Making charges, explained without the sales pitch

Metal value is easy: weight times rate. Anyone can check it. Making charges are where the real variation hides, and where most of the confusion lives.

What it actually pays for

Making charges pay for turning a lump of gold into a thing you'd wear: the goldsmith's hours, the wastage that vanishes as dust and filings, the tooling, the polishing, the setting of every stone. It is labour, not metal.

Why it varies so much

A plain band might carry 8–10%. A hand-raised temple necklace can reach 20–25%, and that is not a markup — it is four hundred hours of bench work that cannot be automated. A cast, mass-produced pendant sits at the bottom because a mould did most of the job.

The rule of thumb: the more a human touched it, the higher the charge, and the more defensible it is.

Percentage or flat?

Charging a percentage of metal value means the labour bill rises when gold rises, which makes no sense — the goldsmith's hours didn't change. Some houses charge flat per gram for exactly this reason. We use a percentage and show it plainly, so you can do the arithmetic yourself rather than take our word for it.

The number that matters

Two showrooms quoting "12% making" on the same design can still hand you different totals, because one is quoting on gross weight (including stones) and the other on net metal weight. Ask which. It is the single most useful question you can ask in a jewellery shop.

Every product page here shows the metal value, the making charge, the stone charge and the GST as separate lines that add up to the total. If a breakup doesn't add up, walk out.