Silver Rises Over 120% YTD 
Published: 08-24-2026, 04:42 pm
The World Gold Council asked 76 central banks where they keep their gold. The answer contradicts almost every headline you have read this year.
You have probably seen the headline some version of a dozen times this year. Central banks are bringing their gold home. The story writes itself. Trust in the old order is fraying, so nations are loading their bullion onto planes and flying it back to domestic vaults.
The World Gold Council asked 76 central banks what they actually did. The answer is more interesting than the headline, and it points somewhere useful for anyone holding metal of their own.
More central banks moved gold into additional foreign jurisdictions last year than brought it home.
Where do central banks actually keep their gold?
Most of it sits in someone else’s vault, and that has not changed.
The World Gold Council published its 2026 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey on 16 June 2026. The Bank of England remains the most popular vaulting location at 57%. Domestic storage comes second at 49%. The Bank for International Settlements holds third place at 16%, while the Swiss National Bank fell to 6% from 12% the year before.
Those numbers add up to well past 100, and that is the point. Reserve managers are not picking one vault. They are spreading holdings across several.
Where central banks vault their gold
Share of respondents naming each location
Respondents store across multiple locations, so shares exceed 100%. Source: World Gold Council, Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2026.
The survey drew 76 responses, the highest participation in its nine-year history. It ran from February to May 2026. Most answers arrived after the Middle East conflict began. So this is a current, self-reported picture of how conservative institutions handle their metal.
Are central banks repatriating gold or not?
Some are. Fewer than you would guess, and slightly more went the other direction.
Here is the finding that almost no coverage has picked up. In the 12 months before the survey, 9% of respondents increased domestic storage. Over the same period, 10% diversified into additional overseas storage locations.
Forward plans run the same way. Looking ahead 12 months, 7% intend to increase domestic storage. Nine percent intend to diversify overseas.
Both numbers jumped from a small base. The year before, only 5% had increased domestic storage and just 2% had diversified overseas. So the overseas figure grew fivefold while the domestic figure did not quite double.
Call it what it is. This is not a homecoming. It is diversification of custody, and the direction that accelerated fastest was outward.
Which direction did custody actually move?
Share of central banks changing vaulting arrangements in the prior 12 months
Source: World Gold Council, Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2026 (76 respondents).
Why would a central bank spread its gold across more countries?
Because concentration is the risk, and your own border is a form of concentration too.
In February 2022, roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank foreign reserves were frozen. Every reserve manager watched a lesson land. An asset held under another government’s jurisdiction can be switched off by that government.
One obvious response is to bring everything home. A more sophisticated response looks different. Note that a single domestic vault concentrates its own set of risks. Selling quickly is one of them. Gold sitting in London can be lent, swapped or sold within hours. London is the deepest wholesale market in the world. Gold in a domestic vault is safe from foreign politics. It is also slower to mobilise when speed matters.
So reserve managers are doing what any careful allocator does with a concentrated position. They are splitting it.
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What does “earmarked” gold actually mean?
It means specific numbered bars held for a named account, not a share of a general pool.
This is the vocabulary that makes the whole subject legible, so it is worth being precise.
- Earmarked is the Federal Reserve’s own term for gold it holds on behalf of others. Specific bars, assigned to a specific account holder.
- Allocated means the same idea in commercial markets. You own identified bars. They are your property, not the vault’s.
- Unallocated means you hold a claim against an institution rather than metal. You are a creditor.
- Good Delivery is the London Bullion Market Association specification for bar weight, purity and certification. It is what makes a bar tradeable internationally without question.
The New York Fed is unusually direct about this. On its own public page describing the vault, last updated with 2024 figures, it states that none of the gold belongs to the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System. It acts as guardian and custodian on behalf of account holders. Those include the US government, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organisations. No individuals or private entities may store gold there.
As of 2024 that vault held roughly 507,000 gold bars weighing 6,331 metric tons. It rests on Manhattan bedrock, 80 feet below street level.
Worth sitting with that structure for a moment. The largest concentration of monetary gold on the planet is held by an institution that owns none of it.
What did France actually do with its 129 tonnes?
It upgraded its bars. The relocation was a side effect, and its own governor said so.
The Banque de France operation is the most cited example of repatriation in 2026, and it is widely misdescribed. In its 2025 results announcement of 9 April 2026, the Banque de France set out what it actually did. Since 2005 it has run a consistent policy of bringing its gold into line with the London Bullion Market Association standard. That standard requires 99.99% purity. A residual 129 tonnes sat in New York, 5% of the total. Those bars did not meet the standard. Rather than ship old bars across an ocean, it sold them in New York and bought gold of the highest standard in Europe. We covered the transaction itself when it completed.
France’s total reserve was unchanged at roughly 2,437 tonnes, the world’s fourth largest. Not one bar crossed the Atlantic.
The sale generated an exceptional capital gain of €11 billion in 2025. The Banque de France noted that this gain belongs to French citizens. Governor François Villeroy de Galhau addressed the location question directly. Reuters reported his remarks in April 2026. Keeping the new bars in Paris rather than New York was not politically motivated. He cited technical and liquidity reasons. Higher-standard gold trades on a European market.
Completion in January 2026 did mark the first time in roughly a century that France held no gold at the New York Fed. But the mechanism was bar-standard modernisation, not a flight to sovereignty.
Germany makes the contrast visible. The Bundesbank still holds 1,236 tonnes at the New York Fed, roughly a third of its reserve and the largest single foreign holding in that vault. Politically, the conversation there is loud. Yet the gold has not moved.
What does this have to do with a private investor?
Everything, because the question is identical at every scale.
A central bank choosing between London, Basel and a domestic vault answers one question. You answer the same one when you decide how to hold metal. Not what do I own. Where does it sit, whose books is it on, and what stands between me and it.
The institutional answer has three parts, and none of them require any special access.
First, insist on allocated. Specific bars, identified as yours. The Fed does this for sovereign clients and calls it earmarking. The same distinction exists for you, and it is the difference between owning metal and owning a promise.
Second, do not confuse the vault with the owner. The New York Fed’s language is the model. A good custodian holds property that is not its own and says so clearly.
Third, treat concentration as the risk to manage. Reserve managers spreading gold across jurisdictions are not hedging one specific event. They refuse to let a single legal system, building or counterparty decide whether they can reach their own asset.
Our vault storage page walks through allocation, segregation and audit. That is those three principles applied at individual scale. Our piece on whether most gold storage is actually allocated covers how to check what you already have.
Why does any of this matter over the long run?
Because one number carries the whole arc. The New York Fed’s vault peaked in 1973 at over 12,000 tons of monetary gold. Today it holds 6,331. That decline began right after the United States suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments.
Read that sequence again. The vault filled while the dollar was legally exchangeable for metal. It has roughly halved in the five decades since that promise ended.
Gold is the one major reserve asset that is nobody’s liability. No government issues it, so no government can dilute it or decline to honour it. That property is why 76 central banks were surveyed about it. A record 45% expect their own holdings to rise.
But being nobody’s liability only helps if you can reach the metal. That is the whole content of the custody question. It is why the world’s most conservative institutions spent the past year rearranging where their bars sit rather than how many they own.
Gold traded at $4,641.47 per ounce this session, a three-month high. Silver sat at $68.56. Those prices move constantly and you can follow them at goldsilver.com/price-charts/.
The custody question does not move. It sits underneath the price. It is the part most savers never consider until they need an answer.
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People Also Ask
Not currently, as of August 2026. The Bundesbank holds 1,236 tonnes at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, roughly a third of its reserve and the largest single foreign holding in that vault. The political conversation in Germany is active and recurring. No formal repatriation programme has been announced, and the gold has not moved.
Not the Federal Reserve. On its own public page, the New York Fed states that none of the gold in its vault belongs to the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System. It acts as guardian and custodian for account holders, which include the US government, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organisations. The gold is earmarked, meaning specific numbered bars are assigned to specific account holders.
Allocated gold means you own identified bars that are your legal property and sit outside the custodian’s balance sheet. Unallocated gold means you hold a claim against an institution rather than specific metal, which makes you a creditor of that institution. Central banks use the equivalent distinction when they earmark reserves rather than holding a general claim.
The United States holds the largest official reserve, ahead of Germany, Italy and France. One caution when comparing sources: official central bank holdings are a different dataset from in-ground mining reserves, and rankings built on the two are not interchangeable. We maintain a full breakdown of official national holdings in our gold reserves by country rankings.
There is no single answer, which is precisely why reserve managers split their holdings. The criteria that matter are the same at every scale: allocated rather than pooled, segregated rather than commingled, independently audited, insured, and held in a jurisdiction whose legal system you have actually considered. Concentration in any one of those dimensions is the risk to manage.
SOURCES
1. World Gold Council — Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2026 (16 June 2026)
2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Gold Vault (figures as of 2024)
3. Banque de France — Banque de France 2025 Results (9 April 2026)
4. London Bullion Market Association — About Good Delivery (accessed 24 August 2026)
5. MINING.COM — France Pulls Last Gold Held in US for $15B Gain (6 April 2026)
6. GoldSilver — Gold and Silver Price Charts (spot prices, 24 August 2026)
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.
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