Gold Calculator — Value, Purity, Resale and Zakat

Value gold or silver by weight and purity in grams, tola, masha or troy ounces, then see the two numbers that matter and rarely appear together: what a jeweller will charge you once making charges, wastage and tax are added, and what the same piece is worth when you sell it back.

Created by Ashar PervaizLast updated 24 October 2026

What You Pay and What You Get Back Are Two Different Numbers

A gold purchase has a price and a value, and they are not the same thing. The price includes the metal, the labour that shaped it, an allowance for metal lost in manufacture, and tax. The value, on the day you sell, is the metal and nothing else.

That gap is the single most expensive thing about buying jewellery, and it is almost never quoted. Take a tola of 22K bought with 12% making charges, 5% wastage and 3% tax. The metal is worth what it is worth; the invoice comes to about 20% more. Sell it back the same afternoon, before the rate has moved at all, and a buyer pays for the gold content — say 3% under it, if they deduct for refining. The round trip has cost a little under a fifth of the purchase price without a single movement in the market, and at the upper end of making charges it passes a quarter.

None of this means jewellery is a bad purchase. It means jewellery is a purchase, and gold bought as a store of value behaves differently from gold bought to wear. The calculator above puts both figures on screen at once so the decision is made with the spread visible rather than discovered years later.

Karat Is a Claim About Purity, Not a Weight

Karat measures how much of an alloy is gold, in twenty-fourths. Pure gold is 24 parts in 24; 22K is 22 parts gold and 2 parts something else, usually copper and silver. It says nothing about how heavy the piece is, which is why a valuation always needs both numbers.

Fineness expresses the same idea in parts per thousand, and it is what the hallmark actually stamps. The two rarely agree exactly, because the stamped standards are rounded down to protect the buyer.

The practical consequence is that two pieces of identical weight can differ in value by a third or more, and that a rate quoted “per tola” is meaningless until you know which purity it refers to. Markets that quote a 22K rate and markets that quote a 24K rate are both common, which is why the calculator asks separately what purity your rate is for and what purity your piece is.

The Tola Is Not a Rounded Gram

A tola is 11.664 grams — an exact figure, not an approximation of twelve. It descends from the British Indian rupee coin and survives as the standard trading unit for gold across Pakistan and much of India, where rates are quoted per tola and jewellery is sold by it.

It subdivides in eights and twelves rather than tens: twelve masha to a tola, eight ratti to a masha, so ninety-six ratti in a tola. Older receipts and inherited pieces are often described this way, and converting them by treating a tola as “about 11.7 grams” introduces an error that compounds across a set.

Why the Ounce on a Gold Chart Is Heavier Than the One in Your Kitchen

International gold prices are quoted per troy ounce, which is 31.1035 grams. The ounce on a kitchen scale is the avoirdupois ounce, 28.3495 grams. The troy ounce is about 9.6% heavier.

This is a genuine trap when converting a headline price into a local per-gram figure. Divide a spot price by 28.35 instead of 31.10 and the per-gram rate comes out roughly a tenth too high — enough to make a jeweller’s honest quote look like an overcharge, or to overstate a holding by thousands. The calculator lists troy ounce and ounce as separate units for exactly this reason, and defaults gold work to the troy ounce.

Making Charges and Wastage Are Two Separate Deductions

Making charges pay for design and labour. They are usually quoted as a percentage of metal value, though some jewellers charge a flat amount per gram or per tola, which works out very differently on a light, intricate piece than on a heavy plain one.

Wastage is a separate line: an extra percentage of gold weight billed on the argument that metal is lost during manufacture. Modern workshops recover most of it, so wastage is best understood as a negotiable margin rather than a physical fact.

The reason to insist on seeing them separately is that a single bundled “making” figure makes two quotes impossible to compare. A jeweller quoting 8% making and 8% wastage is charging more than one quoting 14% making and none, and no amount of staring at the headline percentage will reveal it.

Local Rates Drift From International Spot

Spot is a wholesale price for large, deliverable bars in London and New York. What a local market quotes adds import duty, dealer margin, local demand and the exchange rate, and in Pakistan the per-tola rate is set by the local jewellers’ association rather than derived mechanically from the London fix.

The live figure shown above is therefore a reference point, not an authority. Where the two diverge by a few per cent, the local rate is the one you will actually transact at. Where they diverge by a great deal, that itself is worth asking about before signing anything.

Zakat on Gold Uses the Weight, Not the Receipt

Zakat on gold is assessed on the metal’s current market value at 2.5%, not on what was paid for it. Making charges, wastage and tax form no part of the calculation, which means a heavily worked piece is assessed well below its purchase price.

The threshold, nisab, is defined by weight of pure metal: 87.48 grams of gold, or 612.36 grams of silver. Because those two weights are worth very different amounts of money, which standard applies changes whether many people owe anything at all — and nisab is measured against total zakatable wealth after eligible debts, not a single holding. The calculator reports where one holding sits; the wider judgement needs the whole balance sheet and a full lunar year.

Karat is where most of the arithmetic goes wrong, because the receipt weight and the pure-metal weight are not the same number and only one of them counts. Working zakat out from karat and nisab goes through 22k and 18k holdings with the weights done both ways.