Roughly 216,265 tonnes of gold had been mined by the end of 2024, according to the World Gold Council. Almost all of it still exists, because gold does not corrode and is rarely consumed in a way that destroys it. The wedding ring, the central bank bar and the microscopic bonding wire in a phone are all part of the same durable stock.
Where is it?
The honest answer is that roughly half of it is jewellery, distributed across hundreds of millions of households, and no map can show you that. The other half, the part that moves markets, sits in a surprisingly small number of buildings. Those buildings, and the relationships between them, are the physical architecture of the gold market.
Before the vaults, the stock. Of the estimated 216,265 tonnes above ground at the end of 2024:
The market-relevant portion is the second and third rows. Jewellery does return to the market through recycling when prices rise, which makes it a slow, price-sensitive supply source rather than a stock anyone trades. Who owns that jewellery, and why it matters more than Western commentary suggests, is the subject of Who Actually Buys Gold.
London is where wholesale gold ownership changes hands, and it has been for more than a century.
The LBMA maintains a network of accredited vaults in and around London, operated by a small number of commercial custodians plus the Bank of England, which provides custody for central banks and for LBMA member banks. The Bank publishes a monthly figure for the gold held in its vaults and has said it holds on the order of 400,000 bars.
The market convention is loco London: wholesale prices are quoted for metal held in this system, in Good Delivery bars, settled by book entry. When two banks trade a thousand ounces, nothing moves. An account is debited and another credited within the clearing system operated by London Precious Metals Clearing Limited.
That design is why London matters. It is not that the metal is safer there. It is that the metal being there is what makes the book entry work, and the book entry is what makes the market liquid. The pricing mechanics that sit on top of this are in How Is the Gold Price Set.
What is stored there: central bank reserves held in custody, ETF metal, bank and client allocated holdings, and the unallocated pool against which most trading happens. The ownership distinction inside those same vaults is the subject of Allocated vs Unallocated Gold.
Two quite separate things sit in New York.
COMEX-approved warehouses hold metal deliverable against futures contracts. The exchange publishes daily stocks, split into registered metal that carries a delivery warrant and eligible metal that meets the standard but is not warranted. This pool is far smaller than London's, which is the fact that misleading ratio calculations rely on, as we explain in Paper Gold vs Physical Gold.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York operates a custody vault below street level in Manhattan holding gold on behalf of foreign central banks and international organisations. This metal is not owned by the United States. It is foreign official reserves held in custody, a large share of which arrived during and after the Second World War and simply never left.
The United States' own reserve, at roughly 8,133 tonnes, is the world's largest and is held mostly at Fort Knox, with the remainder at West Point, Denver and the New York Fed. The figure has been broadly static for decades. It is worth saying plainly that the persistent claim the vaults are empty has no evidence behind it beyond the absence of the kind of independent public audit that people would like to see, and that absence is a transparency complaint rather than proof of a missing hoard.
Switzerland has almost no gold mines and is central to the gold trade.
Several of the world's largest refineries operate there, and a large share of internationally traded gold passes through the country at some point. The reason is a specific piece of market plumbing: different markets want different bars.
A London Good Delivery bar weighs roughly 400 ounces at a minimum fineness of 995. Asian retail and investment demand runs heavily to kilobars at 999.9 fineness. When metal flows from Western institutional holdings to Eastern retail demand, it is physically recast. Swiss refineries are where that happens.
This gives Swiss trade statistics an unusual analytical value. Monthly Swiss gold import and export data, published by the federal customs administration, is one of the better real-time indicators of which direction metal is flowing between West and East. When large volumes arrive from London and depart for Asia, the market is moving metal from institutional storage into physical retail demand.
The bar standards themselves, and why fineness is quoted the way it is, are covered in Troy Ounces and Gold Purity Explained.
Zurich operates significant commercial vaulting alongside the refining industry, and Swiss vaults are a common choice for private and institutional holders seeking jurisdictional diversification.
Singapore has built a deliberate position as an Asian vaulting hub, supported by the removal of goods and services tax on investment-grade precious metals in 2012 and purpose-built freeport facilities.
Hong Kong and Shanghai serve the Chinese market, with the Shanghai Gold Exchange operating its own certified vault network and delivery standards.
Dubai is a major physical trading centre linking African and Asian flows, with its own exchange and vaulting infrastructure.
Central banks individually. Many hold some or all of their reserves domestically. Several countries have repatriated metal from foreign custody over the past decade, notably Germany, which moved a substantial portion of its reserves back to Frankfurt from New York and Paris in a programme completed in 2017. The motivation for that trend, and what it says about reserve management generally, connects directly to Central Bank Gold Buying Explained.
A market that clears through a handful of vaults, a small clearing system, and a short list of refiners is efficient. It is also exposed in ways that are easy to ignore until they are not.
The 2020 lesson. When Swiss refineries closed and passenger flights stopped in March 2020, the price relationship between London and New York dislocated. Nothing was fraudulent and no vault failed. The metal simply could not be recast and flown, and the arbitrage that normally holds the two markets together became unexecutable. That episode is the clearest demonstration available that the paper market's link to metal runs through physical logistics that can stop.
Jurisdictional risk is real. Metal held in a foreign custody account is subject to the legal environment of that jurisdiction. This is the argument behind repatriation programmes and it is not hypothetical: the freezing of foreign currency reserves after 2022 is precisely the risk that gold held domestically avoids, because it is nobody's liability and it is physically present.
Custody is a relationship, not a guarantee. Whoever holds your metal, allocated or not, you are relying on their solvency, competence and insurance. Diversification of storage is a legitimate response to that and it is why large holders rarely keep everything in one place.
If you own gold through a fund, a dealer's storage programme or a token, you are a beneficiary of this infrastructure whether you knew it or not. Three practical questions follow.
Where, specifically, is my metal? Not "a secure vault." A named operator in a named city. If a provider will not say, that is information.
Under which jurisdiction's law is it held? This determines what happens in an insolvency and whether any political risk attaches.
Can I see evidence? A bar list, an independent audit, a vault attestation with a date on it. The procedure for tokenized holdings specifically is in How to Verify Gold Token Reserves Yourself.
For self-custody, the storage problem becomes yours, along with the insurance problem most household policies do not solve. The full cost of that choice is in What It Really Costs to Own Physical Gold.
Where is most of the world's gold stored? By volume, in households as jewellery, concentrated in India, China and the Middle East. By market relevance, in the LBMA vault network in London, COMEX warehouses in New York, Swiss commercial vaults, and central bank facilities around the world.
How much gold is in the Bank of England? The Bank provides custody for central banks and commercial members and has described its holdings as being on the order of 400,000 bars. It publishes a monthly custody figure. The gold is overwhelmingly owned by others, not by the Bank.
Is there really gold in Fort Knox? The US holds roughly 8,133 tonnes across Fort Knox, West Point, Denver and the New York Fed, a figure broadly unchanged for decades. The recurring claim that the vaults are empty rests on the absence of a modern independent public audit rather than on any positive evidence.
Why does so much gold go through Switzerland? Because Swiss refineries recast metal between the bar standards different markets require, most commonly turning large London Good Delivery bars into kilobars for Asian demand. Swiss customs data is a useful indicator of West to East metal flow.
Which country holds the most gold? The United States, at roughly 8,133 tonnes of official reserves, followed by Germany, Italy and France. Rankings shift slowly at the top and more quickly further down as newer buyers accumulate.
Is it safer to store gold abroad? It diversifies jurisdictional risk and introduces distance, cost and unfamiliar legal treatment. Whether that trade is worth it depends on which risk you are actually worried about. It is a specific decision, not a general upgrade.
Does tokenized gold sit in these same vaults? Issuers of tokens backed by vaulted metal generally use professional vault operators in established centres, often London, Zurich or Singapore. The specific operator and the allocation status should be disclosed, and if they are not, that is the finding.
The gold market's physical layer is smaller and more concentrated than its size suggests. A network of London vaults settles the trades, a much smaller New York pool backs the futures, Swiss refineries convert between standards, and Asian hubs absorb the metal that ends up in physical hands.
This system works well and has one durable lesson in it: everything depends on a short list of institutions in a short list of places. Whether you hold metal, a fund or a token, knowing the name of the vault and the law that governs it is not paranoia. It is the minimum you should be able to find out.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice.
| Category | Approximate share | Where it physically is |
|---|
| Jewellery | About 45% | Households worldwide, concentrated in India, China and the Middle East |
| Private investment (bars and coins) | About 22% | Retail vaults, bank deposit boxes, homes, ETF-allocated storage |
| Official reserves | About 17% | Central bank vaults, plus custody accounts in London and New York |
| Other, including industrial | The remainder | Electronics, dentistry, catalysts, and stock not otherwise classified |
