Scrap Silver Calculator

Scrap silver is silver that’s being sold for the value of its metal content rather than its form — old jewelry, broken sterling, mismatched flatware, pre-1965 US coins, or even bullion that someone wants to liquidate. The price you can get for it is determined by three things: how much it weighs, how pure it is, and what the spot price of silver is on the day of the sale. This calculator turns those three numbers into the two figures that actually matter to you: the silver’s market value at spot, and a realistic estimate of what a buyer will pay.

Spot price is the global market price for one troy ounce of pure silver, quoted in US dollars on commodity exchanges and updated continuously through the trading day. You can look it up free at kitco.com or apmex.com — type the current number into the calculator above. Spot is what one troy ounce of fine silver would trade for between professional buyers; it’s the upper bound on what your scrap is worth.

The math is straightforward. Multiply your piece’s weight by its purity to get the weight of pure silver inside it. A 15-gram sterling spoon (92.5% silver) contains 13.88 grams of pure silver. Convert that to troy ounces by dividing by 31.1035. Then multiply by the spot price to get the market value of the silver content. At a $32 spot price, our 15-gram sterling spoon contains $14.27 worth of silver at spot.

The number you actually receive will be lower. Buyers don’t pay full spot because they need a margin to operate: they have to refine the metal, account for assay errors, cover their overhead, and absorb the risk that silver prices drop between the day they buy from you and the day they sell on. Different buyer types have very different cost structures, which is why the calculator offers three presets. Pawn shops typically pay around 50% of spot — they have high overhead, slow inventory turnover, and the most negotiation latitude. Local jewelers usually pay 60–75%, depending on whether they’re scrap-only or have an in-house silversmith. Mail-in refiners — companies that melt the silver themselves — typically pay 80–90%, since they skip retail overhead and process volume. The same 15-gram sterling spoon worth $14.27 at spot would fetch about $7.13 at a pawn shop, $9.99 from a jeweler, and $12.13 from a refiner.

Reading hallmarks is the part most people get wrong. The most common silver stamp on jewelry is 925 (or Sterling or Ster.), meaning 92.5% silver. Coins from countries with metric standards often show 800 or 835. Bullion shows 999 or Fine or .999. The reference table below the calculator covers the stamps you’re likely to encounter, with the silver percentage you’d type into the Custom field if your piece doesn’t match a preset.

The mistake to avoid is confusing silver with things that share its name. Silverplate (often stamped EPNS, Silverplate, Plate, A1, or Sheffield) is base metal with a thin layer of real silver electroplated on top — the coating is too thin to recover economically, and silverplate has essentially no scrap value. Nickel silver, German silver, and alpaca silver are copper-nickel-zinc alloys with zero actual silver content; the names refer to the color, not the metal. Both are common in old jewelry boxes, and both will be rejected (or insultingly low-balled) by any scrap buyer. If a piece is unmarked, a magnet test is a useful quick filter: silver is not magnetic, but silverplate over a steel base often is. For a definitive answer, a jeweler can do an XRF test in a few seconds.

Coin scrap deserves a careful caveat. Common-date pre-1965 US dimes, quarters, and half-dollars in worn condition are usually worth their melt value plus a small dealer premium, which is roughly what this calculator estimates. But key dates, uncirculated examples, and pre-1933 US gold/silver are often worth significantly more as collectibles than as scrap — sometimes ten or twenty times more. If a coin looks uncirculated or has an unusual date, get it appraised before scrapping it. The same caution applies to obviously old or hand-engraved sterling: a scrap buyer will pay melt regardless of provenance, but an antiques dealer might pay a substantial multiple for the same piece intact.

The single most useful habit when selling scrap silver is to get more than one quote. The 50–95% range across buyer types is real — on a several-hundred-dollar lot, the difference between a pawn shop and a refiner can easily be a hundred dollars or more. Refiners are usually best for plain scrap (broken jewelry, dental fillings, mismatched flatware), but jewelers are sometimes better for intact pieces with resale potential, and pawn shops are best when you need cash today. Use the calculator to set your floor — the spot value is the most you can possibly get — and treat the dealer-offer estimate as a baseline for comparing real offers.