Why Sterling Silver Costs More Than It Used To
If you've noticed sterling silver jewelry costing more than it used to — yours or anyone else's — it's not your imagination, and it's not a brand quietly raising margins. It's the raw material itself.
What's Actually Happening
Silver entered 2025 trading at roughly $30 per troy ounce. By January 2026, it had climbed to an all-time high above $121 an ounce — a level it had never reached in history, not even during the famous 1980 or 2011 spikes. Since then, silver has pulled back significantly, trading in the high $60s to low $70s as of this writing. But even after that pullback, silver is still worth more than double what it was at the start of last year.
This isn't speculation or a temporary blip. It reflects real forces: industrial demand from solar panel manufacturing and electronics, tightening physical supply, and broader economic uncertainty pushing investors toward precious metals as a safe haven.
What This Means If You're Shopping for Sterling Silver
Here's the part that actually matters for you as a buyer: sterling silver is 92.5% pure silver. When the metal itself costs more than double what it did 18 months ago, that cost has to show up somewhere — either in the price you pay, or in the quality and weight of what you're buying.
This is worth knowing because it cuts both ways:
- If a piece seems suspiciously cheap for "sterling silver," ask questions. At current silver prices, a genuinely substantial sterling piece costs real money to produce. A rock-bottom price on something labeled sterling is worth a second look at the actual silver content — or whether it's genuinely sterling at all.
- Sterling silver you already own is worth more than it used to be. If you're sitting on real sterling pieces, the material value alone has meaningfully increased.
- This is a genuinely good time to buy sterling, not a bad one. Prices track the metal, but demi-fine sterling remains a fraction of the cost of solid gold jewelry, while still being a real precious metal — not a coated base metal. It's one of the better values in jewelry right now, silver prices included.
Our Take
We build every sterling piece with genuine 92.5% silver — not a lighter-weight compromise to protect margins as the metal gets more expensive. It's part of why we list the material honestly on every product page: what you're paying for is real, and its value doesn't evaporate the way a coated base-metal piece's does.
Curious about the difference between sterling, gold filled, and gold plated? Read our full breakdown here.