How do I tell real gold from plated at an estate sale?

Start with the mark and the letters after it. A bare 585, 750 or 14K suggests solid metal at that fineness; the same number followed by GP, GF, HGE or RGP describes a thin layer over a base metal, and the National Stamping Act (15 U.S.C. 297) requires plated goods carrying a fineness mark to be described as rolled gold plate, gold plate, gold electroplate or gold filled. Then check for a second mark: the same statute requires the party applying a quality mark to apply its own registered trademark alongside it, so a karat stamp with no maker mark anywhere on the piece deserves a test before it is priced as solid.

Should I price gold jewelry at melt value?

Melt is a floor, not a price. It tells you the least the piece is worth to somebody, which is exactly what you need in order to avoid selling a heavy chain for twenty dollars. Above that floor sits whatever the design, the maker, the stones and the period add, and for a signed or period piece that can be a large multiple of the metal. Price at or near melt only when the piece is broken, unmarked, or plainly worth more as material than as jewelry.

Do I need an appraisal for estate jewelry before a sale?

Not for the tray of costume, and not for a scrap lot. You do need an expert eye before the doors open on any piece with a significant stone, a recognized signature, or a period look you cannot place. An hour of a jeweler or gemologist time costs far less than one mispriced ring, and nothing on this page is an appraisal.

How should I price a box of costume jewelry?

By the handful, not by the piece. Group it into a few price bands, put it in trays where buyers can dig, and let volume do the work. The exceptions worth pulling out first are signed designer costume, Bakelite and other early plastics, and anything with a working clasp and real weight, because those trade as collectibles rather than as filler.

What is the most common jewelry pricing mistake at an estate sale?

Weighing a mixed lot as if it were all one karat. Ten, fourteen and eighteen karat pieces in the same bag are 41.7, 58.5 and 75 percent gold respectively, so a single average understates the good pieces and overstates the rest. Sort by mark first, weigh each group separately, and the arithmetic stops lying to you.

Updated August 2026

How to price jewelry at an estate sale

One dresser drawer can hold the two extremes of the whole house. A tangle of chains in a shoebox might be four hundred dollars of scrap gold or four dollars of gold-tone brass, and from across the room the two look identical. Jewelry is where a fast pricing pass does the most damage, because the error is invisible: nobody notices the ring you underpriced until it walks out the door in a buyer’s pocket.

The good news is that jewelry rewards a method more than it rewards expertise. You do not have to be a gemologist to price a house well. You have to sort before you price, read what is stamped on the metal, know which four situations are out of your depth, and move the rest at volume.

Sort before you price anything

Do not price a single piece until the whole lot is in three piles.

Precious metal. Anything marked, or anything heavy and cold with the dull warmth of real gold or the specific gray of silver.
Fine jewelry. Precious metal plus stones, a signature, or a period look. These get a slower pass.
Costume. Everything else, including a great deal that is genuinely charming and genuinely worth two dollars.

Sorting first is not tidiness. It is the step that stops you from averaging. A bag weighed as one lot hides the fact that the 18-karat pieces in it are 75 percent gold and the 10-karat pieces are 41.7 percent, and an average price punishes the good pieces to subsidise the poor ones.

Read the marks, then read what is next to them

Almost every piece worth real money tells you what it is, in letters too small to read without help. Use a loupe or your phone camera at full zoom.

The three-digit European form and the American karat form say the same thing. Per Antique Jewelry Buyers’ markings guide, 999 is 24-karat at 99.9 percent gold, 750 is 18-karat at 75 percent, 585 is 14-karat at 58.5 percent, and 417 is 10-karat at 41.7 percent, which that guide describes as the minimum standard sold as gold in the United States. On the white metals, 925 is sterling at 92.5 percent silver and 950 is 95 percent platinum, per the same guide.

Then look for a second mark, and treat its absence as information. Under the National Stamping Act (15 U.S.C. 297), a person who applies a quality mark to a gold or silver article must also apply their own trademark, registered or applied for in the United States, using the same method and in lettering at least as large as the quality mark. A karat stamp standing entirely alone, with no maker mark anywhere on the piece, is not proof of anything, but it is a reason to test before you price it as solid.

The same statute is why the letters after a number matter more than the number. Section 297 forbids marking a fineness on a plated article unless the piece is clearly described as rolled gold plate, gold plate, gold electroplate, or gold filled. So 14K GP, GF, HGE and RGP are all describing a coating, and the karat figure refers to the coating, not the piece. Gold-filled has meaningfully more metal in it than electroplate and is worth grouping separately if there is a quantity of it, but neither is priced from a scale.

The Act also sets how far a mark may miss. Under sections 295 and 296, a gold article’s actual fineness may not fall short of its marked fineness by more than three one-thousandths for watchcases and flatware, or seven one-thousandths for other gold articles, and a silver article by more than four one-thousandths. That is the legal tolerance, and it is narrow. A piece testing far below its stamp is not within tolerance; it is mismarked, and it should be priced as an unknown.

Metal value is a floor, and the floor moves

For scrap, broken chain, single earrings and unsigned plain gold, the metal is the price. The arithmetic is straightforward once the sorting is done: weight of the group, times the purity fraction for its karat, times the current price per troy ounce.

The part people get wrong is the last term. There is no such thing as the gold price, only today’s. The London benchmarks the trade quotes against are set on a fixed schedule, and per the LBMA, the gold price is set twice each business day at 10:30 and 15:00 London time and the silver price once, at noon. A number you looked up last month is not a number, and a printed price list in a pricing binder is a liability. Check spot the morning you price, and check it again the morning you open.

Understand also that nobody pays you melt. A refiner or dealer buys below the metal value because refining, assay and their own margin come out of the offer, so the melt figure is the ceiling on a scrap transaction, not the number on the tag. When you take scrap offers, make each buyer tell you what fraction of melt they are quoting and on which day’s price, because otherwise you are comparing two numbers that were never comparable.

Metal prices being where they are has done the category a favor. Blue Moon Estate Sales’ 2026 outlook reports that gold and silver jewelry has stayed strong on elevated metal prices, with Art Deco and Retro pieces particularly sought. That cuts both ways for an operator: buyers arrive at your sale knowing roughly what metal is worth, and a chain priced at costume money will be gone in the first ten minutes.

Move the costume volume, and mine it once

Costume is a volume problem, not a pricing problem. Two or three price bands, open trays, and let people dig. Pricing each brooch individually costs you a morning and returns almost nothing.

Before the trays go out, though, pull four things: signed designer costume, early plastics such as Bakelite, sterling that got filed into the costume pile by mistake, and anything with real weight and a working clasp. Those trade as collectibles or as metal rather than as filler, and they are the pieces a knowledgeable buyer is hoping you missed.

The traps that actually cost money

Cleaning. Polishing an old piece to make it show better can strip the patina that tells a buyer it is period, and on silver it can soften detail permanently. Wipe the dust; leave the rest.
Stones you cannot grade. A white stone is a diamond, a moissanite, a white sapphire, or glass, and telling them apart at a table is not a skill you can improvise. Price the setting, flag the stone.
Watches. A mechanical watch is its own category with its own specialists. Do not price a watch off the case metal.
Weighing with stones in. Metal weight means the metal. A stone-set ring weighed whole overstates its scrap value, sometimes badly.
One number for the box. A single price on a mixed lot is how a valuable piece leaves at the price of its neighbors.

When to call somebody

The pricing chapter of our free playbook takes the line that a specialist’s fee is cheap insurance, and jewelry is the category where that is most obviously true. Bring in a jeweler or gemologist before the sale opens if the house holds a significant stone, a signed piece by a recognized house, a mechanical watch, or a quantity of period jewelry you cannot date. The cost of the hour is small next to one ring sold for a hundredth of its value, and the family is buying your judgment about what you do not know as much as your knowledge of what you do.

None of this is an appraisal, and neither is a suggested price on a tag. What you owe the family is a defensible method: sorted lots, marks read, metal checked against the day’s price, and the four hard cases sent to somebody who does this for a living. If you are still working out what the whole job pays after the family is settled, the estate sale proceeds calculator does that arithmetic in the browser.

Do the sort, read the stamps, and the drawer stops being a gamble.

Sources

Every figure above is attributed where it appears. These are the places those numbers come from, so you can check them yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I tell real gold from plated at an estate sale?: Start with the mark and the letters after it. A bare 585, 750 or 14K suggests solid metal at that fineness; the same number followed by GP, GF, HGE or RGP describes a thin layer over a base metal, and the National Stamping Act (15 U.S.C. 297) requires plated goods carrying a fineness mark to be described as rolled gold plate, gold plate, gold electroplate or gold filled. Then check for a second mark: the same statute requires the party applying a quality mark to apply its own registered trademark alongside it, so a karat stamp with no maker mark anywhere on the piece deserves a test before it is priced as solid.
Should I price gold jewelry at melt value?: Melt is a floor, not a price. It tells you the least the piece is worth to somebody, which is exactly what you need in order to avoid selling a heavy chain for twenty dollars. Above that floor sits whatever the design, the maker, the stones and the period add, and for a signed or period piece that can be a large multiple of the metal. Price at or near melt only when the piece is broken, unmarked, or plainly worth more as material than as jewelry.
Do I need an appraisal for estate jewelry before a sale?: Not for the tray of costume, and not for a scrap lot. You do need an expert eye before the doors open on any piece with a significant stone, a recognized signature, or a period look you cannot place. An hour of a jeweler or gemologist time costs far less than one mispriced ring, and nothing on this page is an appraisal.
How should I price a box of costume jewelry?: By the handful, not by the piece. Group it into a few price bands, put it in trays where buyers can dig, and let volume do the work. The exceptions worth pulling out first are signed designer costume, Bakelite and other early plastics, and anything with a working clasp and real weight, because those trade as collectibles rather than as filler.
What is the most common jewelry pricing mistake at an estate sale?: Weighing a mixed lot as if it were all one karat. Ten, fourteen and eighteen karat pieces in the same bag are 41.7, 58.5 and 75 percent gold respectively, so a single average understates the good pieces and overstates the rest. Sort by mark first, weigh each group separately, and the arithmetic stops lying to you.

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