How the daily number is made.

The daily basket

Once a day, an automated job fetches gold and silver prices from a basket of named public sources — spot benchmarks and accessible dealer rates. It records each source’s value and the moment it was fetched, then computes a per-metal price and from it the two nisab thresholds (87.48 g of gold, 612.36 g of silver). The result is written to a dated snapshot that the whole site reads from, so the home page, the calculator, and the learning guide always agree on the same numbers.

Current snapshot: June 11, 2026.

The formula: an unweighted mean

For each metal, the basket price is the unweighted (simple) mean of the sources that returned a value that day:

No source is weighted above another, and a source that fails to return a value on a given day simply drops out of that day’s average rather than dragging it. The threshold is then the classical metal weight multiplied by that basket price: gold nisab = 87.48 g × gold basket price, and silver nisab = 612.36 g × silver basket price.

Why not just use the spot price?

The spot quote you see on financial sites is the price for large institutional trades, not the price an ordinary person realises when selling their own gold or silver. A dealer buying real metal from the public prices in their margins — assaying, refining, transport, storage, insurance, and security — and so pays meaningfully underspot, commonly around 10% below and sometimes up to 30% depending on the metal’s purity, weight, and the dealer.

Pegging the nisab to spot would therefore set the bar above what your metal would actually fetch. We follow the National Zakat Foundation (UK) realizable-value rationale: the threshold should reflect what wealth is genuinely worth to its owner, not an idealised institutional quote. That is why the basket blends spot benchmarks with accessible dealer rates rather than relying on spot alone.

Dealer buy-back sources are being added to the basket as their feeds are wired up, and each is named in the table above the day it goes live. Until then, where the basket leans on spot it is, if anything, the more cautious direction for the payer.

Sanity bands and freshness

Each day’s computed prices are checked against reasonable bands for gold and silver before they are published; a source that returns an obviously broken value (a decimal-point slip, a stale cache, a zero) is excluded from that day’s mean rather than allowed to distort it. If the daily refresh fails entirely, the site falls back to the most recent good snapshot rather than showing nothing — and the snapshot date shown on each page tells you exactly how current the figure is.