How the daily number is made.

The daily basket

Once a day, an automated job fetches live gold and silver spotprices from named metals APIs. It records each source’s value and the moment it was fetched, computes a per-metal spot benchmark, then derives the realizable price — what a person actually receives selling to a dealer — by applying a published, calibrated dealer margin (see the next section). From the realizable price it computes 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. Where the metals API exposes the live market bid/ask, we capture and publish it too — for transparency only, since its spread is institutional rather than the retail haircut.

The headline nisab is the realizable value, not the spot price. We publish the higher spot figure right beside it for transparency, but the threshold a payer is held to is what their metal would genuinely fetch — see the next section for why.

Current snapshot: July 27, 2026.

The formula: spot benchmark → realizable threshold

For each metal we first compute the spot benchmark as the unweighted (simple) mean of the spot 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. We then convert the spot benchmark to the realizable price — the actual headline — by applying a published, calibrated dealer margin:

The margin is a calibrated, published constant — the National Zakat Foundation (UK) standard of roughly 10% under spot — versioned with the date and source it was calibrated against, and shown beneath the table above. Gold and silver carry independent margins, so each can be tuned separately if the realizable haircut diverges between the two metals. The threshold is then the classical metal weight multiplied by the realizable price: gold nisab = 87.48 g × realizable gold price, and silver nisab = 612.36 g × realizable silver 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 we discount live spot by a calibrated dealer margin rather than relying on spot alone.

We apply that margin as a calibrated, published figure— the NZF standard of about 10% under spot — rather than scraping dealer “sell-to-us” pages. We tried the scraping route; dealer sites block automated access and rearrange their pages constantly, so a scrape breaks silently and can’t be relied on. A margin you can see, dated and sourced, is both more transparent and more stable — and it errs in the cautious direction for the payer. For added transparency we still publish the live market bid/ask in the table above when our metals API returns it, even though its institutional spread is not the retail margin.

Historical nisab, for back-zakat

If you are paying for a missed year (qaḍāʾ), each year’s zakat is owed against the nisab that applied on that year’s anniversary, not today’s. Our back-zakat lookup returns the realizable gold and silver nisab for any past date.

The historical method mirrors the live one: we take the historical spot close for that day and apply the same calibrated dealer margin(the NZF-standard ~10%) used today. The only difference from the live number is the spot input — a past close instead of today’s live spot:

The lookup shows both the realizable threshold and the spot close it was derived from, with a note recording that the standard margin was applied (marginBasis standard-10pct-historical). Historical closes are immutable, so a given date always returns the same figure.

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.