How to buy gold in Europe: bars, vaulted gold or a gold ETC

To buy gold in Europe, pick one of three routes: buy gold bars or coins from a bullion dealer and store them yourself, buy vaulted gold that a custodian holds for you, or buy a gold ETC on a stock exchange through your broker. Investment gold is VAT-free across the EU, so the choice comes down to costs, what you actually own, and tax.

We checked the providers’ fee pages and the issuers’ own websites on 23 October 2026. Gold pays no interest or dividends, and its price goes down as well as up: only buy gold you can leave alone through a bad year.

Three ways to buy gold compared

The three routes differ most in what you own and who you depend on. Physical gold at home is yours outright but has to be stored and insured; vaulted gold is stored for you; a gold ETC is the cheapest to trade but is a security, not metal.

How to buy gold bullion bars and coins to keep at home

To buy gold bullion bars or gold coins for home, you pay a bullion dealer its selling price, which sits above the spot price, and later sell gold back at the dealer’s lower buy-back price. That gap is your round-trip cost, and it is usually larger on small coins and bars than on larger bars.

The premium over the spot price

We don’t quote dealer premiums, because we haven’t verified any. Before you buy gold bars online or in a shop, ask the bullion dealer for its selling price and its buy-back price for the same bar on the same day, and compare both with the spot price. Bars come in various sizes, so compare the price per gram, not per bar. Then check:

• Purity: bars of at least 99.5% pure gold and qualifying gold coins of at least 90% are VAT-free investment gold.
• Bar details: the refiner, weight and fineness should be stated for every bar.

Fully insured delivery and secure storage

Ask whether the parcel is fully insured until you sign for it, and plan secure storage before it arrives. Gold at home carries theft risk and may not be fully insured. A bank safe deposit box costs fees and often needs extra insurance.

This route suits you if you want metal you can hold. It’s the least practical one for small monthly amounts.

Vaulted gold: gold bullion stored for you

Vaulted gold is physical gold bullion that a professional custodian stores and insures for you. What matters most is whether it is allocated: in an allocated account specific bars, listed by number, weight and fineness, are held for you; in an unallocated account you only have a claim on the provider.

BullionVault: allocated gold you own outright

BullionVault is a UK company (Galmarley Ltd) where you buy gold online, from 1 gram, and own it outright as a bailment under English law. It reports over 130,000 active customers in over 175 countries (company figures). It commits not to lend or pledge your metal, keeps it off its balance sheet, and says a liquidator would return it in full if the company failed. You choose the vault: Zurich, London, New York, Toronto or Singapore. Your holding is a quantity of metal in that vault, not one specific bar, unless you reserve bars for a one-off 0.1% fee and a higher storage rate. In Zurich, gold is held as London Good Delivery bars of 400 oz. A register of owners is published daily and reconciled with the vault operators’ bar lists, and BullionVault has been a member of the London Bullion Market Association since 1 September 2008.

You fund the account by bank transfer from one account in your name; it accepts four major currencies (USD, EUR, GBP and JPY), and euros arrive by SEPA. Costs: 0.50% commission to buy or sell (until you’ve traded $75,000 in 12 months), and storage of 0.12% a year including insurance, with a minimum of $4 a month. A SEPA withdrawal costs €5. You can take delivery of gold bars or accepted coins from 50 g, for 2.5% on whole 400 oz bars or 7.5% on other amounts, plus transport and insurance.

The catch: BullionVault is not regulated by the FCA, because physical bullion trading falls outside financial services regulation. There is no investor compensation scheme for bullion; its own compensation fund is capped at $4 million.

Bitpanda Metals: gold tokens in an app

Bitpanda sells gold, silver, platinum and palladium as tokens of 1 gram each, physically backed and stored by Brink’s in Switzerland. You can pay by SEPA bank transfer for free. Gold costs 0.5% to buy and 1% to sell, with no storage fee. Bitpanda’s metals page says you legally own the underlying metal, as a specific share of real gold, but also calls Bitpanda Metals an unregulated product with counterparty risk from third-party custodians. Austrian investor compensation covers Bitpanda’s securities, not metals, and we found no description of physical delivery.

Gold ETC: buy gold through your broker

A gold ETC (exchange-traded commodity) is a security that tracks the gold price and trades on a stock exchange like a share, so you buy it in a normal broker account. Legally it is a debt security: even when it is backed by physical gold you carry issuer risk, and the prospectus states whether you can ask for physical delivery.

Take Xetra-Gold, one of the gold ETCs you can buy at DEGIRO. Its issuer, Deutsche Börse Commodities, says Xetra-Gold is legally a bearer bond, always 100% backed by gold, with about 95% held physically at Clearstream and the rest as delivery claims on Umicore. Each unit gives you the right to delivery of one gram of gold; you pay for making the bars, packaging, transport and insurance. There is no management fee; a custody fee of 0.025% a month (0.3% a year plus VAT) applies through your bank instead.

What you pay at the broker:

• DEGIRO (available in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium): €1 handling fee per order for ETCs in its core selection on Tradegate; elsewhere €2 plus €1, and a €2.50 connectivity fee per exchange per year (not on Euronext Amsterdam or Brussels). For Xetra-Gold, DEGIRO charges custody of 0.025% a month plus VAT.
• Bitpanda: real ETCs since 29 January 2026 at €1 per trade, though we couldn’t confirm in which countries.
• Other gold ETCs charge a yearly fee (TER) instead of custody. Check it on the issuer’s factsheet before you buy.

Compare brokers in our guide to online brokers in Europe, or read the DEGIRO review.

Ownership and counterparty risk

Who you depend on decides what happens if something goes wrong:

• At home: only yourself, your safe and your insurer.
• BullionVault: the gold is your property, but you depend on the vault operators and on the register being right.
• Bitpanda Metals: Bitpanda and its third-party custodians, in a product it calls unregulated.
• A gold ETC: the issuer. Investor compensation can cover securities your broker fails to return, never a loss at the issuer or a fall in the gold price.

What gold costs: €1,000 and €10,000 for a year

For a year, a gold ETC was the cheapest route in our example: €11.50 on €1,000 and €38.50 on €10,000, plus VAT on the custody fee. BullionVault’s $4 monthly storage minimum makes it the most expensive route at €1,000; at €10,000 it costs about the same as Bitpanda.

We assume you buy once, hold for 12 months and sell once at an unchanged gold price. Spreads aren’t included because they aren’t published as fixed numbers. We converted BullionVault’s dollar minimum at the ECB reference rate of $1.1205 per euro (22 October 2026), so $48 a year is €42.84.

How the sums work:

• Xetra-Gold at DEGIRO: €3 to buy (€2 plus €1), €2.50 connectivity for Xetra, custody of 12 × 0.025% = 0.30%, so €3 on €1,000 or €30 on €10,000, plus VAT, and €3 to sell. Total €11.50 or €38.50.
• BullionVault: 0.50% to buy (€5 or €50). Storage at 0.12% would be €1.20 or €12, but the $4 monthly minimum applies below about $40,000, so you pay $48 (€42.84). Then 0.50% to sell (€5 or €50) and €5 to withdraw by SEPA. Total €57.84 or €147.84.
• Bitpanda Metals: 0.5% to buy (€5 or €50), no storage, 1% to sell (€10 or €100). Total €15 or €150.

As a share of your money, that’s about 1.2% (ETC), 1.5% (Bitpanda) and 5.8% (BullionVault) on €1,000, and about 0.4%, 1.5% and 1.5% on €10,000. Hold longer and it changes: Bitpanda charges only at buy and sell, while custody and storage repeat every year. From roughly $40,000, BullionVault’s storage is simply 0.12% a year.

Gold and silver: what about other precious metals?

Silver, platinum and palladium are precious metals too, but they work differently from gold for EU buyers. Silver bars and silver coins are not investment gold, so the VAT exemption doesn’t cover them.

At BullionVault, storage for silver, platinum and palladium costs 0.48% a year (minimum $8 a month), four times the gold rate, and those metals attract VAT when you withdraw them from the vault. In Zurich, silver bullion is held as 1,000 oz London Good Delivery bars. For EU buyers, gold is the simpler metal to hold: it is VAT-free, and at BullionVault it costs a quarter of the silver storage rate.

Investment gold and VAT in the EU

Investment gold is exempt from VAT across the EU, whether you live in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany or Belgium. That covers bars or wafers of at least 99.5% purity, and gold coins of at least 90% purity, minted after 1800, that are or were legal tender and sell for at most 80% above the value of their gold. The legal basis is the special scheme for investment gold in the EU VAT Directive (Council Directive 2006/112/EC, Articles 344–356).

The European Commission publishes each December the list of coins that qualify for the following year, so check a coin against that list before you buy. At BullionVault, gold carries no VAT on purchase, sale or withdrawal, and Bitpanda states there is no VAT on its metal purchases.

Tax on gold in the Netherlands and Germany

Tax depends on where you live, and on whether you hold physical gold or a security. Here is what we’ve verified for the Netherlands and Germany.

Netherlands: gold in box 3

In the Netherlands, gold counts towards box 3. Investment gold coins fall under “overige bezittingen” (other assets), valued at their metal or numismatic value, not their face value. For 2026, box 3 taxes a fixed notional return of 6.00% on investments and other assets held on 1 January, at 36%, after a tax-free allowance of €59,357 per person.

Worked example: if your box 3 assets are already above the allowance and all count as investments or other assets, €1,000 of gold adds €60 of notional return and €21.60 in tax for 2026. €10,000 adds €600 of notional return and €216 in tax. If your actual return was lower than the notional one, you can report the actual figure and be taxed on that instead.

Germany: tax-free after 12 months

In Germany, gains on physical gold are currently tax-free if you hold it for more than 12 months, under the private sale rules. Sell sooner and the gain can be taxable.

Our data covers physical gold only. Gold ETCs and vaulted gold can be treated differently depending on how the product is set up, so check the product documents or ask a Steuerberater before you rely on the 12-month rule.

Ireland and Belgium

We haven’t covered Irish or Belgian tax on gold yet. If you live in Ireland, check Revenue’s guidance or ask a tax adviser before you buy gold.

Is gold a good investment for you?

Some investors hold gold to spread risk in a portfolio, but it is not a savings account. It pays no interest or dividends, its price can fall as well as rise, and costs eat more of a small purchase. Compensation schemes never cover a fall in the gold price.

To buy a little every month, BullionVault’s Auto-Invest buys gold at the daily price with each deposit, for example from a monthly standing order; selling is blocked while it is on. Read more about buying in regular amounts, diversification and the spread you pay on every trade.

Gold buying checklist