How DrHint calculates gold and silver rates
Every rate page on this site is generated from the same pricing pipeline. This page documents that pipeline in full: what the inputs are, how the arithmetic works, how often it runs, where it is known to be imprecise, and what we do when a reader tells us a number is wrong. If anything below does not match what you see on a rate page, the page is wrong and we want to hear about it.
The two live inputs
Only two values change during the day:
- International spot price — the price of one troy ounce of 24-karat gold (or silver) in US dollars on the global over-the-counter market. This is the same benchmark London and COMEX quote against.
- USD exchange rate — the interbank US dollar rate against the Pakistani rupee or Indian rupee.
Everything else on a rate page — 22K, 21K, 18K, per gram, per 10 gram, per tola, per ratti, per sovereign, city variants — is derived arithmetic from those two numbers. Nothing is entered manually, which is why the site does not carry a "last updated by" human byline on individual rate figures: no human touches them.
The formula
A worked example you can check
Take a spot price of USD 2,400 per troy ounce and an interbank rate of PKR 278 per dollar:
- 2,400 ÷ 2.6667 = USD 900.01 per tola of pure gold
- 900.01 × 278 = PKR 250,203 per tola at interbank
- plus the local market premium → the figure shown as 24K per tola
- 22K = 250,203 × 0.9167 ≈ PKR 229,361 per tola (before premium)
Do that arithmetic against the current spot price and you should land within a few hundred rupees of what the page shows. If you land far outside that, something is broken — please report it.
Why our rate differs from your local shop
This is the single most common question we get, and the honest answer is that a jeweller's counter price is not the metal price:
- Open-market vs interbank dollar. Pakistani sarafa markets price against the open-market dollar, which usually trades above the interbank rate we convert with. On a stressed currency day this alone can be a few thousand rupees per tola.
- Making charges (majoori / wastage). In India and Pakistan a jeweller adds a labour charge, typically quoted as a percentage of metal value or a flat per-gram fee. It is not part of any rate published here.
- Tax. Indian retail bills add GST on top of metal plus making charges.
- Buy-back is lower than sell. When you sell gold back, expect a deduction — commonly 5–10% in the sarafa market — against the quoted rate.
Treat our number as the metal benchmark for that day, and the shop number as benchmark plus the shop's costs.
Known limitations
- City pages apply a percentage premium over the national rate to reflect typical regional spread. That premium is a working estimate derived from observed differences, not a live feed from each city's association.
- Weekend and public-holiday figures carry the last traded spot price forward. They are not fresh quotes and should not be read as such.
- We do not forecast tomorrow's price. Pages that once did this have been removed, because a fabricated forecast is worse than no forecast.
- Silver is thinner and more volatile than gold; intraday swings of several percent are normal and our snapshot can lag a sharp move by up to ten minutes.
Correction policy
If a rate is wrong, the fix goes into the pricing pipeline so every page that depends on it changes together — we do not hand-patch an individual page and leave the rest stale. Report a discrepancy through the contact page with the city and the figure you were quoted; that detail is what makes a premium correction possible.
Who publishes this
DrHint is an independent bullion-rate and financial-utility site covering Pakistan and India. We are not a jeweller, a broker or a dealer, and we do not sell gold — so there is no incentive to shade a rate in either direction. More about the site's scope and ownership is on the about page. Nothing published here is investment advice.