---
title: "Hours of work to buy 1 ounce of gold · Bitsaga Insights"
description: "How many hours an average worker needs to work to buy one ounce of gold, from 500 BC to today. Toggle to the yearly inflation rate."
url: "https://bitsaga.be/insights/hours-of-work-to-buy-gold"
language: "en"
---

> How many hours an average worker needs to work to buy one ounce of gold, from 500 BC to today. Toggle to the yearly inflation rate.
[Insights](https://bitsaga.be/insights) · Macroeconomics

# Hours of work to buy 1 ounce of gold

One ounce of gold now costs about **117 hours** of average pay.

October 1, 2026

How long does an average worker have to work to afford one ounce of gold? In August 2026 the answer was about **117 hours**, close to three working weeks.

That is more than three times the average of the last 100 years (33 hours), and in the US data since 1920 only five months in early 2026 were higher. It is still far below the 500-year average (about 760 hours): in 16th and 17th century England it took roughly 900 to 2,400 hours.

Switch to the inflation rate to see the same history through consumer prices. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and open Sources for the data behind every line.

Treat the older numbers with care. Everything before 1257 is a rough estimate from scattered records, and US figures before 1964 are manufacturing pay scaled to today's definition.

## What the trend says

Over the long run, gold got cheaper in hours of work. Pay rose, and for most of that time the price of gold was fixed by law (£4.25 an ounce in Britain from 1717, $35 in the US from 1934). So a falling line mostly means people earned more.

Then, in 1971, the US stopped swapping dollars for gold and the price was free to move. Since 1970 the line has gone from 8.5 hours to 117. Gold rose about 123 times in dollars. Pay rose about 9 times and prices about 9 times. Gold beat both by more than 13 times.

Does that mean we are poorer? In gold, yes: an hour of work now buys about 13 times less. In goods, only partly. After prices, hourly pay is up just 7% in 56 years, while productivity kept growing. Researchers find that typical pay has fallen behind it since 1973. Gold also swings a lot on its own: 86 hours in 1980, 15 in 2001.

So a rising line is a warning about what wages buy in hard money. It is not a full measure of wealth.

### Further reading

- [Clark (2005): English wages, 1209 to 2004](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=869754)

- [Stansbury and Summers (2017): productivity and pay](https://www.nber.org/papers/w24165)

- [Erb and Harvey (2013): is gold a reliable hedge?](https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706)

- [Federal Reserve: the end of gold convertibility in 1971](https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibility-ends)