Guide

What is the IBJA rate?

It is India's gold benchmark — the number the Reserve Bank itself uses. Not one website's guess at the price, but the price the market agrees on.

The short answer

IBJA stands for the India Bullion and Jewellers Association. Twice every working day it asks the country’s real gold traders what gold is trading at, averages their answers, and publishes the result.

That published number is the IBJA rate. It is the closest thing India has to an official gold price. It is the rate this website shows you.

Why it is the one that counts

Anybody can put a gold price on a web page. What makes IBJA different is who relies on it.

The Reserve Bank of India uses it for Sovereign Gold Bonds.When the RBI sets the price of an SGB, and when it pays you back at the end, it uses IBJA’s closing price for 999 gold. Real money — government money — changes hands on this number.
It is named in the RBI’s lending rules.When a bank values the gold you have pledged for a gold loan, the RBI’s directions point to IBJA as the reference.

So this is not a benchmark somebody invented for a website. It is the benchmark the financial system already runs on.

How the rate is actually decided

The method is simple, and it is the reason the number is hard to fudge.

IBJA polls 29 physical market participants — bullion dealers, refiners, importers and jewellers. People who genuinely buy and sell metal, not analysts with an opinion.
It takes their quotes and throws away the highest and the lowest. One trader having a strange day cannot drag the benchmark with him.
It averages what is left. That average is the rate.

IBJA publishes the 999 (24K) rate, then derives every other purity from it by multiplying by the fineness. That is how 22K and 18K are worked out — we explain the arithmetic in how the gold rate is decided.

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When it is published

Twice a day, on working days only.

The morning rate comes out at about 12:05 PM IST.
The evening rate comes out at about 5:05 PM IST.

There is no rate on Saturday, Sunday or a public holiday. The bullion market is shut, so there is nothing to poll and nothing to publish. This surprises people who expect a gold price to tick like a share price all weekend.

It also means that any site showing you a fresh, moving, different-every-minute “IBJA gold rate” at 9 PM on a Sunday is showing you something IBJA did not publish.

When the market is closed, we show you the last published rate and the date it was published, and we say so plainly. An old number honestly labelled is useful. An old number dressed up as today’s is not.

What the IBJA rate does not include

This trips up almost everyone. IBJA rates are quoted excluding GST. IBJA says so itself on its own rate sheet: the rates are published without the 3% GST and without making charges.

So the IBJA rate is the value of the metal, and nothing else. It does not include:

the 3% GST on the metal,
the 5% GST on making charges,
the jeweller’s making charge (8% to 25%),
the hallmarking fee of about ₹45 per article.

This is exactly why the jeweller’s quote is higher than the rate you looked up in the morning — and it is not a trick. We break the whole bill down in why your jeweller’s price is higher.

IBJA and silver

IBJA publishes a silver rate too. We do not have a licensed feed of it, so we do not pretend to. Our silver rate comes from the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX)instead — a SEBI-recognised exchange, which the RBI’s own directions accept as a valid reference alongside IBJA. It is a different source, so we label it as a different source rather than quietly implying every number here comes from one place.

In one line

The IBJA rate is what India’s bullion market says gold is worth today, before tax and before the jeweller’s labour. It is the honest starting point for any gold purchase — and it is the number on our gold rate today page. How we get it, in full, is in our methodology.