The Royal Mint has closed the busiest financial year in its history, reporting record figures across almost every metric of its online Precious Metals Investments business for the fourth quarter of 2025 26. Transaction volumes on royalmint.com reached an all time high in the January to March quarter, up 130% on the same period a year earlier, as investors moved into bullion against a backdrop of inflation worries and the prospect of a stock market correction.
Sitting beneath those headline numbers is a genuinely historic marker. During the quarter, gold broke £4,000, roughly $5,000, per ounce for the first time, a threshold that helped pull record numbers of both new and returning customers to the Mint.
Gold Crosses a Historic Threshold
For most of the past decade the story of gold has been one of steady ascent. This quarter it became something closer to a stampede. The Mint reports that the move through £4,000 an ounce captured attention well beyond the usual bullion audience, and the buying patterns reflected it.
DigiGold, the Mint’s VAT free digital precious metals range, accounted for 54% of all transactions over the quarter, with the sharpest spikes coming at the end of January and again in March. Notably, those spikes lined up with moments when the gold price dipped rather than climbed, as buyers moved quickly to capitalise on pullbacks. According to the Mint’s Private Wealth Consultant Stuart O’Reilly, the recent retracement looked tied to shifting interest rate expectations rather than any change in conviction, with customers treating the dips as entry points rather than warnings.
The Silver Story
If gold supplied the headline, silver supplied the drama. Sales of silver surged more than 1,000% against the same quarter a year earlier, and the volatility behind that figure was extraordinary. Over the period, silver climbed 65% to push above $100 an ounce in January before retracing all the way below $70.
That kind of swing tends to scatter buyers. It did the opposite here. The value of silver sold back to the Mint rose roughly 3,300% over the same window, the predictable mark of investors taking profits into a spike, yet customers bought two ounces of silver for every ounce they returned. The Mint reads that two to one ratio as a sign that conviction in the metal held even as the price whipsawed. O’Reilly framed the broader shift bluntly, describing the year’s figures as evidence of a fundamental shift in how investors are thinking about their portfolios.
A Tax Efficient Angle
The quarter also rewarded the corner of the market built on tax efficiency. Sales of Capital Gains Tax exempt bullion coins rose 94% year on year, comparing the full 25/26 figure against 24/25, as buyers continued to favour UK coins whose legal tender status keeps any gains outside the CGT net. For investors weighing how to hold a precious metals allocation as well as whether to, that structural advantage appears to be doing real work.
A Bigger, and Newer, Customer Base
Record transaction volumes were matched by record participation. The total number of purchasing customers hit a new high in Q4, up 80% on the same quarter the year before. Across the full 25/26 financial year, the number of people buying and selling bullion through royalmint.com rose 49% against the prior year.
The more telling figure is who those customers were. Six in ten were entirely new to the Mint, and more first time buyers arrived in Q4 alone than in any previous quarter in the history of the Precious Metals Investments business, a sign that the gold milestone and the silver fireworks pulled a fresh cohort into the market rather than simply giving existing collectors more to do.
What It Signals
A single record quarter can be a function of price; a record year built on a flood of new buyers is something closer to a behavioural change. The pattern the Mint describes, buyers stepping in on dips, holding through volatility, and reaching for tax efficient vehicles, points less to speculative froth than to a steady reallocation toward physical and digital metal as a long horizon hedge. Whether gold holds above £4,000 or silver settles its nerves, the more durable story for the hobby and the market may be the 60% of buyers who were not here a year ago, and who now have a reason to keep watching the price.
Figures and commentary in this article are drawn from The Royal Mint’s quarter 4 2025 26 press release. This piece is editorial coverage and not investment advice; investments in physical bullion are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and bullion values can fall as well as rise.
