LBMA Explained: What Good Delivery Means for Buyers

What the LBMA Is and Why Retail Buyers Should Care

The London Bullion Market Association, universally shortened to LBMA, is a trade body headquartered at 62 Threadneedle Street in London. It was established in 1987 to formalise the wholesale bullion market that had operated in London since the seventeenth century. It has no legal enforcement power, no exchange floor, and it does not itself buy or sell metal. What it does is set standards, and those standards govern the vast majority of professional gold and silver trading on the planet.

As of 2026 the LBMA lists 89 Full Members, 93 Affiliate Members, and 12 Market Makers spread across 27 countries. Its London vault network is reported by the association to hold more than 7,700 tonnes of gold and 33,700 tonnes of silver on behalf of central banks, funds, and commercial holders. Those bars change hands every business day through the over-the-counter Loco London market, which is the largest global centre for physical bullion clearing.

None of that infrastructure is directly relevant to a retail buyer, and this is the point most explainer articles miss. What matters to you is that a small stamp on the corner of a gold or silver bar, the refiner logo, tells every professional dealer in the world whether the bar can be resold immediately at spot or whether it needs to be melted, assayed, and re-cast first. The Good Delivery List is the register that determines which refiners’ stamps carry that trust. Buy from a listed refiner and you inherit the certainty. Buy from anyone else and you take on a resale risk that only becomes visible when it is time to sell.

The Good Delivery List, Explained

The Good Delivery List is actually two separate lists, one for gold and one for silver, both maintained and updated by the LBMA. A refiner accepted onto the list has demonstrated three things: consistent purity in every bar produced over an extended assay-testing period, a minimum annual production volume, and a tangible net worth sufficient to guarantee its refining operation. Once on the list, a refiner is re-monitored on a three-year cycle to remain listed.

According to LBMA’s own eligibility guidance, a gold refiner must produce a minimum of ten tonnes of refined gold per year, a silver refiner must produce at least fifty tonnes, and both must hold a tangible net worth of no less than fifteen million pounds sterling. Beyond the numeric thresholds, applicants must satisfy the Responsible Sourcing Programme, which audits the origin of the metal to exclude conflict gold and demonstrably illicit supply.

The listing exists because the professional London market clears large volumes on trust rather than on retest. A dealer receiving a 400-ounce bar from a Good Delivery refiner does not open, drill, or re-assay it before onward sale, because the refiner brand is warranty enough. When a retail investor holds a smaller bar or a fractional coin from a Good Delivery refiner, that same warranty extends downward: the refiner’s reputation is on the bar, and any dealer worldwide can look up the refiner in the current list before quoting a buyback.

Gold Good Delivery Bar Specifications

The Good Delivery standard for gold, as codified in the current Good Delivery Rules published in January 2026, applies to the wholesale 400-ounce bar. Smaller retail bars from the same refiners inherit the refiner’s Good Delivery status but do not themselves have to meet the wholesale weight range.

Every Good Delivery gold bar must carry, at minimum, the refiner’s stamp or logo, a unique serial number, the fineness expressed as a decimal fraction (for example 999.9), and the year of manufacture. Optional but common markings include an assayer’s mark and the weight in troy ounces or grams. The physical bar has appearance requirements too: the surfaces must be smooth enough to inspect, and the bar must be free of cracks, holes, or trapped gas from casting. Bars that fail the visual inspection are not Good Delivery even if they meet the chemistry.

Silver Good Delivery Bar Specifications

The silver Good Delivery specification runs parallel to gold, with different numbers reflecting silver’s lower value per ounce and larger commercial bar sizes. As of January 2025 the LBMA updated the acceptable silver weight range to bring it into line with modern refinery output.

Silver bars are heavier and physically much larger than gold bars of equivalent value because silver trades at a small fraction of gold’s per-ounce price. A single Good Delivery silver bar can weigh over seventy pounds, which is one reason retail silver buyers rarely encounter the full wholesale format and instead buy 10-ounce, 100-ounce, or kilogram bars from the same Good Delivery refiners.

Why Refiner Brand Matters More Than You Think for Resale

A one-ounce gold bar from a Good Delivery refiner and a one-ounce gold bar from an unknown small foundry can hold identical amounts of gold at identical purity. On the melt, they are worth exactly the same. On the resale market, they are not.

The reason is friction. When you sell to a dealer, the dealer needs to be confident enough in the bar to price it against live spot without a physical assay. If the refiner is on the current Good Delivery List, the dealer verifies the stamp against the LBMA register, matches the serial number pattern to the refiner’s known format, sometimes runs a quick electronic conductivity test, and quotes you. The whole process takes minutes and the buyback lands very close to spot minus the dealer’s standard bid-ask spread.

If the refiner is not on the list, the dealer has three choices. Refuse the bar entirely. Accept it at a meaningful discount to cover the risk that a downstream buyer will reject it. Or accept it but require a destructive assay, which physically consumes a small portion of the bar and takes days. All three outcomes cost the seller money, and the loss can easily exceed several percent of the bar’s melt value on smaller quantities. Multiply that friction across a portfolio of ten or twenty bars accumulated over a decade and the difference between listed and unlisted refiners becomes real dollars, not a theoretical concern.

This is why the standard advice, from retail dealers and institutional traders alike, is to buy Good Delivery refiners for anything you may eventually sell into the professional market. Our methodology is identical for every company we cover, independent of any commercial relationship, and this recommendation reflects the mechanics of the resale market rather than any single company’s marketing. If you already hold bars whose refiner you cannot identify, a free listing on our sell-gold marketplace lets up to fifteen verified US buyers examine the photos and submit sealed offers before you commit to a physical transaction.

Refiners Retail Buyers Actually Encounter

The full Good Delivery gold list runs to dozens of accredited refiners worldwide. The ones a US retail buyer is most likely to see on a bar or in a dealer inventory are a much smaller subset, concentrated in Switzerland, North America, Australia, and a few other jurisdictions with mature refining industries.

Several other Good Delivery refiners appear regularly in the US retail market: Metalor (Switzerland and North Attleboro, Massachusetts), Heraeus (Hanau, Germany), Asahi Refining (a US and Canadian operator that acquired the North American precious metals business of Johnson Matthey in 2015), and Umicore (Belgium). All are on the current Good Delivery List and any bar carrying their proper marks resells on the same terms as the Swiss majors.

How to Check a Refiner Yourself in Under Five Minutes

Before you buy an unfamiliar bar, run this checklist. It takes a few minutes and closes off nearly every category of loss retail buyers report in dealer complaint records.

• Locate the refiner name or logo on the front of the bar. It should be a clear, cast or laser-engraved mark, not a printed sticker or a hand-scratched stamp.
• Open the current Good Delivery List on lbma.org.uk. There is a separate list for gold and for silver. Search the refiner name exactly.
• Confirm the refiner is on the current active list, not a former listing that has been removed. LBMA marks removed refiners distinctly in its published register.
• Match the bar’s serial number format to the refiner’s known pattern. Legitimate refiners publish sample bar images; a serial that does not match the format is a warning sign.
• Cross-check the assay card if one was provided. The card serial must match the bar serial. A card with a mismatched serial has no value.
• For any bar over a few hundred dollars, ask the dealer to run a Sigma Metalytics precious metals verifier reading in front of you at pickup. The tool measures electrical conductivity and takes under thirty seconds per bar.

If any single check fails, walk away. Legitimate dealers will let you verify at pickup as a matter of routine. A dealer that refuses inspection has told you something important about the merchandise.

The London Price and How It Sets the Global Benchmark

Every business day the LBMA publishes a benchmark price for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. The gold benchmark, formally called the LBMA Gold Price, is administered independently by ICE Benchmark Administration and set through a transparent electronic auction with 15 direct participating banks. The auction runs twice: at 10:30 AM and at 3:00 PM London time. The headline print is in US dollars, and the LBMA publishes conversions into 16 other currencies including British pounds, euros, Canadian dollars, and Chinese renminbi.

Before 2015 the same twice-daily fix was conducted by telephone between four member banks, a mechanism inherited from 1919. The auction was reformed and rebranded following regulatory scrutiny of benchmark-setting practices across financial markets. The current electronic auction publishes indicative prices during each round and allows any imbalance to clear before the final print, which is why the LBMA Gold Price is treated as the reference for most physical bullion contracts, some ETFs, and a large share of central bank purchases and sales.

For a retail buyer or seller, the London price matters in two practical ways. First, most US dealers publish live spot pricing on their websites; that live spot is typically a real-time feed anchored to the most recent LBMA Gold Price print plus the current forward curve. Second, larger transactions can be booked against the next London PM Fix rather than at instantaneous spot, which reduces execution risk when the market is volatile. Ask any dealer quoting more than a hundred thousand dollars whether Fix-plus-premium pricing is an option. Many will offer it and it can save money on choppy days.

Common Mistakes When Buying Bars Outside the Good Delivery List

Four buyer errors show up repeatedly in dealer complaints and secondary-market friction reports.

Where This Guide Fits with Other Coverage

This is the general buyer explainer to LBMA and the Good Delivery framework. For the coin market specifically, our American Gold Eagle complete guide and American Gold Buffalo complete guide cover the two US Mint bullion coins that dominate the American retail market. On verification technique, the how to verify gold purity guide walks through Sigma Metalytics testing, Fisch gauges, and specific-gravity math. On the assay documentation that ships with retail bars, see the assay card guide. For buyers weighing sub-spot offers on unfamiliar bars, our below-spot offers explainer is the piece to read first.