How it works
How the number is made.
Melt value is the worth of the pure metal in your item: weight × purity × spot price. It is a starting point for a conversation with a dealer. It is not a promise of what you’ll be paid.
What we show, and how
- Gold and silver spot price
- A public price feed, in US dollars. Every price shows its update time. It is a reference price, not an exchange feed.
- Live
- Canadian dollars
- The US-dollar price times the Bank of Canada’s latest daily US dollar rate. The rate and its date are shown beside the price. If the rate is missing, no price is shown.
- Daily
- Price history
- World Bank monthly average prices, each month converted at that month’s average exchange rate (Statistics Canada to April 2017, then the Bank of Canada). Daily closes are COMEX futures at that day’s market exchange rate.
- Monthly
- Sales tax rates
- GST and HST rates from the Canada Revenue Agency’s rate table. Provincial rates (PST, RST, QST) from public rate tables. Each page shows the date we checked.
- Checked by hand
- Tax rules for bullion
- Canada Revenue Agency GST/HST Memorandum 17-1 and Manitoba Finance bulletin RST 043. Where we could not read a province’s own rule, the page says “reported” and tells you to confirm.
- Checked by hand
- Registered plan rules
- Canada Revenue Agency Income Tax Folio S3-F10-C1, on what an RRSP or TFSA may hold.
- Checked by hand
- Coin specifications
- Weight and purity as published by the Royal Canadian Mint and the national mint of each other country.
- Fixed
- Shop locations
- Pawn shops, coin shops and gold buyers from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), Overture Maps Foundation places data (CDLA-Permissive-2.0) and Google Maps business listings in the larger cities (never plain jewellery stores). We do not verify shops, and being listed is not a recommendation.
- When refreshed
- Which shops we list
- Only shops with a name, a full street address (house number, street, city, province and postal code) and a phone number. A shop with an active city licence is listed even if we have no phone number for it. A shop from Overture or Google Maps is added only when its postal code belongs to the province in its address and its map pin sits in that postal area (GeoNames postal data, CC BY 4.0).
- When refreshed
- Licences
- In Canada pawnbrokers and gold buyers are licensed by the city. We read the business-licence registers that cities publish as open data: Toronto (pawn shops and precious metal shops), Winnipeg (precious metal dealers and used goods dealers), and Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, Burnaby, Kelowna and Delta (pawnbrokers and secondhand dealers). In Quebec we also check the consumer protection office’s list of money lender permits, which a pawnbroker needs. Only licences that were active on the day we read the register are used. A shop shows “Licence verified” only when the register matches it by phone and location, name and location, or street address. No tick means no match was found, not that the shop is unlicensed.
- When refreshed
- Google rating
- The star rating and number of reviews as Google Maps showed them on the date printed beside them, with a link to the reviews. When a shop has 20 or more reviews and a quarter or more are 1 star, or its rating is under 3.5, the listing says so under “Check first”. That is Google’s count, not our opinion of the shop. We do not copy review text.
- Dated
- Search box
- The “Search the map” box opens a Google Maps search for your city or postal code. Those results are Google’s, not ours.
- Live
- Your location
- Only the postal code or province you type, used on your own device to pick a tax rate. Never stored by us.
- Live
- Map of Canada
- Province outlines from Natural Earth (public domain).
- Fixed
What we will never do
- Sell rankings, badges or better placement to shops.
- Show a US-dollar price as if it were Canadian.
- Show a made-up price, fee, rating or licence status. Missing means “unknown”.
- Label a named business “bad” without a documented source.