MUMBAI — The gold rate today is ₹15,567 a gram for 24 carat, one rupee more than yesterday. The more interesting number is what yesterday has become.
On Monday morning, reading the tracker most Indian buyers read, this newspaper reported 24 carat at ₹15,512 a gram and 22 carat at ₹14,219. Opening the same tracker on Tuesday and it now says Monday was ₹15,566 and ₹14,270. The published rate for a day that has already finished has moved up by ₹54 per gram. On ten grams, that is ₹540, and it is a revision to history rather than a price change.
Gold Rate Today, August 18, 2026: City-Wise 24K, 22K and 18K
Today gold rate for 24 carat is ₹15,567 a gram, or ₹1,55,670 for ten grams. The gold rate today for 22 K, the purity in which almost all Indian jewellery is sold in, is ₹14,271 a gram, which is ₹1,42,710 for ten grams. Eighteen carat is ₹11,677. All three are up a single rupee on the day.
| City | 24K gold (₹ per gram) | 22K gold (₹ per gram) | 18K gold (₹ per gram) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delhi | 15,582 | 14,286 | 11,692 |
| Mumbai | 15,567 | 14,271 | 11,677 |
| Chennai | 15,567 | 14,271 | 12,051 |
| Kolkata | 15,567 | 14,271 | 11,677 |
| Bengaluru | 15,567 | 14,271 | 11,677 |
| Hyderabad | 15,567 | 14,271 | 11,677 |
| Pune | 15,567 | 14,271 | 11,677 |
| Ahmedabad | 15,572 | 14,276 | 11,682 |
The geography is unchanged from Monday. Delhi holds its fifteen rupee premium, Ahmedabad sits five rupees above the rest, and Chennai is the outlier on 18 carat alone at ₹12,051 against ₹11,677 nearly everywhere else, a quirk of how the southern trade prices its alloy rather than any difference in the metal.
What Moved the Gold Price Today
Internationally, the metal is doing rather more than a rupee’s worth of moving. Spot gold is near $4,429.49 an ounce, up about 0.30 percent, and that is a third consecutive session of gains. It has held above $4,400 throughout.
The driver is a change in what traders expect from the Federal Reserve in September. A week ago, the market was pricing roughly a one-in-three chance of a rate increase. After a run of soft American data, the expectation has shifted to the Fed holding policy unchanged, and gold, which pays no yield and therefore suffers most when rates rise, has taken the other side of that shift.
On the domestic exchange, the October gold contract has been holding above ₹1.55 lakh per ten grams. Monday’s session was livelier than the retail board suggested: the contract reached an intraday high near ₹1,56,155 before giving most of it back to settle around the ₹1.55 lakh mark. Anyone watching only the counter rate that day would have seen none of that.
Why Yesterday’s Gold Rate Changed Overnight
Which brings us back to the ₹54. There is no scandal here, but there is something buyers should understand about the number they are quoted.
Indian retail gold rates are not a market price. They are a convention, struck off association benchmarks and then republished by aggregators through the day. A figure read at nine in the morning is a different object from the same day’s figure read at nine at night, because the underlying fixing and the exchange have both moved in between. What the trackers publish as the day’s rate settles only after the day is over.
So Monday’s ledger was rewritten upward to reflect a session that ran hotter than its opening. The buyer who walked into a shop on Monday morning paid something close to the morning number. The reader who looks up Monday on Tuesday is shown the settled one. Both are described, on the same website, as the gold rate for August 17.
What cannot be established from here is which fixing the revision followed, or whether it was a correction of an error rather than a re-baselining, because no Indian rate tracker publishes a revision log. There is also still no single national gold rate to appeal to. The India Bullion and Jewellers Association fixing, the exchange contract and the shop-level quote remain three different numbers, and the gap between the first and last of them is mostly the three percent goods and services tax.
What This Means If You Are Buying
The practical lesson is narrow and worth having. A rate quoted before noon is provisional. If the international price is moving, as it has been for three sessions, the counter is working from a benchmark set before that movement, and the published record of the day will not match the slip in your hand.
None of this changes the demand picture underneath, which remains poor. Indian gold jewellery demand fell 24 percent in 2025 against the year before, according to World Gold Council data, and the council’s outlook for the rest of 2026 still has jewellery under pressure from elevated prices, with buyers moving to lighter pieces and investment products. A metal that has spent three days climbing in dollars and one rupee climbing in Indian shop windows is a metal most Indian households have already stopped buying by weight.
For the rest of the daily series, our silver rate coverage and crude oil prices are published every morning.
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