In short: Gold is quoted as one price, but nobody pays that price. Between the quote and what you actually keep sit a buying premium, a yearly charge, and a worse price when you sell. This page adds all three up for each way of holding gold, over whatever period you choose, using figures each provider publishes.
Set the three inputs. How much is going in, how long it is held, and whether your state charges sales tax on bullion. Everything below is recalculated from those.
Seven states and the District of Columbia charge sales tax on bullion, and several more charge it on purchases below a threshold. Leaving this at zero is right for most of the country and wrong for some of it, so check your own state rather than assuming.
The three costs, and why the middle one is the one people forget
Buying costs you the gap between the gold price and what you are charged. For a coin that is the dealer’s premium; for an ETF it is the bid-ask spread, which is tiny. This one is visible, so it gets all the attention.
Holding costs you every year, whether or not you do anything. An ETF charges an expense ratio. A vault charges a storage fee. Metal in a drawer at home appears to charge nothing, which is not the same as costing nothing.
Selling costs you again, and this is the one almost nobody quantifies. Dealers buy back below the gold price. On the same day, at the same dealer, a 1 oz American Gold Eagle was offered at 3.38% above spot and bought back at 1.80% below it. Buy and sell on the same afternoon and you are down about 5% before the price has moved at all.
Three things change the answer completely
How long you hold it. Buying and selling costs are paid once. Storage is paid every year. Over one year a high premium dominates; over twenty years a small annual fee overtakes it. There is no method that is cheapest at every horizon, which is why a page that answers this with a single ranking is answering the wrong question.
How much you are holding. This is the one that surprises people. Vaulted gold services charge a percentage, but with a flat monthly minimum underneath it. Goldmoney’s storage is 0.25% a year with a $10 monthly minimum; BullionVault’s is 0.12% with a $4 monthly minimum. On a large holding the percentage is what you pay. On a small one the minimum is, and it stops looking like a percentage at all. Set the amount above to $2,000 and hold for ten years, and those minimums consume a quarter and more than half of the money respectively.
How you pay, and where you live. Paying by card rather than bank transfer costs about 4.17% more at the large dealers, because they discount 4% for wire and check rather than surcharging cards. And seven states plus the District of Columbia — Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and DC — charge sales tax on bullion, which lands entirely on physical metal and not on an ETF. Several more, including California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Virginia, charge it only on purchases below a stated threshold, so a small order is taxed where a large one is not. Together those two can add more than thirteen points to the cost of the same ounce.
The tax rule that applies to all of it, including the ETFs
In the United States, long-term gains on collectibles are taxed at a maximum rate of 28%, rather than the 20% that applies to most other long-term gains. The IRS states this directly, and the definition that pulls gold into it is in the tax code itself, which counts “any metal or gem” as a collectible.
What catches people out is that this reaches the ETFs too. GLD, GLDM, IAU, IAUM, SGOL, BAR and OUNZ are all grantor trusts, which means the tax system looks through the fund and treats you as owning the bullion directly. Selling the shares is selling a collectible. You do not have to take anyone’s word for this: State Street says it in the GLD tax FAQ, and BlackRock puts it in a prospectus heading.
Two details that get garbled elsewhere. The 28% is a maximum, not a flat rate: if your ordinary marginal rate is lower, that lower rate applies. And the 3.8% net investment income tax can sit on top for higher earners, separately. Tax treatment depends on your circumstances and this page is not tax advice.
What this leaves out, and which way it is wrong
Every model omits something. The useful question is which direction the omissions push, and here they all push the same way: they flatter physical metal.
- Storing metal at home is counted as free. It is not. A safe costs money, and most homeowners policies either exclude bullion or cap it at a few hundred dollars, so real cover means a scheduled rider. No source publishes reliable bullion-specific rider rates, so rather than invent a number, this page leaves it at zero and tells you it did.
- Shipping is not counted. Most large dealers ship free above about $199, so on the amounts this page deals with it is usually zero, but it is not always.
- The fractional coin figure is too kind. No dealer in our sources publishes a buyback price for a 1/10 oz coin, so the 1 oz bid is used instead. Small coins almost certainly sell back worse, so the real cost is higher than shown.
- The gold price is assumed flat. Storage fees are charged on the value of the holding, so if gold rises, storage costs more in dollars. Holding the price still keeps this a comparison of costs rather than a projection of returns.
- Some providers do not publish enough to be included. Kitco quotes allocated storage by phone and does not publish a rate. GBI Direct, formerly Hard Assets Alliance, publishes the formula for its storage fee but not the number in it. Neither is criticised for that here, but neither can be compared.
How to check it yourself
Everything here is published by the providers themselves and takes an afternoon to reproduce.
Expense ratios are on each issuer’s product page, and the larger issuers also publish a 30-day median bid-ask spread there. Storage fees are in the published tariffs linked below. Dealer premiums are the harder part, because they move with the market: the method used here is to read a dealer’s ask and its published buyback bid at the same moment, against the spot price that same dealer is displaying, so the two figures are comparable. Percentages taken from different moments are not.
If you want to check one number rather than all of them, check the buyback. It is the figure least often published and the one that most changes the answer.
Related reading
Costs are only half of what you keep. For the other half — what moves the gold price itself, and when — see The Four Releases That Move Gold.
Sources
- Expense ratios and bid-ask spreads: issuer product pages and prospectuses for GLD, GLDM, IAU, IAUM, SGOL, BAR and OUNZ. Read 30 September 2026.
- Storage and dealing fees: BullionVault published tariff, OneGold pricing, and the Goldmoney fee schedule dated 1 February 2026.
- Dealer premiums and buyback bids: SD Bullion product and sell pages, read 28 and 29 September 2026, against the spot price displayed on those same pages. Cross-checked against Money Metals Exchange, which publishes its bid and ask together.
- Tax: IRS Topic no. 409 for the 28% maximum collectibles rate, and 26 U.S.C. §408(m)(2) for the definition that includes metal. Grantor trust treatment confirmed in State Street’s GLD tax FAQ and BlackRock’s iShares Gold Trust prospectus.
- Payment discounts and sales tax by state: dealers’ own payment pages. The state list is dealer-compiled and changes with legislation, including sunset dates, so check your own state rather than relying on it.
- No provider on this page has any relationship with this site, and none of the links are affiliate links.
Educational content only. This is not financial advice or an investment recommendation. The author is not a registered financial adviser, is not a tax adviser, and has no relationship with any provider named on this page.