Stats › Long run returns › Central bank gold
Central bank gold buying
Central banks own gold, and every quarter the World Gold Council publishes an estimate of how much more of it they bought. That estimate has turned into one of the most quoted numbers in the whole gold argument, usually in the form "central banks are buying more than ever". That version is wrong, and has been for four years. Buying peaked in 2022 and has fallen every year since. It is still running well above where it sat for the decade before, so the honest sentence is "elevated and falling", which is less exciting and points somewhere quite different from the version you normally hear.
So this page has the tonnage year by year, what the gold price actually did through its record run and the sharp fall that followed, and a section on why the exchange traded fund story does not hold up as the main driver. I also spend real space on how soft the tonnage numbers are, because the Council revised one of its own quarterly figures from 243.7 tonnes down to 56.5. That is not a rounding error, and anyone leaning on this data should know it first.
Sources are listed at the bottom with their dates. The World Gold Council and the LBMA both publish this material for free, so there is no reason to take my summary over their originals.
Central bank net gold buying peaked at 1,136 tonnes in 2022 and has fallen every year since: 1,050.8 in 2023, 1,044.6 in 2024 and 863.3 in 2025. The first half of 2026 delivered 345.4 tonnes, the weakest first half since 2022. Gold itself returned 62.90% in 2025, set an all time high of $5,501.70 on 29 January 2026, and then fell 14.70% in the second quarter, ending June around 26% below that peak while the S&P 500 gained. The tonnage figures carry a large health warning: the World Gold Council revised its own first quarter 2026 estimate from 243.7 tonnes to 56.5.
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Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart and 4 named sources, roughly 1800 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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