How many gold bars are you worth in weight?
A standard Good Delivery gold bar weighs 12.4 kg (400 troy ounces). A 75 kg adult equals approximately 6.05 gold bars, worth roughly £4.6 million at current spot prices.
The Good Delivery standard
The world\'s most-traded gold format is the Good Delivery bar — a standardised 400-troy-ounce (12.4 kg) brick of 99.5%+ pure gold, used as the unit of international settlement between central banks. They\'re produced by certified refineries, marked with serial numbers, and stored in vaults like the Bank of England\'s, JPMorgan\'s and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York\'s.
The dimensions are roughly 25 × 7 × 4 cm — small enough to fit in two cupped hands, dense enough to be genuinely difficult to lift (gold has a density of 19.3 g/cm³, almost twice that of lead).
| Format | Weight | Approx. value (2024) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 g coin | 1 g | £60 |
| 10 g bar | 10 g | £600 |
| 1 oz Krugerrand | 31.1 g | £1,900 |
| 100 g retail bar | 100 g | £6,000 |
| 1 kg retail bar | 1,000 g | £60,000 |
| Good Delivery bar | 12,400 g | ~£760,000 |
Could you actually lift a gold bar?
A 12.4 kg gold bar is heavy. Most adults can lift it briefly with both hands, but its small size (you can wrap your hand around it) plus its density makes it surprisingly awkward — much harder than lifting 12.4 kg in a more natural shape. Bank vaults exploit this: there\'s a famous Federal Reserve "lift challenge" where visitors try to one-hand a gold bar; almost nobody can.
Gold trivia
- All the gold ever mined in human history would fit in a 22-metre cube — around 212,000 tonnes total.
- About 2,500–3,000 tonnes of new gold is mined globally each year. Most goes to jewellery, then bars and coins, then industrial uses.
- The US Federal Reserve in Manhattan stores roughly 6,000 tonnes of gold in its bedrock vault — more than any other location on Earth.
- Olympic gold medals are actually only 1.2% gold by weight — they\'re mostly silver with a 6 g gold plating, which complies with the IOC\'s minimum standard.
- If gold spot prices were to hit $5,000/oz (some analysts predict this within the decade), a single Good Delivery bar would be worth £1.5 million.
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