De Nederlandsche Bank announced on Wednesday 2 September that it had moved 86 tonnes of gold from New York and Ottawa to London between March and August. The headlines followed fast, but one of them is wrong: the Netherlands has not taken all of its gold out of the United States. Almost a fifth of the reserve still sits in New York. What did happen is a redistribution, and the reasons behind it are more interesting than the image of a country hauling its gold home in a panic.
What actually moved
Total Dutch gold holdings stood at 612.4 tonnes at the end of 2025, worth 72.2 billion euros. They are spread across four sites: the vault of De Nederlandsche Bank in Zeist, the Bank of England in London, the Federal Reserve in New York and the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. Moving 86 tonnes changed that split as follows:
| Storage location | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| London | 18.1 percent | 32.1 percent |
| Zeist | 30.8 percent | 30.8 percent |
| New York | 31.3 percent | 18.5 percent |
| Ottawa | 19.7 percent | 18.5 percent |
London has thereby become the largest single home of Dutch gold, with Zeist in second place. The share held in North America fell from well over half to roughly 37 percent.
The method is striking. Almost 59 tonnes were simply sold in New York, after which an equivalent quantity of gold meeting the London market standard was bought in London. The remainder, more than 27 tonnes, was physically shipped to Zeist, while an equal quantity of bars that do meet the market standard travelled from Zeist to London. Nothing had to be melted down that way, and the risk of one large physical shipment was spread out.
The reason De Nederlandsche Bank gives itself
In its press release the bank points first to world politics and to its own state of readiness.
Vanwege de toenemende geopolitieke onrust werkt DNB aan het versterken van haar crisisparaatheid. Het verbeteren van de verhandelbaarheid van het Nederlandse goud, en daarmee hoe snel het goud ingezet kan worden in crisissituaties, is hier onderdeel van.
That is the heart of it. For a central bank, a gold reserve is an insurance policy that is only worth something if it can actually be used in an emergency. London is the largest trading centre for physical gold in the world, with fixed standards for the weight and purity of bars and every major counterparty within walking distance of the vault. Gold held there can be sold or lent out within a day. Gold in New York and Ottawa cannot move nearly as fast. Olaf Sleijpen, president of De Nederlandsche Bank, described it as an improvement in how readily the reserve can be deployed, adding that the bank assumes the gold will never have to be used.
Three further causes at play
Spreading concentration risk. Before the move, more than half of Dutch gold sat at two sites in North America. That is a lot for holdings meant to be the ultimate safety net. After the operation no single location holds more than a third of the total. It is the same logic the bank already applied in 2014, when it quietly had 122.5 tonnes shipped from New York to Amsterdam.
The precedent of frozen reserves. Ever since Western countries blocked the assets of the Russian central bank in 2022, every reserve manager knows that holdings abroad can in theory be rendered unusable. Physical gold in your own vault or on a neutral trading centre is a different matter from a balance in an account. DNB does not mention Russia, but the phrase growing geopolitical unrest leaves little to the imagination.
A shift that has been under way for years. The Netherlands is not the first country to reorganise its gold. Germany’s Bundesbank pulled 674 tonnes out of New York and Paris between 2013 and 2017. On top of that, central banks worldwide have been net buyers of gold since 2022, which we described earlier when central banks kept on buying. The difference is that the Netherlands bought nothing extra: the same reserve is simply spread differently.
And where is Belgium’s gold?
That question comes up here immediately after news like this. Belgium holds 227.4 tonnes of gold, managed by the National Bank of Belgium. The largest share sits at the Bank of England in London, a smaller share at the Bank of Canada, a limited quantity at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel and a very small quantity in Brussels itself. The exact split across those institutions is confidential. Finance Minister Jan Jambon confirmed as much on 26 August in an answer to parliament.
Belgium is therefore already in the position the Netherlands is now working towards, with the bulk of its reserve on the London trading centre. The historical reason is well known: shortly before the Second World War, Belgium moved a large share of its gold to England, for fear of what might happen on its own soil.
What this means if you want to sell old gold
On today’s price, a move like this has no effect at all. Not a gram of gold disappears from the world and not a gram is added. Anyone who wants a price for their jewellery or coins therefore still looks at the international gold price of the moment.
What the story does illustrate nicely is how much the standard of the metal counts, right up to the highest level. De Nederlandsche Bank went as far as selling bars and buying others, purely to hold gold that meets the London market standard. That same distinction runs all the way down to your own items. A certified investment bar or coin has a fixed, verifiable purity, while a box of old jewellery has to be weighed and tested first. Why those two categories are settled differently is explained on the page about investment gold and scrap gold.
The Netherlands did not pull gold out of the US because it would lose value there, but so it could be sold faster if that ever became necessary. For your own sale the same logic applies on a smaller scale: the price on the day, the weight and the actual purity determine the settlement, not the day's news.
For the gold market itself, then, this is not a price story but a story about trust. Central banks are once again treating gold as an asset that has to work in a crisis, rather than a relic in a cellar. If you want to know what your own items are worth today, the route is the same as ever: have them weighed and tested, and only then compare. How that works in practice is set out step by step on the page about selling old gold.