How the Silver Price Is Set

The official world benchmark is the LBMA Silver Price, set in a single electronic auction each London business day at 12:00 noon London time (7:00 AM Eastern for most of the year). The London Bullion Market Association owns the benchmark; ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA) independently administers it and runs the auction platform. Around a dozen banks and trading firms take part directly — 14 direct participants were listed by ICE in September 2026.

The auction works like a balancing act. IBA posts a starting price close to the current spot. Each participant enters how much silver it wants to buy or sell at that price, in units called lakhs — one lakh is 100,000 troy ounces. If buy and sell orders are far out of balance, the price moves and the round repeats; when the orders roughly balance, the auction stops and that price is published as the LBMA Silver Price, in US dollars per troy ounce of 99.9% pure silver. The whole process usually takes minutes. Banks, miners, refiners, industrial buyers and ETF providers use the published price to settle contracts, value holdings and price large physical deals.

From the 117-year fix to the electronic auction

The benchmark most people still call “the fix” ran from 1897 to 14 August 2014 — 117 years of a daily telephone call between fixing banks, latterly HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Nova Scotia. It ended after Deutsche Bank withdrew amid a regulatory push to reform financial benchmarks. The very next day, 15 August 2014, the electronic LBMA Silver Price auction launched, run by CME Group and Thomson Reuters; IBA took over administration in October 2017. The change brought transparency to a process that had operated largely unchanged since the reign of Queen Victoria — but the benchmark’s role is the same: one fixed reference point per business day.