Why This Obscure Specification Runs the Gold Market
If you have ever wondered why gold trading is so standardized globally — why a bar sitting in a vault in Zurich is treated as economically identical to a bar in Singapore — the answer is the LBMA Good Delivery specification.
It is a set of rules published by the London Bullion Market Association that defines exactly what a "London Good Delivery" gold bar looks like, weighs, is stamped with, and is refined from.
The specification is not a piece of financial regulation.
It is a private-market industry standard.
And yet it functions as global infrastructure for one of the world's most important commodity markets.
Central banks, the London bullion clearing system, most institutional investors, and every serious refinery in the world reference this document.
Getting off the list of accredited refiners can be existential for a smelting operation.
Getting on it is a multi-year process.
This piece is a technical walkthrough for readers who want to understand what the standard actually says, how it operates in practice, and why a change to it can move markets that don't obviously seem related.
The Physical Specification
An LBMA Good Delivery gold bar must meet several precise physical criteria.
These have been essentially stable for decades but are worth stating in one place.
📊 Good Delivery gold bar specification
- Fine gold content: 350 to 430 troy ounces (approximately 10.9 to 13.4 kg). The industry sometimes refers to these as "400-ounce bars" for shorthand.
- Minimum fineness: 995.0 parts per thousand (99.5% pure gold).
- Marks: The refiner's stamp, a serial number, the fineness, the year of manufacture, and the assay stamp.
- Dimensions: Recommended (not mandatory) — length 250 mm, width 70 mm, height 35 mm.
- Appearance: Good surface finish, no significant cavities, no obvious cracking. Bars can be rejected on visual inspection even if the metal content is correct.
The equivalent silver specification is similar in structure but the numbers are different: silver bars are 750 to 1,100 troy ounces (approximately 23 to 34 kg), minimum fineness 999.0 (99.9% pure).
The Refiner Accreditation
You cannot just make bars that meet the physical specification and sell them into the London market.
The bars must come from an LBMA-accredited refiner.
Accreditation is granted after a rigorous multi-year process that examines the refiner's technical capability, financial standing, production history, and business practices.
The current list has approximately 70 refiners globally.
Accreditation is not permanent.
Refiners are required to demonstrate continued minimum production volumes, maintain their standards, and pass periodic audits.
Loss of accreditation is rare but does happen — and when it does, the affected refiner's existing bars remain "Good Delivery" for a defined transitional period, but no new bars can enter the standard.
This transitional handling is important because it prevents disorderly market impact from a refiner's status change.
The Chain of Integrity
The specification is not just about the physical bar.
It is about the chain of custody that keeps the bar within a trusted network of vaults, transporters, and settlement participants.
A bar’s acceptability within the London market depends on its refiner, markings, documented custody, condition, and the requirements applied by the receiving vault or market participant. A bar that leaves an accepted custody network may require additional inspection, documentation, or assay before it can re-enter.
Allocated and unallocated gold describe different account and ownership structures. Allocated holdings are associated with identified bars or specific metal, while an unallocated account generally represents a contractual claim against the account provider.
Neither structure has one permanent price premium over the other. Pricing and costs depend on the provider, contract, credit exposure, storage arrangement, liquidity, withdrawal terms, bar specification, and transaction circumstances. This site does not collect allocated or unallocated account prices.
Relationship with the Chinese Market
The Shanghai Gold Exchange uses contract and delivery specifications that are not identical to the LBMA Good Delivery standard. Products intended for the Chinese market may therefore require bars of a different weight, purity, or approved form.
Refining and recasting can connect the two systems, but this site does not collect refinery throughput, bar-conversion volumes, customs flows, or London vault movements. It cannot determine how much SGE-deliverable gold originated as an LBMA Good Delivery bar or where any conversion occurred.
Changes in an SGE-related price should not automatically be attributed to London vault withdrawals or refinery constraints. Confirming such a relationship would require shipment, inventory, refinery, and timing data that are not included in the dashboard.
The 2020 pandemic disrupted refining, transport, and market operations in several countries. Those disruptions form useful historical context, but they do not establish that every later difference between London, COMEX, and SGE prices has the same cause.
Why the Standard Underwrites COMEX Deliveries
COMEX allows several forms of physical settlement, but the standard 100-ounce COMEX gold futures contract can be settled with a specific set of eligible bars.
In practice, most COMEX deliveries settle with kilo bars, not Good Delivery bars, but LBMA Good Delivery-format bars are also eligible on many contracts.
The reason: kilo bars are smaller, more granular, and easier to physically move for the delivery process.
The 400-ounce Good Delivery bar is optimized for London vault storage where it may sit for years.
When a metal actually needs to change hands between counterparties, smaller units are more practical.
The Refining Chain in Numbers
Roughly 3,500 tonnes of new gold enters the market each year from mining.
Almost all of this passes through an LBMA-accredited refiner at some point in its journey to a saleable form.
On top of new mine supply, another 1,000-1,500 tonnes per year comes from recycled gold — old jewelry, industrial recovery, and scrap — and this too is refined by the same network of facilities.
The largest gold refineries in the world — Argor-Heraeus, Metalor, PAMP, Valcambi in Switzerland; MMTC-PAMP in India; Rand Refinery in South Africa; Perth Mint in Australia; several in China — process a substantial share of this flow.
A serious operational disruption at any of these can create real supply-chain effects that show up in premiums and delivery availability.
This is not theoretical; it happened in 2020, in miniature form in 2022 during energy shortages in Europe, and it will happen again.
What a Reader Actually Needs to Know
📊 Practical takeaways from Good Delivery
- The specification is the reason gold is fungible across venues. Without it, a bar in Zurich would trade at a discount or premium to a bar in Singapore because their integrity would need to be independently verified.
- The refiner list is a real barrier to entry. A new refinery cannot simply start selling into London because they produce pure gold; the accreditation process is deliberate and multi-year.
- The chain-of-integrity requirement is why physical gold outside vaults is worth less than inside. A one-ounce coin in your safe is not Good Delivery; it can be resold, but its liquidity path is different from that of an allocated London vault holding.
- The standard connects markets that appear separate. London-to-Shanghai physical flow depends on Swiss refinery capacity to convert Good Delivery bars to SGE kilo bars.
- Refinery disruptions are a real supply-side event. Watching refinery capacity utilization is a useful adjunct to watching premium data.
What This Site Shows
Our LBMA reading on the dashboard is not the Good Delivery bar price directly — it is the value that our vendor Metals.dev publishes in its LBMA-related price field (currently the field named lbma_gold_pm for gold), pulled once per day. We do not claim it is identical to the LBMA auction print or to any live LBMA OTC quote.
However, the Good Delivery standard is what underwrites the entire London OTC market that the vendor's LBMA-labelled field ultimately draws from.
If the standard were to change materially, or if a major refiner were delisted, our LBMA figure would eventually reflect the disruption because the pricing structure it sits on would move.
For readers who want to track refinery-side news directly, the LBMA publishes updates when refiners are added, delisted, or placed on transitional status.
The market impact of these changes is usually delayed by weeks, so the news itself often precedes any premium reading move.
📌 Key Takeaways
- LBMA Good Delivery is a physical bar specification (350-430 oz, 99.5%+ pure) plus a refiner accreditation regime plus a chain-of-integrity requirement.
- The standard is what makes gold fungible across global venues.
- The current list of accredited refiners should be checked through LBMA because membership and status can change.
- Differences between London, COMEX, and SGE specifications may require conversion or additional verification, but this site does not measure those physical flows.
- Bars that leave the chain of integrity — like coins in private hands — trade at meaningfully different prices from allocated London vault holdings.
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