The Bar Everyone Trusts: refining and the LBMA Good Delivery list

A London Good Delivery gold bar is the most trusted object in the gold market, and almost nobody outside the trade has held one. It weighs about twelve and a half kilograms. It settles trades between banks, and exchanges on several continents lean on the same standard. The reason is not the gold alone. It is a list of names, kept in London, that says who is allowed to make it. This is the story of that list, and of what it takes to stay on it.

What a Good Delivery bar is

The rules are published by the London Bullion Market Association and they are exact. A bar must contain at least 350 and no more than 430 fine troy ounces of gold, roughly 10.9 to 13.4 kilograms. Its fineness must be at least 995.0 parts per thousand. It must be about 250 millimetres long on top, 70 wide and 35 high, within stated tolerances, with sloped sides. Its gross weight is recorded in troy ounces, in steps of 0.025, always rounded down.

Four things must be struck into it: a serial number, the stamp of the refiner, the fineness to four significant figures, and, for bars made from January 2019 onwards, the year and month of manufacture. The rules even say how a bar may be cast: in graphite or cast iron moulds.

Nothing else qualifies. The LBMA's own guide to the market is plain on the point: kilobars "are not regarded as Good Delivery bars". The coins, the small bars and the jewellery that most people own sit outside this system entirely.

A list of names, since 1750

The London market's answer to "how do you know it is gold?" has always been "we know who made it". By the LBMA's own account, the Bank of England set up the London Good Delivery List in 1750, formally recognising the refineries whose bars reached the required standard. It was originally called the List of Acceptable Melters and Assayers. For generations it was kept by the London Gold Market, which by 1850 meant five firms: N M Rothschild and Sons, Mocatta and Goldsmid, Pixley and Abell, Samuel Montagu and Co. and Sharps Wilkins. In the 1980s the Bank concluded that the list needed an independent keeper, and that was the catalyst for founding the LBMA in 1987.

Anyone who has read our piece on the history of UK hallmarking will recognise the idea. A hallmark names the maker and the office that tested the metal. A Good Delivery bar names its refiner. In both cases the guarantee is struck into the metal itself.

How hard it is to get on

On 21 September 2026 the LBMA's current list showed 67 accredited gold refiners. That is the whole of it. The LBMA's own explainer sets out what a refiner needs: it must produce at least 10 tonnes of refined gold a year, it must have a tangible net worth of at least 15 million pounds, and it must pass checks on its history in the market, its financial standing and its ability to make bars to the standard. The LBMA says it checks production and net worth every year, and adds a line worth reading twice: "The LBMA believes that the long-term viability of a refiner is just as important as the Rules."

The reach of the list goes far beyond London. The LBMA's guide records that exchanges including ICE, Borsa Istanbul, CME Group and TOCOM, along with the Singapore Bullion Market Association, the Shanghai Gold Exchange and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, use it in whole or in part to decide whose bars they accept.

How hard it is to stay on

Getting on is not the end of it. Under the LBMA's Proactive Monitoring programme, which is mandatory, every refiner's assaying is reviewed every three years. Samples are dipped from a normal melt under supervision; two go to London to be check-assayed by LBMA Referees, the refiner submits its own analysis of one, and the two results are compared for a pass or a fail. Every gold refiner must be able to assay across the whole range from 995 to 999.9.

Then there is where the gold came from. Under the LBMA's Responsible Sourcing Programme, refiners selling into London must undergo an independent third party audit every twelve months, and failure to adhere results in removal from the list.

August 2026: two refiners suspended

That is not theory. On 4 August 2026 the LBMA announced that it had invoked its Incident Review Process against Shandong Gold Smelting Co. Ltd. following the company's addition to the United States Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List, and suspended it from both the gold and silver lists from 5 August, as an interim measure and without prejudice to the outcome. The company told the LBMA it "firmly rejects its inclusion" on that list and welcomes a fair and independent review. We report both positions and take neither.

On 20 August the LBMA suspended Hunan Shuikoushan Nonferrous Metals Group from 21 August, for a different reason: a modified assurance opinion from its auditor on its responsible silver reporting for 2025.

Notice what neither notice says. Neither says the metal was impure. The modern list judges two things: whether a refiner's gold is what it says it is, and whether it came from where it says it came from.

The bars already made

The most revealing rule is the one about bars made before a suspension. When the LBMA suspended six Russian refiners in March 2022, in light of UK, EU and US sanctions, it stated that "the bars that the Refiner produced while on the List will still be considered Good Delivery."

That sentence explains the whole system. A bar is judged by who made it and when. A refiner can be removed tomorrow, but a bar struck while it was trusted stays trusted, because its gold has not changed. The same holds for a hallmarked ring made two hundred years ago.

What the numbers add up to

At the end of September 2026 the LBMA reported 9,821 tonnes of gold in London vaults, approximately 785,690 bars. Divide one by the other and the average bar weighs almost exactly 12.5 kilograms, which is the Good Delivery bar at work. At the price we read from our own markets feed at 07:06 UTC on 9 October 2026, 4,197.40 dollars an ounce or 101.96 pounds a gram, a bar of 400 fine ounces is worth about 1.68 million dollars, or about 1.27 million pounds. That arithmetic is ours, and it is dated so you can check it.

Contrast that with the paper claims described in Paper Gold and the Unsecured Creditor. A claim is only as good as whoever owes it. A bar is only as good as the name struck into it, and in London that name has been checked, tested and audited, and it can be struck off.

Most of us will never own a Good Delivery bar, but the principle scales down. Know who made it, know what it is, and let the metal carry the proof. Our Gold Price page shows the live metal value, and our piece on recycling and the second mine follows the gold that comes back to the refiners. If you have gold you no longer wear, our Sell with Chapman page explains how we buy. Nothing here is financial advice, and every figure above carries its date and source so you can check it yourself.