How Silver Is Priced: Spot, Futures, LBMA, COMEX & Premiums

The silver spot price you see on a chart looks like a single, clean number. It is anything but. It is a continuously updated reflection of trades happening in several different markets at once, with different participants, different settlement conventions, and different time zones. Understanding how that number is constructed makes the rest of the silver market easier to read — including why the price you pay at a coin shop never quite matches it.

Spot: a wholesale, OTC market

The silver "spot" market is an over-the-counter (OTC) market in which large dealers, refiners, and institutional buyers quote each other prices for unallocated silver — silver that exists as a balance on a vault operator's books rather than as identifiable physical bars. Trade sizes are large; settlement is typically two business days later. There is no central exchange for spot silver in the same way there is one for, say, listed equities. Spot prices on retail charts are aggregated from these OTC quotes plus the most active futures market.

The LBMA Silver Price

The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) administers a daily auction known as the LBMA Silver Price. It is the most widely cited reference price in the wholesale silver market, used by ETFs, central banks, refiners, and miners as the benchmark for daily contract settlement. The auction runs once a day, at noon UK time, and produces a single fixed price for that session. For long-term contracts, "LBMA Silver Price" is usually the number being settled against, even when other prices were trading throughout the day.

Because the LBMA price fixes once a day, it does not move continuously. The intraday silver price you see on a chart is not the LBMA price — it is the OTC and futures market trading around expectations for the next fix.

COMEX silver futures

COMEX, part of CME Group, lists silver futures (ticker SI) and a smaller version called Micro Silver (ticker SIL on CME). A standard SI contract is 5,000 troy ounces of silver; the price quote is in US dollars per troy ounce. Silver futures trade nearly around the clock during the trading week and are the most liquid public source of intraday silver pricing. Most silver charts you see on third-party sites — including the live charts on this site — derive their continuous price feed primarily from COMEX or from OTC quotes that are themselves anchored to COMEX.

Futures prices are not the same as spot. A futures price is a price for delivery in a future month, and it usually trades at a small premium to spot to reflect storage and the time value of money — a relationship called contango. When the relationship inverts (futures below spot, called backwardation), it is usually a sign of unusually tight near-term physical supply.

Other regional benchmarks

Outside London and New York, silver also trades on the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM), and a handful of regional venues. These are smaller than London and COMEX in pure silver volume, but they matter because they reflect Asian physical demand and the time-zone gap between London and New York closes. When a chart shows continuous 24-hour pricing, it is stitching across these venues.

Why the chart number is in dollars

Silver, like gold, is conventionally quoted in US dollars per troy ounce. A troy ounce is about 31.1035 grams — slightly heavier than a kitchen ounce, which is part of the reason "ounce" prices look bigger than people sometimes expect. When charts show silver in EUR, GBP, or JPY (as the multi-currency section on this site's home page does), the price is the dollar quote multiplied by the relevant FX rate. Silver in non-dollar terms therefore reflects two moves at once: silver vs. dollars, and dollars vs. that currency.

From wholesale to retail: the premium

Spot is a wholesale price for very large amounts of unallocated silver. To get a one-ounce coin into your hands, that silver has to be refined to coin-grade purity, struck or cast into the product, distributed through a wholesaler, and sold by a dealer in a single-coin quantity. Each step costs money. The combined markup, called the premium over spot, is what stands between the chart price and the price you pay.

Premiums are not fixed. They widen when retail demand is heavy and mints run behind on production, and they compress when demand is weak. Different products have structurally different premiums: large cast bars carry the lowest, government bullion coins the highest. The physical silver buying guide walks through how those premiums break down per product type.

Bid-ask, and what "selling" really pays

Like all real markets, silver has a bid (what a buyer is willing to pay) and an ask (what a seller is willing to accept). The chart price is usually a mid-point. Wholesale bid-ask spreads are tight, often a few cents on a multi-thousand-dollar contract. Retail spreads are far wider, especially when you sell back to a dealer. This is the reason a quick round trip in physical can cost several percentage points even when the chart has not moved.

How ETFs and miners are priced relative to spot

A physical silver ETF holds silver bars in a vault and aims to track spot. Its share price is set continuously through arbitrage with the underlying metal: when ETF shares trade above the per-share value of the silver they represent, authorised participants create new shares; when they trade below, they redeem shares. The result is a share price that tracks spot closely, minus the fund's annual expense ratio.

Silver miner share prices are not anchored to spot the same way. They reflect spot expectations, plus company-specific factors: cost of production, reserve life, balance sheet, and management. That is why miners can rally hard when spot rises and cost stays flat, and why they can sell off sharply when spot drops below a producer's marginal cost.

What this means for reading a silver chart

Three habits help. First, treat the chart price as a wholesale, mid-market number — not the price you would pay or receive at retail. Second, watch the spot-vs-futures relationship; backwardation and inversion tell you something about physical tightness that the headline number does not. Third, when you compare prices across days or weeks, remember that LBMA fixes and COMEX closes happen at fixed times — patterns that look like "silver always sells off at 1pm" often reflect when those fixings happen.

From here, the natural next steps are the underlying macro drivers in the 2026 outlook, the supply side in the mining-stocks primer, and the demand side in the industrial demand article.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not investment advice. See our full Disclaimer.

How Silver Is Priced: Spot, Futures, LBMA, COMEX, and Premiums