There is no secret local rate. There is the world price, your gold's assayed purity, and a short, disclosable set of costs between the two. Here is exactly how a real price is built — and how to read a quote. Written from Freetown, updated October 2026.
The single most useful thing to understand about buying gold in Sierra Leone is that there is no separate "Sierra Leone gold price." Gold is a globally traded commodity, and it is priced off one international benchmark — the London spot price, quoted in US dollars per troy ounce of pure gold. The rate a miner in Kono can get and the rate a refiner in Switzerland pays are both anchored to that same number, moving minute by minute with the world market. Everything local is a modification of the world price, never a replacement for it.
This is liberating for a buyer, because it means a price is checkable. You do not have to trust a dealer's assertion of "the rate today" — you can look up the world spot price yourself and ask how the quote in front of you was derived from it. A legitimate price traces back to spot in steps you can follow. A price that cannot be traced back to spot is a price to question.
The spot price is the price for immediate delivery of pure, refined gold, expressed per troy ounce. A troy ounce is not the ordinary kitchen ounce — it is about 31.1035 grams, heavier than the 28.35-gram avoirdupois ounce most people picture. Precious metals have been quoted in troy weight for centuries, and every serious gold figure you encounter uses it. Getting this unit right matters: confusing troy and standard ounces introduces a near-10% error, which is exactly the kind of gap a careless or dishonest quote can hide in.
So when you see "gold at 2,400," that means USD 2,400 for one troy ounce of pure gold, delivered into the market. It is the starting point for every calculation that follows. Nothing you buy physically in Sierra Leone is "pure gold delivered into the market," which is why the number you are actually quoted will differ — in ways that should be fully explainable.
Real gold is rarely perfectly pure, and the spot price is for pure gold, so the bridge between them is the assay. Assaying establishes the fineness of your parcel — its purity, expressed as a percentage or in carats. Apply that purity to the gross weight and you get the net fine weight: the amount of actual, pure gold the parcel contains. A one-kilogram parcel assaying at 96% contains 960 grams of fine gold, and it is that 960 grams — not the full kilogram — that the world price is applied to.
This is why the assay is the hinge of the entire transaction. It determines the net fine weight, which determines the value, which determines both your price and the 5% duty charged on it. A buyer who understands this stops asking "what's your rate per kilo?" — a near-meaningless question, since a kilo of 96% gold and a kilo of 80% gold are worth very different sums — and starts asking "what did it assay at, and what's the net fine weight?" That is the question a professional counterparty is ready to answer with a certificate.
Not "what's the price per kilo?" but "what did it assay at, and what is the net fine weight?" Price follows net fine weight. Anyone quoting a flat per-kilo price without reference to purity is quoting air.
People often want a price per gram, and you can build one from spot in two short steps. Take the world spot price per troy ounce and divide by 31.1035 to get the price per gram of pure gold. Then multiply by your gold's assayed purity to get the price per gram of your gold. At an illustrative spot of USD 2,400 per troy ounce, pure gold is about USD 77.16 per gram; 96%-fine gold is about USD 74.07 per gram before any duty or cost. Those two steps are the whole arithmetic.
The value of doing it yourself is not that you will transact on your own estimate — the real valuation happens under supervision at assay — but that you arrive with a sense of the right order of magnitude. If a quoted per-gram figure is wildly below what spot-times-purity implies, that gap is the thing to ask about. Sometimes it is legitimate cost; sometimes it is margin dressed up as "the local rate." Either way, you only know to ask because you did the two-step sum first.
Sources: London Bullion Market Association benchmark methodology; NMA — Directorate of Precious Minerals Trading; Mines and Minerals Development Act 2022.A physical parcel in Sierra Leone will always be quoted below the raw spot price, and that is normal rather than suspicious — provided the gap is explained. Spot is the price of pure gold already delivered into the world market. Your parcel is neither perfectly pure nor already there. Between the two sit several real costs: the purity discount captured by the net fine weight; the 5% export duty and the 0.05% rehabilitation levy; the cost of assaying, photographing, sealing and documenting the export under supervision; logistics and insurance to move high-value goods; and the dealer's margin for arranging all of it and carrying the risk.
The test of a good dealer is not that none of these exist — they always do — but that the dealer will show them to you. A transparent quote lays out the spot reference, the purity, the net fine weight, the duty and levies, and the margin, so the discount to spot is a sum of named things. An opaque quote gives you one number well under spot and dares you to ask why. You should always ask why.
The export duty deserves its own mention because it is the largest single deduction after purity. Sierra Leone levies a 5% export duty on the assayed value of a gold parcel, payable to the central bank before the export certificate is issued, with a further 0.05% going to the rehabilitation fund. Whether a dealer quotes you a "net of duty" price or itemises the duty as a separate line, it is part of what the gold costs to get lawfully out of the country — so it belongs in any honest comparison of offers.
Because the duty is charged on value, it moves with the gold price and the purity just like everything else, and it is reproducible from the same inputs. We set out the full duty-and-tax stack — including the different treatment of diamonds — in a dedicated guide to gold export duty & taxes in Sierra Leone. The short version for pricing purposes: expect roughly five per cent of assayed value to go to duty and levy, and expect a straight dealer to show it rather than smuggle it into the spread.
The 5% figure is the rate in force as this guide is written. Duty rates are set by government in the Finance Act and can move. Confirm the current rate with the NMA or PMTD before you rely on it in a price.
Put it all together and reading a gold quote becomes a short checklist. Does it reference the world spot price it was built from? Does it state the assayed purity and the net fine weight, not just a gross weight? Does it itemise the 5% export duty and the rehabilitation levy? Does it disclose the dealer's margin, or at least present the cost components openly rather than as one sealed number? A quote that answers yes to those is one you can reconstruct from first principles — and a price you can reconstruct is a price you can trust.
A quote that answers no — a flat "local rate" with no spot reference, no purity, no itemised duty — is not necessarily dishonest, but it is unverifiable, and in a high-value transaction unverifiable is a risk you do not need to take. The whole argument of this guide is that gold pricing is not mysterious: it is spot, times net fine weight, minus a short list of nameable costs. Insist on seeing that list. If you would like a real parcel priced on exactly this basis, with every line shown, that is what our desk in Bo does.
Read our companion guides on how to buy gold in Sierra Leone and how to verify a seller. A good price from an unverified seller is not a good deal.
Buying bullion, sourcing rough, or arranging lawful export — our desk in Bo answers every serious enquiry within one business day.