What Are Gold Reserves and Who Holds the Most? (October 2026)

Gold reserves are the official monetary gold — physical bullion held as bars and coins — that a central bank or monetary authority owns as part of its reserve assets. The United States holds the most gold reserves at 8,133.5 tonnes, followed by Germany at 3,349.3 tonnes and Italy at 2,451.9 tonnes.

That is the short answer to what are gold reserves and who holds the most. The longer answer is messier than the ranking suggests, because central bank gold, gold exchange-traded fund holdings, private investment bars and gold still sitting in the ground are four very different things that often get added together in headlines.

Figures in this article come from World Gold Council compilations of IMF International Financial Statistics, using the most recently published country data available as of July 2026. Reporting runs roughly two months behind, so treat every number as a snapshot rather than a live feed.

What Are Gold Reserves?

Gold reserves are the gold bullion a country owns outright, counted in tonnes, and held by its central bank or monetary authority. It is one line inside a much larger figure called foreign exchange reserves, which also includes foreign currency deposits, bonds, IMF position and Special Drawing Rights.

The technical term is monetary gold: fine gold of at least 99.5 per cent purity held by official institutions or international organisations. Central banks report these holdings to the IMF, the World Gold Council compiles them, adjusts some series and republishes them alongside dollar values and gold’s share of total reserves.

Two practical points follow from that definition. First, the tonnage is physical ownership, not a claim on someone else’s gold. Second, the dollar value attached to it moves daily with the gold price while the tonnage does not move at all, so a change in market value says nothing about whether a country bought or sold metal.

On the accounting side, there is a wrinkle worth knowing about US holdings. The US Treasury carries its gold at a statutory book value of 42.2222 US dollars per troy ounce, a figure fixed by law in 1973. Valued at 2026 market prices, the same metal is worth roughly 1.05 trillion dollars against about 11 billion dollars on the books.

What Counts as a Country’s Gold Holdings?

Not every bar in a vault belongs in the ranking, and the official figures are narrower than readers often assume. Here is what does and does not count.

• Allocated physical bullion held by the central bank: this is the core of official gold reserves, and it is what the tables below measure.
• Sovereign gold outside the central bank, held by a treasury or finance ministry: some countries report this separately, which is why totals can shift between sources.
• Gold deposits and swapped gold, where bullion is lent out and other metal is pledged in return: reported in some cases, omitted in others.
• Gold-pool and pooled positions shared between institutions: not attributable to a single country.
• ETF and private holdings: excluded from official reserve figures, even though the metal is often the same metal sitting in the same vault.
• Gold in the ground: mined reserves and geological resources held by companies and governments. Australia and South Africa rank near the top here while sitting far down the official gold table.

This is the trap behind the question “which country has the most gold”. Australia has more recoverable gold than anyone, Russia and China mine heavily, and private investors hold thousands of tonnes. None of that is gold reserves.

Who Holds the Most Gold Reserves?

The United States holds the most gold reserves, at 8,133.5 tonnes — nearly as much as the next three countries combined, and a stock that has barely changed since the early 1970s. Below is the ranking of the largest official holders, with the share of each country’s total reserves that gold represents.

Rank	Holder	Gold holdings (tonnes)	Gold share of total reserves
1	United States	8,133.5	81.3%
2	Germany	3,349.3	80.8%
3	IMF (institution, not a country)	about 2,814	Not a national reserve
4	Italy	2,451.9	77.0%
5	France	2,437.0	78.6%
6	China	about 2,346 (reported)	8.0%
7	Russia	about 2,326.5	Not published
8	Switzerland	1,039.9	High share of a small reserve base
9	India	about 880.5	Large share
10	Japan	about 846.0	8.5%
11	Turkey	about 772.5 (530.6 excluding commercial-bank gold)	High
12	Poland	640.2	Rising sharply
13	Netherlands	612.5	High

How the Largest Gold Holders Are Ranked

The ranking uses official monetary gold reported to the IMF, not estimated holdings and not gold in private hands. That choice matters in three places.

First, the International Monetary Fund sits third in the table and is not a country. Its holdings are pooled across member states, so leaving them in a list of national reserves confuses two different kinds of owner.

Second, reported and estimated figures diverge. China publishes its holdings but has stopped providing the detail analysts use to verify purchases, so many market participants treat its additions as estimates. Turkey illustrates the same issue from the other direction: reported holdings include roughly 242 tonnes held on behalf of commercial banks, which the World Gold Council strips out of its adjusted series. Quoting 772.5 tonnes and 530.6 tonnes for the same country is not an error, it is two different definitions.

Third, there is a lag. Country reports arrive with a delay of about two months, some central banks report late or revise previous figures, and the World Gold Council publishes on its own schedule. Any ranking screenshot without an as-of date is close to worthless.

Gold as a Share of Total Reserves Shows a Different Ranking

Share of reserves answers a different question from tonnage. A country with a small reserve base can hold a modest pile of gold and still depend on it heavily.

Holder	Gold as a share of total reserves
Bolivia	91.5%
Uzbekistan	87.1%
United States	81.3%
Germany	80.8%
Kyrgyzstan	79.5%
Portugal	79.0%
France	78.6%
Italy	77.0%
Japan	8.5%
China	8.0%

The spread is the story. The US, Germany, Italy and France keep gold at the heart of their reserve books. China and Japan hold enormous tonnage and lean on government bonds for most of their reserves, so they appear at the bottom of this table and the top of the previous one.

Why Countries and Institutions Hold Gold

Gold has no issuer, no counterparty and no credit rating. That single property explains almost every reason a central bank holds it, and the reasons sharpened considerably after 2022.

No counterparty risk. A government bond depends on the issuer paying you. A dollar deposit depends on the banking system and the jurisdiction you deposit it in. A gold bar in a domestic vault cannot be defaulted on by anyone, because there is no promise being broken.

Insulation from sanctions and asset freezes. When roughly 300 billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves were immobilised in 2022, the metal inside those reserves did not become available to Moscow. Gold held at home cannot be frozen by a foreign government. This is the argument most often heard in central bank discussions today.

Diversification. Gold moves differently from bonds and equities. It rarely correlates strongly with either, which is exactly what a reserve manager wants when everything else is selling off at once.

Crisis liquidity. Physical bullion can be moved or monetised without asking a market counterparty for permission, which is not true of other reserve assets in a stressed week.

Collateral and portfolio demand. Gold can back derivatives and margin obligations, and central banks are also buying it as part of ordinary reserve rebalancing and long-run diversification targets. The widely quoted benchmark floating around reserve committees is a gold share somewhere near 30 per cent, up from single digits a decade ago.

The buying data supports the story. Central banks added 1,082 tonnes in 2022, 1,051 tonnes in 2023, 1,092 tonnes in 2024 and 863 tonnes in 2025, against an average of roughly 473 tonnes a year across 2010 to 2021. Poland has added more than 409 tonnes and China more than 398 tonnes since the end of 2021, which makes them the biggest net purchasers even though neither sits near the top of the tonnage table.

That gap is worth pausing on. Holding the most gold and buying the most gold are different questions, and the second one tells you more about current intent. It also says nothing on its own about where the gold price goes next. A strategic stockpile is a hedge, not a forecast, and plenty of holders are not investors at all.

How Much of a Country’s Gold Is Actually Available?

Reported holdings are a statement of ownership, not a promise that every bar is sitting in the country or free to move. A good share of the world’s official gold is held abroad, leased, swapped or pledged as collateral.

In the United States, the question of who owns the gold confuses readers more than any other. The United States official gold holdings are reported as a US figure and the metal is physically held in US government facilities, with the Treasury holding title and the Federal Reserve acting as custodian through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Roughly 147.3 million troy ounces sit at Fort Knox, which is a little over half of Treasury gold, alongside about 54.1 million ounces at West Point and 43.9 million ounces in Denver, with the balance in New York.

Abroad, ownership and location diverge further. The Bank of England is one of the world’s two largest custodians, with holdings of roughly 400,000 bars for other countries’ account. Germany keeps about 51 per cent of its gold in Frankfurt, 37 per cent at the New York Fed and 12 per cent in London, which is why repatriation has become a recurring political topic there and in the Netherlands, where 122.5 tonnes came home, and in Poland, where 100 tonnes followed. India holds roughly 680 of its 880.5 tonnes onshore.

Two practical consequences. A government facing sanctions has less usable metal than its headline number implies if the bars sit in a foreign vault. And a country can own gold it has lent out, in which case the offsetting claim — a deposit or swap, not physical metal — is what keeps its accounts whole.

How Investors Can Read Gold Reserve Data

Before drawing a conclusion from any reserve figure, run it through this checklist. It takes about a minute and filters out most of the bad comparisons.

1. Check the date. Official holdings update with a two-month lag, and annual snapshots are often a year out of date.
2. Check the source. World Gold Council and IMF International Financial Statistics publish different series, and the World Gold Council adjusts some of them.
3. Check the unit. Tonnes, million troy ounces and “million ounces” are all in circulation and are not the same number.
4. Check the category. Official monetary gold, sovereign gold held outside the central bank, ETF assets and private bars are four separate buckets.
5. Check the valuation. Tonnage is a stock; dollar value is that stock marked to the market price on the day. Only the tonnage tells you about buying and selling.
6. Check reported against estimated. Where transparency is thin, say so rather than presenting a number as settled.

The dollar value of official holdings is worth watching on its own. Gold passed 4,000 US dollars per troy ounce in October 2025 and set a record of 5,595.47 dollars on 29 January 2026, and by 2026 the metal has moved above US Treasuries as the second-largest reserve asset held by central banks. Central banks now hold more gold than Treasuries in aggregate, which is a bigger structural shift than any individual country’s tonnage.

None of this makes gold a trade to chase. Reserve composition is a slow-moving macro signal about sanctions risk and monetary sovereignty, useful for context and poor as a timing tool. Prices and rules vary by country and change over time, so treat the ranking as a starting point and verify the current figures before acting on them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What to Look at First

If you take one thing from this: the United States holds the most official gold reserves at 8,133.5 tonnes, and every other figure on the page needs a date and a category attached to it before it means anything.

Compare reported holdings from one reporting date against another rather than mixing sources, keep official monetary reserves separate from ETF assets and private bars, and check whether a tonnage is reported or estimated. Where a country’s value jumps without a tonnage change, you are looking at the gold price rather than a purchase.

And when a headline tells you a country has the “most gold”, check whether the journalist meant mined reserves in the ground. It is a different question, and the answer looks nothing like the table above.

Source: https://www.pgm-blog.com/what-are-gold-reserves-and-who-holds-the-most/