How this site's figures are produced

Every dirham figure on this site starts from the suggested retail gold jewellery price published by Dubai Jewellery Group, the trade body established in 1996 under Dubai Economy & Tourism. The London metal price is never taken from the same page.

Why a weight, not a gram, is the honest unit for this market

Dubai sells gold by weight, and a gram is only one of the weights on the ticket. The tola, three-eighths of a troy ounce, is still quoted beside it, and a buyer who compares prices in grams alone misses the unit that many counters still lead with. A price per gram is useful for small pieces, but a tola is the traditional unit for larger purchases, and the difference between the two is not a rounding error. This site shows both, and the troy ounce as well, because a weight is the only unit that means the same thing at every counter.

A percentage, by contrast, is the wrong tool here. The same percentage is a different sum of money on a gram and on a tola, and a buyer who thinks in percentages mistakes the size of the gap they are paying. What matters is the money: what a given weight costs at the counter, what the metal inside it is worth at the London price, and the gap between the two in dirhams. This site's tables are built around those weights, not around a percentage, because a percentage tells a buyer almost nothing in a market that quotes by weight.

How a suggested retail price differs from what a till prints

The Dubai Jewellery Group publishes a suggested retail price per gram, not a till total. Each shop adds its own making charge on top of that price, and the group's own pages describe that charge in words without publishing a rate. The result is that two shops on the same street can quote the same suggested price and still print different totals for the same piece, because the making charge is set by the shop, not by the group. A buyer who walks in expecting the published price is therefore paying more than the metal is worth, and the difference is the shop's own margin.

This site does not estimate that margin, because it is published nowhere. The suggested retail price is the only figure the trade body makes public, and it is the starting point for every dirham figure on this site. Weights are multiplied from that price: five grams, ten grams, one tola of 11.6638 grams, and one troy ounce of 31.1035 grams. The karat ladders are read from the page by container, never by position, so a reordered page fails loudly instead of quietly swapping two karats.

Where the London figure comes from and why it is never taken from the same page

The London metal price is taken from two sources, independent of each other and of the Dubai Jewellery Group page. A gold price in dollars an ounce comes from one source, and the dirham rate from another. The dirham's rate against the dollar is checked against its institutional peg on every run, and a rate that has wandered off the peg is treated as a broken source rather than as news. That peg is a fact of the UAE's monetary system, and a source that ignores it is not a source worth reading.

The London figure is never taken from the same page as the Dubai suggested retail price, because the two must be independent for the gap between them to mean anything. If both came from the same place, a single error would move both numbers and the gap would lie. By taking them from two sources, this site can show when the counter price is high relative to the metal, and that gap is the cost of buying gold in Dubai rather than in London.

The sums this desk refuses to estimate

Making charges, a shop's own margin and what a counter pays on buy-back are published nowhere and are not estimated here. A reading whose counter price sits outside a band of zero to fifteen per cent above the London metal is refused, and nothing is written that run. A reading is also refused if the karat ladder does not fall with purity, or if any karat prices out below the metal inside it. Those checks are not about accuracy; they are about not printing a number that cannot be true.

The source page carries a date dropdown whose endpoint returns today's figures for every date requested. It is therefore never used, and any series shown here is accumulated from our own dated readings. That means this site does not show a historical series from the group's own page, because that page cannot be trusted to return the right date. The desk's job is to refuse sums it cannot verify, and to say so plainly when it does.