Gold Price History

Year-end USD spot price per troy ounce, selected years 1971–2024. Source: widely cited public historical gold price series (LBMA/COMEX-derived). Figures rounded to the nearest $5–10.

Approximate nominal USD spot returns, year-end to year-end. Not inflation-adjusted — see our gold and inflation article for real returns.

For nearly four decades before 1971, gold's dollar price was fixed by international agreement — first at $20.67/oz, then $35/oz under the Bretton Woods system established in 1944. It could not rise or fall with market forces because it was not, in any meaningful sense, a freely traded asset. That changed on 15 August 1971, when President Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility to gold — an event now known as the Nixon Shock — and gold began trading on the open market for the first time in a generation.

The 1970s saw gold reprice violently upward, rising more than twelvefold as the market absorbed decades of pent-up repricing plus a genuine inflation shock following the 1973 and 1979 oil crises. Gold peaked above $850/oz intraday in January 1980 — a level it would not decisively surpass, even in nominal terms, for another 28 years.

The two decades that followed were brutal for gold holders. Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker's disinflation campaign pushed nominal interest rates above 15%, and with inflation falling faster than rates, real interest rates turned sharply positive — the single strongest headwind gold can face (see our article on what actually drives the gold price for the underlying mechanism). Central banks, holding what many saw as a relic of the gold-standard era, were also large net sellers through the 1990s, adding further supply to a market with weak demand. Gold bottomed near $253/oz in 1999.

The 2000s reversed the trend entirely. The dot-com crash, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the near-zero interest rate policies that followed each pushed real yields down and gold up. Gold broke its 1980 nominal high in 2008 and continued climbing to a then-record $1,895/oz in September 2011, amid a US credit rating downgrade and the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

A multi-year consolidation followed, including a sharp 2013 "taper tantrum" decline as markets priced in the end of quantitative easing. Gold found a new catalyst in 2020, when COVID-19 pushed real yields to record lows and gold set a fresh nominal high above $2,000/oz. The most recent structural shift began in 2022: central banks, responding to the freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves, began buying gold at a pace not seen in decades — over 1,000 tonnes annually in 2022, 2023, and 2024 — helping gold set repeated new record highs even as the Federal Reserve ran its fastest rate-hiking cycle in a generation.