Every snapshot this site stores carries two numbers for each karat: the price a shop sells at, and the price a dealer buys back at. Across 52 recorded sessions between 2026-06-29 and 2026-09-02, that gap was exactly 100.0 EGP per gram on every recorded karat, in every single session. It did not vary once.
What did move is what that gap is worth as a share of the price, because the price itself rose. On the 21K gram it was widest at 1.77% of the price on 2026-06-29 and narrowest at 1.50% on 2026-08-24. Measured against the most recent recorded price it comes to 1.60%. Set that beside a mean daily move of 0.77% and you get the number that actually matters to a seller: gold has to move in your favour for about 2.1 average sessions just to break even on a round trip — before any workmanship.
The buy-back column is what a dealer pays you, not what you pay. It is a reference for the metal alone, drawn from the Egyptian market and stored as recorded. No dealer is bound by it, this site does not buy or sell gold, and nothing here is a quote from any named shop — what a particular counter offers on a particular morning is its own business and depends on the piece in front of it.
| What you are selling | Recorded sell | Dealer buy-back |
|---|---|---|
| One 24K gram | 7,127.1 EGP | 7,027.1 EGP |
| One 21K gram | 6,236.3 EGP | 6,136.3 EGP |
| One 18K gram | 5,345.4 EGP | 5,245.4 EGP |
| One gold pound (8 g of 21K) | 49,890 EGP | 49,090 EGP |
| 20 g of 21K | 124,726 EGP | 122,726 EGP |
The bottom two rows are arithmetic on the 21K row: a gold pound is 8 grams of 21K, so it is priced at 8 times the 21K gram, and 20 grams is 20 times it. At these figures, selling 20 g of 21K back returns 122,726 EGP against a 124,726 EGP sell reference — a gap of 2,000 EGP. Selling one gold pound's worth of metal returns 49,090 EGP against 49,890, a gap of 800 EGP.
Because the recorded gap is a flat number of pounds per gram rather than a percentage, it lands harder on the cheaper karats. On 2026-09-02 it was 1.40% of the 24K gram, 1.60% of the 21K gram, 1.87% of the 18K gram. Averaged across every session in the window the same ordering holds: 1.45% on 24K, 1.66% on 21K, 1.93% on 18K.
That is a real, if small, cost of holding a lower karat: the same physical gap is a bigger slice of a cheaper gram. It is one of the few things in this record that argues for 21K or 24K over 18K on resale grounds alone, and it is entirely separate from workmanship, which is the far larger number for most people.
Over the recorded window the 21K gram closed higher in 28 of the session-on-session comparisons and lower in 23, with a mean absolute move of 0.77%. The gap costs 1.60% of the price. Dividing one by the other gives roughly 2.1 average sessions of favourable movement to get back to where you started.
Two things that figure quietly excludes are worth stating. It excludes workmanship entirely, which for worked jewellery is the larger cost and is not recovered at all. And it assumes the price moves in your favour and keeps going — an average session is an average, not a promise, and the same record shows 23 sessions that went the other way. This is a measurement of what a round trip costs in this data. It is not a recommendation to sell, to hold, or to buy.
When you buy worked jewellery in Egypt you pay for three things: the metal, the workmanship (masna'iya) that turned it into a chain or a ring, and the shop's margin. When you sell it back you are paid for one of them. The buy-back figures in our record price the metal and nothing else, which is precisely why the gap above understates the real round trip on a worked piece.
That is also the honest answer to whether a bar or a gold pound sells back closer to its purchase price than a chain does. Our record cannot measure it, because it stores one reference pair per karat and does not carry product premiums at all. What can be said from it is where the difference lives: not in the buy-back column, which is the same per gram whatever the piece, but on the purchase side, in how much you paid above the metal in the first place. Bars and coins carry a smaller premium than worked jewellery does; how workmanship is charged and how bar and coin premiums work are covered on their own pages.
Selling is two numbers: the weight in grams, and the karat. Weigh the piece, identify the karat from its stamp, multiply the weight by the buy-back figure for that karat, and that is the metal you are being paid for. Mixed karats are weighed and priced separately rather than averaged. Stones, clasps and any non-gold component are not gold and are not paid for as gold — a piece is normally weighed with them and their weight deducted, which is one of the places where a written weight slip is worth asking for.
Our figures let you do that arithmetic before you walk in, so an offer arrives as a number you can compare rather than a number you have to accept. They do not tell you what any particular shop will offer, and any real transaction happens at the counter's own price on the day.
Everything on this page is computed from this site's own stored daily snapshots and from nothing else. Each snapshot is one recorded reading per session, saved as recorded and never revised afterwards; sessions with no trading carry no snapshot, so the counts above are sessions rather than calendar days. The complete series, both columns, is published on our price history page, and the current reference levels for each karat are on the 21K and 24K pages.
This site is a price reference. It does not buy, sell, broker or value gold, it takes no position on whether you should sell, and it names no dealer. The live prices shown elsewhere on the site refresh about every five minutes; the figures here are a fixed daily record and do not change once a session is stored.