In short: The 10-year Treasury yield everybody quotes is two numbers added together. One of them is what gold actually competes with; the other is not. The panel below pulls both straight from the US Treasury and splits them apart, updating every business day.
What the three lines are
Nominal is the headline figure — the 10-year Treasury par yield, the one on every news ticker. It is what the bond pays before inflation is taken into account.
Real is what the bond pays after inflation, taken from Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities. It is the return in terms of what your money can actually buy.
Breakeven is the gap between the two. It is not published as a series of its own anywhere on this page’s sources — it is the nominal rate minus the real rate, and nothing more. Read as a number, it is roughly what the bond market expects inflation to average over the next ten years.
That subtraction is the whole identity, and it holds exactly rather than approximately:
Nominal yield = Real yield + Breakeven
Why the real yield is the one that competes with gold
Gold pays nothing. No coupon, no dividend, no interest. Hold an ounce for a year and you still have one ounce. So the cost of holding it is whatever a bond would have paid you instead — and what a bond pays you, in terms of purchasing power, is the real yield, not the headline.
This is why the headline moving tells you very little on its own. If the nominal rises because the real yield rose, bonds genuinely pay more after inflation and holding gold got more expensive. If the nominal rises because breakeven rose while the real yield sat still, nothing has changed in the competition between the two. Same headline, opposite meaning.
The short paragraph above the chart works out which of the two moved more over the last five trading days, from the numbers alone. The longer version of the argument, with worked examples from 2021 and 2022, is in How Bond Yields Move Gold.
One boundary worth stating plainly: real yields are one of the strongest known influences on the gold price, not the only one and not a formula. Central bank buying, the dollar, and physical demand push on it too, and there have been long stretches where the observed relationship weakened. This page tells you what a move in yields means. It does not tell you what gold will do.
How to check it yourself
Every figure here comes from two public files. Go to the US Treasury’s interest rate data pages and open Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates for the nominal figures and Daily Treasury Par Real Yield Curve Rates for the real ones. The 10-year column in each is what this page uses.
Rates are published each business day in the afternoon, New York time, so the newest reading here is the previous business day until that release lands. The real curve only goes back to 2003, which is when the Treasury began publishing it; the nominal curve goes back much further.
If you compare this page against FRED, the series are DGS10, DFII10 and T10YIE. They should match, because FRED sources them from the same Treasury curves and builds T10YIE as DGS10 minus DFII10 — the same subtraction done here. Small differences on any given day usually mean one source has published and the other has not yet.
Related reading
These two yields do not move on their own. They move when the market changes its mind about the path of the policy rate, and four scheduled US releases do most of that work. The Four Releases That Move Gold explains what each one contains and why the gap between the figure and the consensus matters more than the figure.
Sources
- US Department of the Treasury, Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates — field
BC_10YEAR. - US Department of the Treasury, Daily Treasury Par Real Yield Curve Rates — field
TC_10YEAR. - Breakeven on this page is calculated, not retrieved: nominal minus real.
- Figures are retrieved live from the Treasury each time the page is loaded. They are not stored or edited here. Treasury data is a work of the United States federal government and is in the public domain.
Educational content only. This is not financial advice or an investment recommendation. The author is not a registered financial adviser. Trading leveraged instruments carries risk of loss.