Minted or cast: what is the difference, and what are you paying for?

Big Bullion · Published 15 September 2026 · Updated 15 September 2026 · 5 min read

Reviewed by the Big Bullion team, 15 September 2026

A cast bar is molten gold poured into a mould, and a minted bar is a blank cut from a rolled strip and struck under a press. The gold is identical, so what you pay extra for on a minted bar is the finish, the packaging and the certificate that comes with it.

Two ways to make the same gram of gold

A cast bar is the older and simpler of the two. Gold is melted, poured into a mould, left to cool and then stamped with its weight, its fineness and the refiner's mark. The surface keeps the marks of the pour, so no two are quite identical, and some people like a cast bar precisely because it looks like a lump of metal rather than a product.

A minted bar takes more steps. Gold is rolled into a strip of exact thickness, blanks are cut from it, and each blank is struck under a press so the design and the lettering come out sharp. It is then usually sealed into a card with an assay certificate carrying the bar's own serial number. Every one of those steps costs the refiner something, and that is where the difference in price comes from.

Read the gap off our own shelf

You do not have to take a figure from us for this. Find two bars in the table below that weigh the same, where one is a cast bar and the other is minted, and compare the last column. That gap is the whole of what the extra work costs you, in our prices, at this moment.

Do it again at a different weight and you will see the gap behave differently, because a fixed amount of extra work is a bigger share of a small bar than of a large one. The same reason small bars cost more per gram in the first place.

What the extra actually buys

• A sealed card with an assay certificate and a serial number, which makes the bar quick for anyone to identify.
• A sharp, even finish, which is what makes a minted bar the one people buy as a gift.
• Security features on some bars, which are pressed into the surface and cannot be added afterwards.
• Small sizes at all. Below about 20 g, a bar is almost always minted, because pouring metal that small is not practical.

What it does not buy

It does not buy more gold. A 50 g minted bar and a 50 g cast bar of the same fineness hold the same metal and are worth the same at spot, and nobody buying either from you later will pay for the gold twice.

It does not change the tax treatment either. Paragraph 3.6 of the IRAS e-Tax Guide GST: Guide on Exemption of Investment Precious Metals (IPM), Twentieth Edition, names the PAMP Suisse Fortuna bar, the PAMP Suisse Lunar series bar and the Argor-Heraeus gold Kinebar as qualifying, so a pressed and decorated bar is exempt exactly as a plain poured one is. Read 15 September 2026.

Should you keep it sealed?

If it came sealed, keep it sealed. You do not need the card or the packet to sell a bar to us, and we test the metal itself either way, but an intact seal and a matching certificate save everybody time and they cost you nothing to keep. A bar that has been out of its card is still a bar, so this is a small convenience rather than a rule.

Which one suits what you are doing

If you are putting a serious amount of metal away and you want the most gold for the money, cast is the cheaper way to do it, and at the larger weights that is most of what you will find. If you are buying a small bar, giving one, or you simply want the sealed card and the certificate, minted is what you want and the extra is modest.

Either way you are buying the same gold from the same refiners, and we buy both back at rates we publish.

We sell physical gold and silver. Nothing on this page is financial advice.