Can You Buy Gold From a Bank?
Values on this page use gold spot at $4,197.40/oz · updated
Quick answer: If you hoped to buy gold bars from a bank in the United States, the plain result of our search is that we found no page on a large US bank's website offering a gold bar for sale. One online bank, EverBank, advertises gold coins, not bars. Banks in Canada and parts of Europe do sell bars, and their own pages say so. Gold is $4,197.40 per troy ounce as of October 9, 2026, so a 1 oz bar is worth about $4,197.40 before any seller adds a premium.
What we found at the large US banks
We went looking on the websites of Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and US Bank. The question was narrow: does the bank's own site offer a physical gold bar for sale to an ordinary customer? On Bank of America's, Wells Fargo's, Citi's and US Bank's sites we found no page that does. For Chase we found an education article about gold for beginners, which is not an offer. It tells readers to buy physical gold from a vetted source and gives a US Mint authorized purchaser as an example.
Chase also has a safe deposit box page. It lists coins and small collectibles among suitable contents and says boxes do not come with insurance for what you store in them. That is useful if you already own metal, and it says nothing about selling you any.
Two third-party buying guides say, in their own words, that Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo stay out of retail bullion sales. We treat those guides as outside opinion, not as our finding, and a bank can change its mind faster than a guide gets updated. What we can say is narrower and more solid: we looked, and the pages we read do not list a bar.
There is one more data point that cuts the other way. A CBS News article dated 2026-10-01 says some banks in the US sell gold bars and coins, suggests asking your local bank, and warns that a bank's stock is limited next to a specialist online dealer. The article names no bank. We could not turn that sentence into a single institution we could confirm, and the same goes for credit unions and community banks: we found none we could verify.
So the honest summary has two halves. Nothing we read shows a large US bank selling bars. And a local branch could still surprise you, which is why a phone call costs little.
Why banks mostly stay out
No bank we read explains its own reasons, so treat this section as reasons industry sources commonly give, not as any bank's statement.
- Cost of holding metal. Vaults, insurance, armored transport and trained staff all cost money before a single bar is sold.
- No lending return. A bar in a vault does not earn the interest that a deposit earns when it is lent out.
- Thin margins. Dealers compete hard on the gap between buying and selling, which leaves little room for a bank branch.
- Paperwork. Anti-money-laundering rules add reporting and identity checks to every cash-for-metal sale.
The Federal Reserve is sometimes assumed to be the place where this happens, so a note on that: the Fed's own page says it does not own gold (the Treasury does, and the Fed holds gold certificates), and that individuals and private entities may not store gold at the New York Fed or any other Reserve Bank. Custody there is for governments and international organizations. The page does not address sales to the public at all.
What the big banks offer instead
When a large bank does talk about gold, third-party guides say the usual route is a gold exchange-traded fund bought through its brokerage arm, which those guides call paper exposure. You own a share of a fund, not a bar you can hold. Some guides also mention wealth-management divisions that serve high-net-worth clients, which is a different door from the branch counter.
We found no bank page describing this as a gold bar substitute, so check what your own bank actually offers before assuming anything. The CFTC lists exchange-traded products and commodity pools among the other ways to own metals, which is a neutral place to read about what they are. This site does not recommend one over the other. If you want the metal itself in your hands, the pages on how to buy gold bars and where to buy gold bars cover the routes that remain.
Where banks do sell
| Country | Bank | Status | What we found | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo | Not found | We searched their sites and found no page offering gold bars for sale. Chase publishes an education article on gold, which is not an offer. | Chase's gold article Read |
| United States | EverBank | Sells | Coins only on the page we read: gold, silver, platinum and palladium coins through a coin account that opens at $7,500. The page does not mention bars. | EverBank's coins page Read |
The United States. EverBank is the one US bank page we read that sells physical gold. Its coins page offers gold, silver, platinum and palladium coins through a coin account, and the page states $7,500 to open it. Home delivery is available with a fee. A second option, called unallocated, holds no physical metal at all and has no storage or delivery fees. The page does not mention bars, and it does not mention buy-back. We print no EverBank pricing because the page describes a seller's markup over its own prices, which is a premium and belongs in your written quote.
Canada. Canadian banks are the clearest yes. The Royal Canadian Mint's page on buying from a bank, dated October 2024, says CIBC sells at a branch, online or through online banking, RBC sells through branches, TD sells on its website, at branches and at foreign-exchange centres, and BMO sells through its Nesbitt Burns brokerage or Private Bank channels, with vault storage or delivery. The same page says Scotiabank stopped offering precious metals in early 2021, so ask before relying on an older page. CIBC's own page lists gold bars in 1 oz and 1 kg sizes, caps online orders at CA$9,500 before tax and shipping per 24 hours, and sends larger orders to a banking centre.
Europe. Swiss and German banks are far more used to selling metal at the counter. Raiffeisen Switzerland says it sells bars from 1 g to 1 kg. Commerzbank says it sells gold bars and coins to holders of a Commerzbank current account. Sparkasse in Germany lists bars from about 1 g. UBS runs a gold product, but its page points it at clients in Switzerland, not US residents.
These pages describe other countries' customers and other countries' rules. A US reader cannot walk into any of them and expect the same service, which is why the full dated list, with a source link per row, sits on the page for banks that sell gold bars.
If your bank says yes: five questions
Suppose you ask at a branch and the answer is yes. Ask these five things before you hand over money, and get the answers in writing.
- What is the price over spot, in dollars, for this exact bar? Spot is the market price of the metal. A seller's premium is the extra. Work it out yourself: ask for the quoted price, subtract the gold content at spot, and see what is left. The page on the live gold price shows today's number.
- Will you buy it back, and at what price? Where a bank sells, it may not buy. CIBC's page, for example, ties buy-back to the original receipt, pristine condition and the bank still selling that product. The page on whether banks buy gold bars back covers this in detail.
- How does the bar reach me? Branch pickup, mail, or storage with the bank are different arrangements with different risks and costs.
- What ID and reporting does the sale involve? Expect identity checks. Ask what the bank records and files.
- What does it cost to keep it? If the bank stores the metal, ask what that costs each year. If you take it home, read the notes on gold bars in a safe deposit box, since a box is not the same as an insured vault.
A bank that cannot answer these in a few minutes is telling you something about how often it does this. Write the answers down, with the date and the name of the person who gave them, because a verbal reply at a counter is hard to prove later.
One practical point on the first question: ask for the weight and fineness of the exact bar, not just its size. A 1 oz bar marked .9999 holds a little more gold than one marked .999, and the quote should say which one you are being offered. Fineness is the purity, shown as parts per thousand, and a seller who will not state it is not ready to sell you anything.
What this can't tell you
This page cannot tell you what your own bank will do. Policies change, branches differ, and a manager may say yes to a request a website never mentions. It cannot tell you the price you will be quoted, because no one prints a bar premium we can stand behind, so we print none. It cannot tell you tomorrow's gold price either. And a bank page that is silent about bars is not proof that a branch never sells one; it is only what we found. Our reads were made on 2026-10-09 and the dated bank list is updated when we re-read a page. Treat every figure here, from EverBank's account minimum to CIBC's online cap, as the figure on the page we read, and check the live page before you act on it.
If your bank says no, you are not stuck. Retail warehouses, web-based dealers, neighborhood coin shops and phone-based dealers all sell bars. The page on Costco gold bars shows how one of those looks in practice, and the guide on where to buy compares all five.
FAQ
Can you buy a gold bar at Bank of America, Chase or Wells Fargo?
We found no page on any of the three sites offering a gold bar for sale. Chase has an education article about gold, which is not an offer. A branch employee may know of something a website does not, so asking costs little, but do not count on a yes.
Does any US bank sell gold?
EverBank's coins page offers gold, silver, platinum and palladium coins through a coin account that starts at $7,500, per the page. We found no US bank page listing a bar. CBS News says some banks sell bars and coins but names none, so a local institution may still be an exception.
Do banks in Canada and Europe sell gold bars?
Several do, according to their own pages. CIBC lists 1 oz and 1 kg gold bars, and the Royal Canadian Mint's page names CIBC, RBC, TD and BMO as sellers. Raiffeisen Switzerland, Commerzbank and Sparkasse describe bars on their sites. Rules and eligibility differ by country.
Is gold at a bank insured?
Metal you buy and keep at home or in a safe deposit box is not covered by FDIC deposit insurance, which applies to deposits. The FDIC says box contents are not insured by it, and institutions generally do not insure contents either. Ask an insurance agent about a policy that does.
Keep reading
- Costco gold bars: how the big-box route works, what the listings read, and how to check the price.
- banks that sell gold bars: the dated list with a source link and read date for every row.
- how to buy gold bars: seven steps from picking a size to checking the bar on arrival.
Data sources: Spot price via api.gold-api.com · COMEX futures (GC=F) via Yahoo Finance. Prices are for informational purposes only and may be delayed. Figures on this page were generated . Gold is quoted in US dollars per troy ounce.