Gold price API: live XAU, silver and precious metals prices

A gold price API returns the current price of gold as data your code can use. With TickerLayer, GET /commodities/quote/XAUUSD answers with the best bid, the best ask and a Unix-millisecond timestamp, and the commodities.quotes WebSocket channel streams the same fields as they change. Silver, platinum and palladium use the same routes under XAGUSD, XPTUSD and XPDUSD.

This is the developer version of the question. It covers the request and the response, the spot versus futures distinction, the troy ounce to gram conversion that trips up many jewelry calculators, the gold/silver ratio in a few lines of Python, streaming and history. The metals sit inside the broader commodities API next to crude, gas and grains; energy has its own oil price API guide.

Your first gold price request

Send your key in the x-api-key header and ask for the quote. There is no version segment and no path prefix, and the symbol goes straight into the path:

curl -sS "https://api.tickerlayer.com/commodities/quote/XAUUSD" \
  -H "x-api-key: $TICKERLAYER_API_KEY"

{
  "symbol": "XAUUSD",1
  "bid": 4155.9475,2
  "ask": 4156.4675,3
  "bid_size": 98,4
  "ask_size": 56,
  "timestamp": 17905911296605
}

Two habits save trouble later. Keep both sides of the quote instead of a single price, because the bid-ask spread is the cheapest liquidity signal you will ever get. And treat timestamp as the moment the price was observed, not the moment your request ran: the gold reference pauses from Friday 17:00 to Sunday 18:00 New York time, so a quote read on Saturday morning is Friday evening’s last one, and your interface should say so.

Metals symbols and the routes that serve them

Metals follow the same pattern as currency pairs: a metal code followed by the quote currency. XAUUSD is gold, XAGUSD silver, XPTUSD platinum and XPDUSD palladium, and COPPERUSD covers the main industrial metal. All five sit in the commodities catalog (GET /commodities/symbols lists the 25 commodity instruments) and share one set of routes:

Spot gold vs gold futures: which price is this?

Search results mix several different "gold prices", and they differ by real money. Spot is the price for gold delivered now (in wholesale practice, settled two business days later). Futures fix a price today for delivery on a later date. Fund shares and perpetual contracts track one of the two, each with its own costs and trading hours. A gold price API that does not say which of these it returns is leaving the hard part to you.

XAUUSD is an indicative spot reference: gold against the dollar, not a particular futures contract. The commodities docs describe these references as indicative pricing, "not a claim about physical delivery, warehouse stocks, or venue-listed futures", which is the right framing for dashboards, analytics and valuation screens.

Futures sit above spot for a mechanical reason. Whoever sells gold for later delivery keeps the metal until then and waits for the cash, so the buyer effectively pays the interest the seller gives up, minus the small fee gold earns when it is lent out, called the lease rate.

That upward slope is called contango, and it is the normal state of the gold curve. The contango and backwardation explainer shows why it matters to anyone who holds futures or a fund built on them.

The perpetual column deserves its own read: funding, mark prices and the 24/7 schedule are covered in perpetual futures explained.

Troy ounces, grams and kilograms

Gold is priced per troy ounce, and the symbol says so: in ISO 4217, XAU is defined as one troy ounce of gold, just as XAG is one troy ounce of silver. A troy ounce is exactly 31.1034768 grams. The ounce on a kitchen scale, the avoirdupois ounce, is 28.349523125 grams, so the two differ by 9.7%.

That gap is the most common bug in gold calculators. Divide the dollar price by 28.35 instead of 31.10 and every per-gram figure comes out 9.7% too high: $151.21 a gram instead of $137.82 at the 25 September close. The troy ounce explainer covers where the unit comes from and how the other commodities are quoted; the converter below does the arithmetic.

The gold/silver ratio in Python

The gold/silver ratio is how many ounces of silver buy one ounce of gold. Both metals are quoted in dollars per troy ounce, so the units cancel and the ratio is a plain division of the two mid prices.

This script pulls gold, silver and EURUSD, then prints the ratio next to the numbers a jewelry or savings app actually shows: per gram, per kilogram, in euros and at 18 karat. It needs Python 3.9 or newer and pip install requests.

import os

import requests

API = "https://api.tickerlayer.com"
HEADERS = {"x-api-key": os.environ["TICKERLAYER_API_KEY"]}
GRAMS_PER_TROY_OUNCE = 31.1034768


def mid(asset: str, symbol: str) -> float:
    """Midpoint of the latest bid and ask for one symbol."""
    r = requests.get(f"{API}/{asset}/quote/{symbol}", headers=HEADERS, timeout=10)
    if r.status_code == 403:
        raise SystemExit(f"This key has no access to {asset}: see tickerlayer.com/pricing")
    r.raise_for_status()
    q = r.json()
    return (float(q["bid"]) + float(q["ask"])) / 2


gold = mid("commodities", "XAUUSD")    # USD for one troy ounce of gold
silver = mid("commodities", "XAGUSD")  # USD for one troy ounce of silver
eurusd = mid("forex", "EURUSD")        # USD for one euro

per_gram = gold / GRAMS_PER_TROY_OUNCE
print(f"Gold, 1 ozt      {gold:>10.2f} USD")
print(f"Silver, 1 ozt    {silver:>10.3f} USD")
print(f"Gold/silver      {gold / silver:>10.2f}")
print(f"Gold, 1 gram     {per_gram:>10.2f} USD {per_gram / eurusd:>9.2f} EUR")
print(f"Gold, 1 kg       {per_gram * 1000:>10.0f} USD")
print(f"18k gold, 1 gram {per_gram * 0.75:>10.2f} USD")

Gold, 1 ozt         4157.09 USD
Silver, 1 ozt        61.392 USD
Gold/silver           67.71
Gold, 1 gram         133.65 USD    117.52 EUR
Gold, 1 kg           133654 USD
18k gold, 1 gram     100.24 USD

EURUSD is dollars per euro, so a dollar price becomes a euro price by dividing by it. For a pair quoted the other way round, such as USDINR, multiply instead. The 403 branch matters in production: a key without the commodities feed gets a clear refusal, and retrying will not change it.

Read the ratio as a relative-value gauge, not a signal. Since 1990 it has ranged from roughly 30 to above 120, and it can stay stretched for years. It is useful for normalizing a precious-metals dashboard, or as one column in a correlation matrix. It is not a trade recommendation.

Streaming gold prices over WebSocket

Polling is fine for a price tile. For a ticker, an alert or a live ratio, subscribe instead: one connection, one subscribe message, then quote frames as the price moves. WebSocket access comes with paid plans, and free accounts can request a trial from the dashboard.

// npm install ws
import WebSocket from "ws";

const URL = "wss://stream.tickerlayer.com/?apiKey=" +
  encodeURIComponent(process.env.TICKERLAYER_API_KEY);
const mids = {};

// perMessageDeflate: false keeps per-message compression off on a busy stream.
const ws = new WebSocket(URL, { perMessageDeflate: false });

ws.on("message", (data) => {
  const msg = JSON.parse(data.toString());
  if (msg.type === "system" && msg.event === "ready") {
    ws.send(JSON.stringify({
      action: "subscribe",
      channels: ["commodities.quotes"],
      symbols: ["XAUUSD", "XAGUSD"],
    }));
    return;
  }
  if (msg.type === "error") {
    console.error("subscribe failed:", msg.code, msg.message);
    return;
  }
  if (msg.type !== "quote") return;

  // Commodity frames usually carry numbers, but some arrive as strings.
  mids[msg.symbol] = (Number(msg.bid) + Number(msg.ask)) / 2;
  if (mids.XAUUSD && mids.XAGUSD) {
    const at = new Date(msg.ts).toISOString().slice(11, 23);
    console.log(`${at} UTC  gold ${mids.XAUUSD.toFixed(2)}  ` +
      `silver ${mids.XAGUSD.toFixed(3)}  ratio ${(mids.XAUUSD / mids.XAGUSD).toFixed(3)}`);
  }
});

ws.on("close", (code) => console.log("closed with", code));
ws.on("error", (err) => console.error("socket error:", err.message));

10:57:20.166 UTC  gold 4157.12  silver 61.380  ratio 67.727
10:57:21.425 UTC  gold 4157.22  silver 61.390  ratio 67.718
10:57:22.404 UTC  gold 4157.51  silver 61.390  ratio 67.723
10:57:23.010 UTC  gold 4157.50  silver 61.386  ratio 67.727

The time to read is ts, in Unix milliseconds; commodity frames mirror it as timestamp. For reconnecting with backoff and resubscribing after a drop, follow the WebSocket market data guide.

Gold price history for charts and backtests

Live quotes are half of a gold price API; the other half is history, which comes from the aggregates route. Bar sizes are 1, 5 and 15 minutes, 1 and 4 hours, and 1 day; dates are UTC YYYY-MM-DD, limit goes up to 5,000, and next_offset goes back in as offset until it comes back null. How far back you can go depends on the plan: two years on Individual and ten on Business, per the pricing page.

curl -sS "https://api.tickerlayer.com/commodities/agg/XAUUSD/1/day/2026-09-13/2026-09-25?sort=asc" \
  -H "x-api-key: $TICKERLAYER_API_KEY"

Three details matter when you build on these bars. A daily bar covers a UTC day, so it is not the same number as a London auction price or a futures settlement. Do not read v on the spot metals as market-wide volume: spot gold trades over the counter, with no single tape to count, and the docs note that volume may be 0 or null. And weekend bars are thin, because the reference pauses between Friday and Sunday evening in New York, so filter to Monday through Friday before you compute daily returns.

Choosing a gold price API

Quality claims should be checkable too. The commodities data-quality page publishes how the metals references compare with an instrument-matched outside reference, under a stated methodology, which is a better basis for a decision than a headline number.