Perth Mint August Shipments: What the Numbers Really Say

A September report about August activity

The Perth Mint’s September 4 update reports August shipments of 23,932 troy ounces of gold and 333,880 troy ounces of silver in minted products. Its July report recorded 30,871 and 486,043 troy ounces respectively. Both metals therefore moved lower month to month.

The reporting period is August 1–31, 2026. September 4 is the publication date, not the date all those products were sold or shipped.

Check the comparison before repeating the percentage

Subtract August from July and the reductions are 6,939 gold ounces and 152,163 silver ounces. Using July as the denominator gives declines of approximately 22.5% and 31.3%. These are our calculations from the two published totals, rounded to one decimal place.

For example: 152,163 ÷ 486,043 × 100 = 31.3%. Dividing by August instead answers a different question: how much larger July was than August. Keeping the earlier month as the base makes a month-to-month decrease reproducible.

These calculations compare metal volume with metal volume. They do not calculate revenue or the number of customers.

Read the boundaries of the measure

The Mint defines the gold and silver figures as worldwide shipments of minted products to wholesale and retail customers. It excludes cast bars and precious-metal sales for allocated or unallocated storage. That boundary matters: this is not a complete measure of every part of its business.

Because wholesale deliveries are included, the totals cannot be read as purchases by individual collectors alone. Nor does a shipment total from one producer establish what happened across the entire precious-metals market.

Ounces do not reveal the number of coins

Consider a fictional example, unrelated to the Mint’s actual product mix: twenty one-ounce coins and ten two-ounce coins each contain twenty ounces. The metal total is identical; the number of objects is not. Adding minted bars would make a coin-only interpretation less reliable still.

When someone turns a monthly ounce figure into a claim about how many coins collectors bought, ask for the missing product-level breakdown. Without it, the arithmetic cannot supply the answer. Keep this distinction in a collection notebook: metal volume belongs in one column, units of a particular issue in another.

Shipment totals are not mintage declarations

The Perth Mint’s separate collecting guide distinguishes a maximum mintage—the ceiling for an issue—from a declared mintage, finalized when production is closed. An issue limit concerns a particular presentation or packaging format. Those are issue-level concepts, unlike an aggregate monthly metal total.

For a specific coin, start with its exact year, metal, weight and finish. Then locate the relevant mintage record and check whether the number is a limit or a declaration. A monthly shipment decline does not tell you which design is scarce or how many examples remain available.

Use the news as context for better questions, not as a replacement for the record of the coin in front of you.

A quick collector check

Before sharing a sales headline or adding it to your research notes, make the underlying claim easy to audit. A useful entry should let another reader find the same source and repeat the same comparison.