Selling Silver: How Much Under Spot Will a Dealer Actually Pay?
On recognized silver bullion, a good dealer pays roughly 85 to 95 percent of spot. Junk silver and sterling come in lower, and a "we buy silver" pop-up counter usually pays the least of all. Almost nobody hands you the full spot number, and on silver the gap between spot and your offer runs wider than it does on gold. Here is what each kind of silver gets you, and the structural reason the spread is bigger than a gold seller ever sees.
To be clear up front, we are talking about metal value only here, the silver in the piece against today's price. We are not grading anything for collector or numismatic premium. That is a separate world with its own rules.
The short answer, by what you are holding
The single biggest factor in your offer is what the silver actually is, because how easy it is to resell drives the size of the spread. Here is the rough shape, using illustrative ranges, not a quote.
| Silver you are selling | What a good buyer typically pays |
|---|---|
| Recognized bullion coins (Maple, Eagle) | about 85 to 95% of spot |
| Generic rounds and bars | about 80 to 90% of spot |
| Junk silver (US 90%, Canadian 80%) | close to melt, less the refining slice |
| Sterling (.925) and mixed scrap | melt content, wider spread for refining |
| "We buy silver" pop-up counter | often well under melt, scrap rates |
Recognized government bullion gets the best treatment everywhere because it is easy to authenticate and resells as-is, no refining needed. The further you move from that, toward generic metal, then junk, then sterling and scrap, the more work a buyer has to do before your silver is useful again, and that work comes out of your offer.
Spot is the starting point, not the price you get
Spot is the live per-ounce market price of pure silver, and it traces back to a daily London benchmark auction held at noon. Your piece's melt value is its actual silver content times that spot price. A troy ounce is 31.1035 grams, so a sterling spoon at .925 fineness is worth 92.5 percent of its silver weight in metal, and a bag of 90 percent junk silver is worth its silver content, not the face value stamped on the coins.
A buyer works from that melt number, pays you a percentage below it, and resells above it. That gap is the spread, and it is how every metal buyer stays in business. It covers overhead, the risk of holding inventory while the price moves, and on anything that has to be refined, the actual cost of shipping it off and processing it. A buyer paying under spot is not automatically lowballing you. It is the normal mechanics of selling a commodity to someone who has to resell it. The real question is how wide that spread is, and on silver the answer is: wider than you would guess if your only reference point is gold.
Why silver's spread is wider than gold's
This is the part almost nobody explains. The reason gold sellers get offers right up near spot and silver sellers do not is not that dealers like gold better. It is math.
A buyer's handling costs, the refining, the freight, the assay, the labor to sort and process a lot, are roughly fixed per ounce. They do not shrink just because the metal underneath is cheap. Say that fixed cost runs a couple of dollars an ounce on scrap. Now put it against the metal.
Silver is a low dollar-per-ounce metal. Call it 70 dollars an ounce, illustratively. A couple of dollars of handling on a 70 dollar ounce is around three percent of the value, gone before the dealer has made a cent. Put that same couple of dollars against gold at, illustratively, 3,000 dollars an ounce, and it is under one tenth of one percent. It vanishes. So the identical handling cost that is a rounding error on gold is a real, visible slice of a silver offer.
Freight makes it worse. Silver is bulky and heavy for its value. Moving 10,000 dollars of silver means shipping and insuring a heavy box, while 10,000 dollars of gold fits in an envelope. Every ounce of silver that changes hands carries more shipping and storage cost per dollar than gold does. That is also why silver markets seize up faster in a squeeze, when refiners back up and shops widen their spreads or stop buying scrap. The plumbing is simply more expensive to run.
Put the two together, low value per ounce and high bulk, and you get silver's structurally wider spread. It is not a judgment on your metal. It is the cost of moving a cheap, heavy commodity through a chain that has to refine and reship it.
The "we buy silver" counter is a different animal
There is a category worth calling out on its own: the pop-up counter, the jewelry-and-gold buyer at the mall, the pawn shop that also "takes silver." These are generalists, not silver specialists, and it shows in the number. They tend to treat everything as scrap regardless of what it is, so a recognized Silver Eagle can get quoted at the same rate as a broken chain. They need wide margins, they often do not resell silver themselves, and they price to protect against not knowing what they are looking at.
If you walk in with recognized bullion and get a scrap-rate offer, that is the mismatch in action. It is convenient, and you pay for that convenience in a lower number. A specialist who recognizes a Maple as a Maple, and can resell it as-is, has no reason to bucket it with the melt pile.
Junk and sterling: the melt still counts
Do not let the low-value-per-ounce reality talk you out of selling the cheap stuff. Junk silver and sterling are still real silver, and the melt adds up faster than people expect.
Junk silver is priced purely on its silver content. US 90 percent and Canadian 80 percent coins carry no collector premium in bulk, so a good buyer pays close to melt, less the refining slice, and a generalist pays well under. Know the content before you go, because the bag math is quick once you have the two numbers. Sterling flatware, medals, and scrap are melt-content plays with a wider spread, since the metal usually has to be refined before it is useful again, and that cost lands on your offer. The melt is still real money, it just carries the widest spread of the silver categories.
The Canadian tax footnote
Two things sellers get wrong. First, investment-grade silver at .999 or finer is GST/HST-exempt to buy in Canada, the same as gold and platinum, while sterling, jewelry, and scrap are taxed because they miss the purity-and-form line. Second, and this catches people, selling can have a tax side even when buying did not. If you sell for more than you paid, the profit can be a capital gain, a separate question from the purchase exemption. Tax-free to buy does not mean tax-free to sell. None of this is tax advice, just the shape of it.
Know your number before you sell
The pattern across all of this is simple. The person who knows what they are holding and what the silver in it is worth gets a fair offer. The person who does not gets whatever the counter feels like quoting. So walk in with the melt already in your head.
That is exactly what the free What's It Worth? tool is built to give you. Enter the weight and purity, it pulls live silver spot, and it turns that into your melt floor plus an estimate of the range each kind of buyer typically pays, from a specialist near the top of the range down to a scrap counter at the bottom. It will not tell you a particular shop's exact spread, no tool can, that is their business. But it hands you the baseline, so when an offer comes in you know instantly whether it is fair, light, or a lowball. For the full buyer-by-buyer breakdown across both metals, including where gold lands, see what each kind of buyer really pays.
The short version: nobody pays spot on silver, and the spread is wider than on gold because a cheap, heavy metal costs more to move and refine per dollar. A specialist pays close to melt on recognized bullion, junk and sterling come in lower, and a pop-up counter pays the least. Know your melt, know what you are holding, and get more than one quote. No hype, no hot tips, just the number you should already have before you hand anything over.