Understanding Gold Karats: What 10k, 14k, 18k and 22k Really Mean for Your Payout

Karat is the single biggest factor in what your gold jewellery is worth, ahead of style, brand and condition. Understanding it takes about five minutes and puts you on equal footing with the person on the other side of the counter.

Karat is a fraction, not a grade

Karat expresses how many parts out of 24 are pure gold. Pure gold is 24 karat. Everything below that is an alloy, mixed with metals such as copper, silver, zinc or nickel to make it harder and to change its colour.

• 24k — 99.9% gold. Very soft, deep yellow, common in bullion and some South Asian jewellery
• 22k — 91.7% gold. Rich colour, widely used in South Asian and Middle Eastern jewellery
• 18k — 75% gold. Standard for European fine jewellery and higher-end designer pieces
• 14k — 58.3% gold. The most common karat in North American jewellery
• 10k — 41.7% gold. The legal minimum to be sold as gold in Canada and the US

What this means in practice

Two chains that both weigh 20 grams contain very different amounts of gold depending on karat. The 22k chain holds roughly 18.3 grams of gold; the 10k chain holds about 8.3 grams. That difference is not marginal — it more than doubles the metal content.

This is why a buyer must sort your items by karat before weighing anything. A single weigh-in of a mixed pile either overpays for the low-karat items or, far more often, underpays for the high-karat ones.

Reading the stamps on your jewellery

Look inside a ring band, on the clasp or tag of a chain, or on the back of a pendant. Common marks include:

• 10K, 14K, 18K, 22K — North American karat marks
• 417, 585, 750, 916, 999 — European fineness marks, meaning parts per thousand of gold (417 = 10k, 585 = 14k, 750 = 18k, 916 = 22k)
• GF or 1/20 12K GF — gold filled, a thin bonded layer over base metal
• GP, GEP, HGE — gold plated or electroplated, an extremely thin coating
• 925 — sterling silver, not gold, even if the piece looks gold coloured

Why the stamp is not the final word

Stamps wear away over decades of contact with skin. Handmade and older pieces were often never stamped at all. And in rare cases, stamps are simply inaccurate — either through sloppy manufacture or deliberate misrepresentation somewhere in the item's history.

That is why a physical test is always performed. Acid testing on a stone, or an XRF reading, establishes the actual purity regardless of what the stamp claims. If your piece is unstamped, it is not a problem at all.

Colour is alloy, not purity

White gold, rose gold and yellow gold can all be the same karat. Rose gold gets its tone from a higher copper content in the alloy; white gold from metals such as palladium or nickel, usually with a rhodium plating on top. The colour tells you about the mix, not about how much gold is in the piece.

Gold-plated and gold-filled items

Plated jewellery carries a layer of gold measured in microns. There is so little metal that recovering it is not economically viable, so plated pieces generally have no scrap value. Gold-filled is thicker than plated but still bonded to a base core, and is rarely worth processing.

An honest buyer will tell you when a piece is plated rather than solid and will not charge you for finding out.

What to do with this information

Before you sell, sort your own pieces roughly by stamp. It makes the counter conversation faster and it means you can follow along as each group is tested and weighed. At AGN we walk through this sorting with you at 1646 Victoria Park Avenue in North York, free of charge and with no obligation. Call (416) 551-6400 if you have a piece you cannot read the stamp on.