Gold Bar
Refined gold cast or minted into a bar of standard weight and purity, the physical form used for investment holding, central bank reserves, and bullion trading.
Covered in 1 MetalsCost.com News Intelligence article, most recently on August 8, 2026.
Overview
A gold bar is refined gold cast or stamped into a standardized form, and it's the shape the bullion market actually trades in bulk — everything from a one-gram minted wafer sold to a retail investor up to the roughly 400-troy-ounce "Good Delivery" bars that move between central banks, bullion banks, and vaults on the wholesale market. Standardization matters enormously here: a bar's weight, purity, refiner hallmark, and serial number let it change hands or sit in a vault for decades without anyone needing to re-assay it.
How It's Manufactured
Doré bar — impure gold from a mine, typically 60-90% gold alloyed with silver and other metals — or recycled scrap gold is refined further before it can become a standard bar. Refiners commonly use the Miller process, which bubbles chlorine gas through molten metal to reach about 99.5% purity quickly, or the more precise Wohlwill electrolytic process for the 99.99% purity that Good Delivery bars require. The refined gold is then melted and either poured into ingot molds to produce larger cast bars, or rolled into strip and stamped into smaller minted bars, each marked with the refiner's hallmark, exact weight, purity, and a unique serial number.
Byproducts
Refining doré or scrap gold recovers associated silver, and often platinum-group metals, as separate saleable byproducts alongside the gold itself — for a refiner working ore-derived doré, the silver credit can be a meaningful part of the economics. The acids and chlorine used during refining generate waste streams that licensed refiners are required to treat, and to recover and reuse wherever practical rather than discharge, and even the crucible and furnace linings are periodically processed to reclaim trace gold residue.
Who Consumes It
Central banks buy bars to build and manage national gold reserves, bullion banks and dealers trade them as their core inventory, and ETF custodians hold vaulted bars to back gold-backed exchange-traded funds. Private investors buy retail-sized bars directly for wealth storage, and jewelry manufacturers occasionally buy bar stock as raw material for their own casting and fabrication — in India specifically, jewelers and bullion dealers are major buyers of small cast and minted bars around festival and wedding seasons.
Everyday Uses
Most people never hold a bar in their hand, but retail bars as small as a gram are sold through banks, jewelers, and online bullion dealers specifically so ordinary savers can hold physical gold without buying a full ounce, and gold ETFs that back their shares with vaulted bars let investors gain the same exposure through a brokerage account instead. In India, small gold bars and coins are also a common gifting and savings tradition around festivals like Akshaya Tritiya and Diwali.
Industrial Uses
Bars themselves aren't used industrially — that role belongs to jewelry manufacturing and electronics-grade gold — but the standardized bar is the monetary and financial unit of the gold market: it's what central banks hold as reserves, what vaults store on behalf of ETFs and investors, and the deliverable form specified by gold futures contracts on exchanges like COMEX and India's own MCX.
