Dental Gold Value Calculator

How this dental estimate is calculated

The arithmetic is short, and the hard part is the purity. Weigh the metal, multiply by the gold percentage you enter, and price that gold at the spot shown on the calculator. A payout percent, the one a buyer actually quoted, then scales the melt. There is no karat menu and no default percentage, because a crown is not “16K” or “18K” unless an assay or the alloy record says so. Up to 100 in the purity box is a percent, so 40 means 40 percent gold. Above 100 is fineness out of 1,000, so 400 is the same 40 percent. The result is the gold portion only. Platinum, palladium, and the other metals in the alloy are not priced here.

Weight can be grams, pennyweight, troy ounces, or regular ounces. One pennyweight is 1.555 grams. One troy ounce is 31.1035 grams. A kitchen ounce is 28.35 grams and is not the ounce a gold buyer means. The item list is a label: crown, bridge, inlay or onlay, post and core, or other scrap. Changing the label does not change the math. The line under the list describes the piece. It is not a gram weight.

What the alloy classes do and do not say

The American Dental Association’s archived 2003 classification, published on its page “Materials for Indirect Restorations,” sorts alloys by noble metal, and the page marks that table as archived and informational. High noble means at least 60 percent gold plus platinum-group metals, and at least 40 percent gold. Noble means at least 25 percent gold plus platinum-group metals. Predominantly base means under 25 percent. Titanium and titanium alloys are a separate row, at least 85 percent titanium. The platinum-group metals named there are platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, osmium, and ruthenium.

Those rows are minimums a product must meet to carry the class name. They are not the assay of the crown in your hand. A high-noble alloy can be well above 40 percent gold, or it can sit on that floor with the rest of the noble share in palladium and platinum. A noble alloy can contain almost no gold at all if the 25 percent is palladium. A white crown is not a base-metal crown, and a yellow crown is not a high-gold crown. Color does not settle the class. The current materials standard cited on that same ADA page, ANSI/ADA Standard No. 134 and ISO 22674, sorts metallic restorations by strength and by the job, such as a small inlay, a crown, or a bridge. It does not hand you a karat.

Gold in a dental alloy is mixed with other metals so it will hold up in the mouth. The ADA page notes that gold is soft on its own and is hardened with copper, silver, platinum, or another durable metal. That is why pricing the whole crown as if it were pure gold, or as if it were a jewelry karat you guessed, misstates the gold. Enter the gold percentage from the lab slip, the alloy name looked up in the manufacturer’s sheet, or the refiner’s assay. If you do not have one, the honest result is no result.

Platinum-group metals, porcelain, and cement

A high-noble crown can hold meaningful platinum or palladium beside the gold. Those metals have their own prices, and this calculator does not include them. An estimate that counts only gold can be low when the assay shows a rich platinum-group share, and it can be high when you typed a gold percentage the piece does not have. The warning on the result is there for that reason: dental gold often contains platinum-group metals and other alloys, and only an assay gives the true figure.

Porcelain, cement, and leftover tooth are not metal. A porcelain-fused crown can weigh more in ceramic than in alloy. Weighing the crown as it came out of the mouth, with cement still on it, applies your purity to material that has no gold in it. Clean off what you safely can, and treat anything you cannot remove as extra weight that makes the gold figure high. A bridge adds solder at the joints, and that solder is not necessarily the same alloy as the crowns. A post and core may be a gold core on a steel or titanium post. A magnet that grabs the post has found steel. A magnet that does nothing has not proved the rest is gold, because many dental alloys are not magnetic.

If the only paper you have is a class name, do not type 40 and treat it as the assay. High noble means the gold is at least 40 percent, not that it is 40 percent. Noble does not mean 25 percent gold. Put the class in your notes, leave the purity box empty until a sheet or an assay fills it, and use the calculator to check the arithmetic after that number exists. Guessing a jewelry karat and running the crown through a 14K or 18K page is the same mistake with a different label.

Why there is no typical gram weight

A one-surface inlay, a full crown, and a three-unit bridge are different objects, and the same tooth on two people is not the same casting. Porcelain thickness changes the scale without changing the metal. Published “a crown weighs this many grams” lists rarely say whether they weighed the metal, the ceramic, or the crown with cement. This page does not print one. The item menu tells you what you are holding. You type the weight from a scale that reads to 0.01 g if you can. A kitchen scale that jumps by a whole gram is coarse for a single inlay.

Melt value and the payout percent

Melt value is the gold portion at the spot price on the calculator. Estimated payout is that melt times the percent you enter. Leave the percent blank until a buyer gives you one. The box does not start at a hidden rate, and the ranges used on the scrap-gold page are for ordinary karat jewelry, not a claim about dental buyers. A dental buyer may also pay for platinum and palladium after an assay, which this gold-only payout does not show. The line is an estimate of melt value, not an offer.