Things to know about Making and Wastage Charges of Gold Jewellery

While buying any gold jewellery you look at the beautiful designs and how wonderful they would look on you when you wear them. You end up purchasing the ones that win your heart with their intricate motifs or subtle style and also fit your budget with their prices. However, most of us need to be aware of the journey that pure gold goes through to become that particular piece of our favourite design. It is a long process of various efforts made by the jewellers to present that astonishing fine piece of gold in front of us. And before buying any piece of gold jewellery, you must know about the various factors influencing your prices.

The Process of Applying Making Charges:

Whenever you buy gold in any form of jewellery, you don’t just pay for the design crafted by the jeweller or the weight of your gold piece. The price you invest in also includes the gold purity, effort, and artistry of the craftsmen that shaped, polished, cut, and moulded that gold into the design you get. The final price is calculated in the following way:

Price of jewellery = gold rate per gram of a particular purity of gold x weight of gold in jewellery + making charge per gram + GST. 

All of these, along with GST (on Jewellery plus making charge), determine the final price of a gold jewellery piece which may often vary from jeweller to jeweller. However, the gold rate per gram remains the same in a city and is often similar throughout the country. You can check the live gold rate in India online and check the current gold price whenever you want. 

What are Making Charges in Jewellery?

Making charge is the cost of the process involved in producing and designing any piece of gold jewellery that you buy. Simply put, it costs to change raw gold into fine jewellery. Also, gold purity plays an important part in making charges. If the gold is stronger and more durable, it can be moulded into fine jewellery by craftsmen. Certainly, if the design is more intricate, more time and artistry will be invested into its making, so the making charge for it may also vary accordingly. It is always recommended to buy gold with the BIS hallmark, which certifies its purity. Making charge is usually expressed in Rupees per gram of gold.

Making charges can make a real difference in the price of your gold jewellery no matter where you buy it. It may vary from one piece of jewellery to other and from one jeweller to another. Jewellers use different ways of computing these charges. Some jewellers make charges at a fixed rate per gram of gold, while other charges are based on a percentage of the total jewellery weight. For mass-market machine-made jewellery like simple gold chains, the making charges usually range from 3% to 25%. For pure gold coins, the making charges are negligible or much less than gold jewellery.

While in the case of intricate designs requiring skilled craftsmanship, like wedding jewellery, these charges could go up to almost 25%. Studded jewellery pieces usually involve very intricate work, and thus they incur higher making charges than plain gold jewellery. However, you can find various online platforms that give you discounts on making charges.

What are Wastage Charges in Jewellery?

Crafting gold jewellery pieces requires melting, cutting, and shaping them which leads to some possible amount of wastage as the perfect pieces are joined together to form a single piece of well-designed jewellery. Traditional jewellers always keep a margin for the amount of gold wastage usually charged to customers at a percentage included in the final price. This concept originated because jewellers used their hands in the old times resulting in a certain amount of gold wastage. Even modern machine-made jewellery has a wastage charge component. 

Pieces embellished with stones cause a little more wastage than plainer gold jewellery. Hence, the charges will differ accordingly and can range between 5-7%. However, modern methods and technology are generally more efficient in using gold in jewellery production, minimizing the wastage that occurs while crafting designer pieces.

So whether you buy gold jewellery online or offline, it is important to keep these things mentioned above in mind to make your purchase safe and reliable.