COMEX Gold Inventories Fell About 23 Percent Since January

How much gold is in COMEX vaults right now?

On January 8, 2026, COMEX-approved warehouses held 36.31 million ounces of gold. As of June 15, 2026, that figure is 27.94 million ounces. That is a fall of 8.37 million ounces, about 23 percent, in roughly five months. These are the official CME Group daily warehouse reports, the same receipts the exchange itself publishes. We just read them back.

The live per-metal tiles, with the eligible split and the deliverable share, sit on the COMEX inventory page, and the abnormality-ranked view is on the board.

Registered versus eligible: two buckets, not one

COMEX splits warehouse gold into two categories, and the difference is the whole story here.

• Registered is metal pledged to settle futures contracts, the bars carrying a warehouse receipt and ready to change hands on delivery. It went from 19.18 million ounces to 15.42 million, down about 20 percent.
• Eligible is metal stored in COMEX-approved vaults but not pledged to any contract, gold that meets exchange specs and is parked there for its owner. It went from 17.13 million ounces to 12.52 million, down about 27 percent, the faster-draining of the two.

The part most write-ups get backwards

The deliverable share, the slice of warehouse gold actually committed to settle contracts, is registered divided by the total. On January 8 that was 52.8 percent. On June 15 it was 55.2 percent. It rose. Not because more metal was pledged, but because the unpledged eligible pile walked out faster than the registered pile did. When the bottom of the bucket drains quicker than the top, the committed share of what remains goes up.

So the accurate read is narrow. The whole pile shrank about 23 percent, led by eligible outflow, and the readily-deliverable portion held up relatively better. The deliverable share sits near the high end of its range. That is not the same sentence as "registered is collapsing." Registered fell less than eligible, and by share it gained ground.

What a smaller pile does and does not mean

What the data flatly shows: there is less gold in COMEX warehouses than there was in January, and the unpledged buffer is the bucket that thinned most. The mechanism that follows is simple inventory arithmetic. A smaller pile means fewer ounces on hand if delivery demand rises, and a thinner eligible cushion means less metal that can be converted to registered quickly without new bars arriving. That is a tendency in how the plumbing works, not a prediction about price or a forecast of a squeeze.

The honest counter-read deserves equal weight. A rising deliverable share is a sign of health, not stress. More than half the remaining warehouse gold is committed and ready, a higher proportion than at the start of the year. This is a drawdown of total stock, not an imminent delivery failure, and nothing in the receipts says otherwise. Both things are true at once: the pile is smaller, and the committed share of it is firm.

What to watch

The tell is not a single day's headline number. It is whether the eligible pile keeps draining faster than registered, and whether the total stabilizes or keeps sliding from here. We publish the daily registered, eligible, and deliverable-share figures on the COMEX page, so the next print is always one click away. We report what the warehouse shows, nothing more.