Gold or silver: which nisab applies to you?
Rulings · 21 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
Gold or silver: which nisab applies to you?
Two thresholds, both classical, and today they are nowhere near each other. Choosing between them is the single setting that most often decides whether you owe anything at all.
The nisab is the floor beneath which no zakat is due. It was fixed in metal, not in currency: 85 grams of gold, or 595 grams of silver. In the period the rulings come from, the two were worth roughly the same. They have not been for a long time.
Priced today, the silver threshold is a fraction of the gold one. Which you pick decides whether a modest portfolio is above the line or below it — and for most crypto holders, that is the whole question.
The case for silver
The lower threshold captures more people, which means more zakat reaches those entitled to it. Scholars who favour it argue the point of the nisab is to identify surplus wealth, and the silver figure tracks the modest surplus the ruling was describing better than gold now does.
The case for gold
Gold has held its purchasing power far more steadily. On this view the silver threshold no longer marks meaningful surplus at all — it would oblige people who are, in any practical sense, not wealthy. Gold keeps the threshold where the ruling intended it.
Pick one and stay with it
The failure mode is not choosing wrong. It is choosing gold in a strong year and silver in a weak one, which is not a position — it is arithmetic in your own favour. Settle the question once, ideally with someone qualified who knows your circumstances, and hold it across years.