100 Years of Gold Prices: The Full Historical Chart
Gold closed August 2026 at roughly $4,602 an ounce. A century ago, under the gold standard, its price was fixed by law rather than traded -- the entire idea of a "gold price" that moves is a comparatively recent one. Here's the arc, sourced to Macrotrends' 100-year historical gold price dataset.
From a fixed price to a floating one
For most of the early 20th century, the U.S. dollar price of gold was set by government policy, not a market -- $20.67 an ounce under the gold standard, then fixed at $35 an ounce after the 1934 Gold Reserve Act. That fixed price held for decades. It was the 1971 "Nixon Shock" -- the U.S. formally ending the dollar's convertibility to gold under the Bretton Woods system -- that let gold begin trading as a freely floating commodity for the first time in generations.
Milestones since the float began
| Period | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1971 | Bretton Woods ends; gold begins trading freely instead of at a fixed ~$35/oz |
| January 1980 | A brief, sharp spike to roughly $850/oz amid inflation and geopolitical crisis -- a high not revisited in nominal terms for nearly three decades |
| 1999-2001 | A multi-year low, gold trading in the roughly $250-$280/oz range |
| 2008 | Gold crosses $1,000/oz for the first time, amid the global financial crisis |
| September 2011 | Gold peaks near an all-time high around $1,900/oz before a multi-year pullback |
| 2020 | Gold crosses $2,000/oz for the first time, amid pandemic-era uncertainty |
| 2023-2026 | A sustained multi-year rally -- see the recent monthly closes below |
Exact historical figures vary slightly by data source and whether you're looking at a daily, monthly average, or month-end close -- the full dataset is public at macrotrends.net's 100-year gold price chart if you want to verify any specific point.
The most recent stretch, month by month
| Month | Close |
|---|---|
| Aug 2023 | roughly $1,940 |
| Aug 2024 | roughly $2,503 |
| Jan 2025 | roughly $2,798 |
| Aug 2025 | roughly $3,416 |
| Jan 2026 | roughly $4,865 |
| Aug 2026 | roughly $4,602 |
That's more than doubling in three years -- a genuinely unusual run by the standard of the chart's full 100-year history, not a typical annual move. The monthly figures above bounce around (note January 2026's $4,865 close was actually higher than August's), which is itself the point: even inside a strong multi-year trend, gold doesn't move in a straight line month to month.
Why the long chart matters more than the daily one
A single year of gold prices can look dramatic in either direction. A hundred years of them shows the pattern underneath: long fixed or quiet stretches, punctuated by sharp multi-year moves tied to currency policy, inflation shocks, or crisis-driven demand for a hard asset outside the banking system.
