How these figures are produced

Every figure on this site starts from one published source: the suggested retail gold jewellery price that Dubai Jewellery Group posts for five karat marks, in dirhams per gram. That price is then divided by the purity each mark carries, and the result is checked against the London metal from two independent sources. What follows is the whole process, its limits and what a reader should not conclude from it.

Why dividing a price by its purity is the whole measurement

A karat mark is a proportion of gold in the alloy, nothing more. The published price per gram of jewellery at each mark is therefore not directly comparable across marks. Dividing that price by the proportion of gold the mark carries gives a price per gram of fine gold, which is the only rate that can be compared mark against mark. Without that division, a lower mark appears cheaper simply because it contains less gold, and the comparison is meaningless.

The division also exposes the tariff structure. When the price per gram of fine gold comes out the same for three different marks, those marks are not quoted as separate markets. They are derived from a single underlying rate for fine gold, with a different amount of metal in each gram of jewellery. That is the whole measurement: one division, one comparable number.

What a suggested retail price is, and who suggests it

Dubai Jewellery Group is the trade body for the emirate's gold and jewellery trade, established in 1996 under Dubai Economy & Tourism. It publishes a suggested retail price for each karat mark, in dirhams per gram. The word suggested is doing the work: no shop is bound by it, and the till price can be higher or lower. The suggestion is a benchmark, not a fixing.

The group's price is the starting point for these pages because it is the only daily, mark-by-mark figure published by a body with no shop of its own. It is not a wholesale price, not a buy-back price, and not a promise of what any counter will charge. It is what the trade body suggests a gram of jewellery should sell for, before making charges and before any other fee.

How the London metal enters these pages without being read from the same page

The London metal price is the independent check on the Dubai suggestion. It comes from two sources: a dollar gold price an ounce and a separate dirham rate. Neither source is the page being measured. That independence matters, because a suggested retail price could be wrong in a way that only shows against an outside reference.

The dirham rate is checked against its institutional peg to the dollar on every run. A rate off the peg is treated as a broken source, not as news. The London price is then compared with the price per gram of fine gold derived from the Dubai suggestion. If the counter price sits outside a band of zero to fifteen per cent above the London metal, the reading is refused and nothing is written. That band is the desk's guard against a source error or a misprint.

The figures this desk will not print

Making charges are published nowhere and are not estimated here. The margin a shop keeps is its own business and is not estimated here. What a buy-back counter pays is published nowhere and is not estimated here. Those are the three numbers a buyer most wants, and they are the three numbers this desk will not invent.

The source page offers a date dropdown that returns today's figures for any date requested, so it is never used. Any series here is built from our own dated readings, one per day, stored and compared. Day-to-day movement is checked mark against mark: one mark that moves on its own, away from the rest, is treated as a typing error at the source and refused. The desk refuses more than it prints, and that is the point.