A 195-state universe
The broad scope includes the 193 UN member states, Palestine and Vatican City. Territories and dependencies are excluded to prevent double counting.
Methodology
How estimated gold holdings per person are calculated.
The worldwide comparison attributes official reserves, investment gold and jewellery across 195 countries. Official monetary gold is also presented as a separate 29-country dataset.
Per-person formulafine tonnes x 1,000,000 / population
The primary result is grams per resident. Fine troy ounces are calculated as tonnes x 32,150.7465686 / population. The UN World Population Prospects mid-year projection for 2026 supplies the denominator.
Coverage follows evidence
The broad estimate covers all 195 countries and carries a range for uncertainty. Narrower official and investment views show only countries with an eligible value; missing values never become zero.
01
One worldwide estimate and two narrower views
The broad comparison brings official, investment and jewellery layers together without treating them as equally certain. The view controls also let you isolate investment gold or official monetary gold.
Estimated holdings
Official and investment holdings plus jewellery.
- Official
- ETF and ETP
- Bars and coins
- Jewellery
Official monetary gold
Gold held as a reserve asset by the reporting monetary authority.
- Official
Official plus investment
Official holdings plus physically backed funds, bars and coins.
- Official
- ETF and ETP
- Bars and coins
02
From source to a validated release
The pipeline favours a direct country observation, then a derived value, an anchored estimate, a peer estimate and finally a modelled residual.
Private source snapshots, permissions and checksums
Consistent units, dates, country names and ownership assumptions
Component stocks with low, base and high scenarios
Versioned derived metrics and public provenance
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Confidence describes evidence quality
Confidence labels describe the source, derivation and attribution. They do not describe whether a country ranks highly. Value ranges feed 400 deterministic simulations, and the country detail shows the resulting 5th to 95th percentile rank band.
GradeEvidence statePublic label
ADirect official or product-level sourceReported
BDerived from direct country observationsDerived
CCountry-anchored modelEstimated
DPeer model or residualModelled
Recycling is a flow
Recovered metal leaves an existing stock bucket. It is never added again as a new holding.
Private gold is modelled
Fund domicile is not beneficial ownership. Bars, coins and jewellery rely on accumulated demand, trade and survey anchors.
Ownership, not vault location
Gold is attributed to the reporting monetary authority that owns or controls it, not the country where the metal is physically stored.
Official data is a supporting view
The official-reserve series is published separately from private investment and jewellery estimates. Countries with an official value appear in that view; countries without one remain unavailable, and an explicitly reported zero remains zero.
Sources
Where the data comes from and how it may be reused.
Each public result includes its source, date, scope and assumptions. When a source restricts redistribution, the original material is not republished here.
01
Official monetary-gold datasetThe 29 official-reserve records included in the current Gold release · Open source
02World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet)CC BY 4.0 historical gold and silver prices used by the research library · Open source
03USGS Gold Historical Statistics, Data Series 140Public-domain long-run gold production history · Open source
04USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 data releasePublic-domain 2025 production, silver use and U.S. Treasury gold context · Open source
05UN M49 country and area standardCanonical geography identifiers · Open source
06UN World Population Prospects 2024Annual mid-year population denominator · Open source
07World Bank country and lending groupsIncome-group covariate for the peer model · Open source
08Metal Per Capita global peer modelCountry anchors, peer allocation, uncertainty and residual reconciliation · Research reference
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