Costco Puts Purchase Limit on Gold Bars as Demand Surges

Costco, the nation's largest warehouse club chain, recently added a purchasing limit on an increasingly popular item and one of the club's hottest commodities in recent years - 24-karat gold bars.

The warehouse retailer began selling gold bars to its members back in June of 2023, with an original limit of 2 one-ounce gold bars per person. However, Costco recently tightened its purchase restrictions on the precious metal to 1 bar per member transaction, with a maximum of 2 bars per 24 hours, according to the Costco website. 

Limiting customers to a single one-ounce gold bar might not sound like much of a decrease from the 2-bar limit members were used to, but according to Business Insider, just last year members were able to bring home up to 5 gold bars from a warehouse in Wisconsin at one point, so the decrease is more substantial than it might appear to some members. 

The price tag for the 1-ounce South African-made gold bar currently runs as high as $3,279.99, which is significantly higher than the $2,000 the bars were going for shortly after Costco began selling them in 2023. However, that price increase makes sense considering gold prices have risen more than 70% over that time – hitting record highs in April, according to USA Today. 

Demand for the gold bars has been soaring over the last year, which may have prompted Costco's decision to adjust the purchasing limit. A survey from Bloomberg last year revealed that approximately 77% of Costco locations across 46 states sold out of gold bars within a week in October 2024. 

"When we load them on the site, they’re typically gone within a few hours, and we limit two per member,” Costco's then-chief financial officer Richard Galanti told analysts during the company's earnings call in September 2023, according to a transcript from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Earlier that same year, Wells Fargo Equity Research estimated that Costco was making as much as $100-$200 million per month in revenue from the sales of its gold bars alone, according to CNBC.

“Our work suggests there has been significant interest given COST’s aggressive pricing and high level of customer trust,” Edward Kelly, an equity analyst at Wells Fargo said in 2024. “The accelerating frequency of Reddit posts, quick on-line sell-outs of product, and COST’s robust monthly eComm sales suggests a sharp uptick in momentum since the launch.”

Costco’s bars are available in PAMP Suisse Lady Fortuna Veriscan and the Rand Refinery’s South African bullion, according to the retail site.