. Weigh it as it is, tarnish and all.
Should I sell now or wait for the price to rise?
This calculator cannot answer that, and no calculator honestly can. It values your silver at a price you enter, so it shows you what a rise or fall would be worth in dollars, but it makes no claim about which way the price will move, and it never shows a live price. What it can do is make the decision concrete: enter today’s price, then enter the price you would need to see before selling, and compare the two melt values against your own need for the money and your own view of the market. If the difference between selling now and waiting is smaller than the discount a dealer will take anyway, the timing question matters less than the choice of buyer. Treat any source that promises a future silver price as marketing, not information.
Is sterling silver worth more than coin silver?
Per gram, yes, because sterling is 92.5% pure silver and coin silver is 90%. On 100 grams, sterling contains 92.5 grams of pure silver and coin silver 90 grams, so at the same silver price the sterling item’s melt value is about 2.8% higher, before any difference in weight or condition.
Why does the calculator ask me to enter the silver price myself?
Because the silver price moves constantly during trading hours, and this page stores no live prices. Enter the current spot price per troy ounce from a market source at the moment you calculate, and the melt value will reflect that price. A price from yesterday can already be stale.
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