Silver Price Per Pound Today
Byline: Reviewed by the Silver Value Chart Editorial Team · Updated September 19, 2026
$968.04 per pound (avoirdupois)
Troy pound: $796.56 (12 troy oz)
Silver spot $66.38/oz · updated
Quick answer
A pound of silver is worth $968.04 as of September 19, 2026 — if you mean the ordinary pound you weigh groceries in. If you mean a troy pound, the answer is $796.56. The two differ by more than 20%, and which one is correct depends entirely on what you are weighing and why. Almost every page that answers this question gives only one of the two numbers.
| Unit | Equivalent | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Troy ounce | 31.1034768 g | $66.38 |
| Gram | 1 g | $2.13 |
| Kilogram | 1,000 g | $2,134 |
| Pound (avoirdupois) | 453.59 g · 14.5833 oz t | $968.04 |
| Pound (troy) | 373.24 g · 12 oz t | $796.56 |
| Tola | 11.6638 g | $24.89 |
| Sterling (925), per gram | 1 g × 0.925 | $1.97 |
Two pounds, two answers
This is the only common precious-metals question where the obvious answer is genuinely ambiguous, so it is worth setting out properly.
The avoirdupois pound is the everyday pound. It is defined as exactly 453.59237 grams. Divide that by 31.1034768 grams per troy ounce and you get 14.5833 troy ounces of silver.
14.5833 troy oz × $66.38 = $968.04
The troy pound is the precious-metals pound, and it contains exactly 12 troy ounces — not 16. It weighs about 373.24 grams, noticeably lighter than the pound you are used to.
12 troy oz × $66.38 = $796.56
The gap is 2.5833 troy ounces, or 21.5% more silver in an avoirdupois pound than in a troy pound. On a single pound of metal that is a difference of hundreds of dollars at today's price.
Why on earth are there two pounds?
Because the troy system and the avoirdupois system evolved separately for different trades, and both survived.
The avoirdupois system — the name comes from Old French for "goods of weight" — grew up around bulk commerce: wool, grain, coal. It settled on a pound of 16 ounces, and those ounces are about 28.35 grams each.
The troy system was the system of the mints and the apothecaries. Its ounce is heavier, at 31.1034768 grams, and its pound is only 12 of them. It stayed in use for precious metals because coinage and bullion contracts were written in it, and because the value of the goods made precision worth more than convenience.
The result is a genuine trap. A troy ounce is heavier than an avoirdupois ounce (31.1 g against 28.35 g), but a troy pound is lighter than an avoirdupois pound (373 g against 454 g), because it has four fewer ounces in it. Anyone who learns the first fact and assumes it carries over to pounds will get this backwards.
Which one do you actually want?
In practice:
- Weighing silver on a household or postal scale? You want the avoirdupois answer, $968.04. Your scale is calibrated in ordinary pounds, and so is every shipping label and kitchen measure in the country.
- Reading a historical document, a mint record, or an apothecary reference? You want the troy answer, $796.56. Older bullion and coinage records are in troy pounds.
- Dealing with a modern bullion dealer? Neither. The trade works in troy ounces and nobody quotes silver by the pound. If a dealer quotes you a per-pound price, ask which pound before you go further.
The safest habit is to stop using pounds for silver entirely. Weigh in grams, convert to troy ounces, and the ambiguity disappears. Our per-gram page covers that route.
Worked examples at today's price
At $66.38 per troy ounce:
| What you have | Troy ounces | Melt value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 avoirdupois pound (454 g) | 14.5833 | $968.04 |
| 1 troy pound (373 g) | 12.0000 | $796.56 |
| 5 avoirdupois pounds | 72.92 | $4,840.21 |
| 10 avoirdupois pounds | 145.83 | $9,680.42 |
An important caution on these figures: they assume pure silver. A pound of sterling flatware is 92.5% silver, so an avoirdupois pound of it holds 13.49 troy ounces of actual silver, not 14.5833 — worth $895.44, not $968.04. Since almost everything anyone weighs in pounds is sterling rather than fine silver, this correction applies far more often than not. Use our scrap silver calculator to apply it.
"A pound of silver" as a mental benchmark
The question is often asked less as a calculation than as a way of grasping scale, so here is the scale.
At today's price, a single ordinary pound of pure silver is worth $968.04 — about what a laptop costs. That is a useful contrast with gold, where one pound of metal is worth more than most cars. Silver's low value-to-weight ratio is its defining practical characteristic: it means storage and shipping costs matter far more than they do for gold, and it is why large silver holdings become a physical logistics problem long before they become a large sum of money.
It also explains why silver is used industrially and gold mostly is not. At these prices silver is cheap enough per unit of useful property — it is the most electrically and thermally conductive metal there is — to be consumed in electronics, solar panels and medical applications. A meaningful share of all silver ever mined has been used up rather than stored, which is not true of gold.
Selling or buying?
If you are selling a pound or more of silver, weigh it in grams, not pounds, and separate items by purity before you get a quote. Mixing sterling with plated items in one lot invites a buyer to price the whole lot at the lower grade. The melt figures on this page are a ceiling, not an offer: refiners and major buyers typically pay 90–95% of melt, coin shops 70–90%, pawn shops less.
If you are buying, nobody sells silver by the pound. You will be quoted per troy ounce or per bar. See what a realistic premium over spot looks like →
Related pages
Per ounce · Per gram · Per kilo · Sterling silver price · Scrap calculator
FAQ
How many ounces are in a pound of silver? It depends which units. An avoirdupois pound holds 16 avoirdupois ounces, which is 14.5833 troy ounces of silver. A troy pound holds 12 troy ounces. Silver is priced in troy ounces, so the 14.5833 figure is the one to multiply by spot.
Why is a troy pound lighter than a regular pound if a troy ounce is heavier? Because a troy pound contains only 12 ounces instead of 16. The heavier ounce does not make up for four missing ones.
Does anyone still use troy pounds? Rarely. Modern bullion trades in troy ounces and kilograms. Troy pounds appear mainly in historical records and older reference works, which is exactly where the confusion comes from.
Is a pound of silver a lot? As metal, no — it is under fifteen troy ounces and fits in a hand. As value it is $968.04 at today's price. Silver is heavy relative to its value, which is the opposite of how gold behaves.
Data sources: Spot price via api.gold-api.com · COMEX futures (SI=F) via Yahoo Finance. Prices are for informational purposes only and may be delayed. Figures on this page were generated . Silver is quoted in US dollars per troy ounce.