How many ounces of gold are stored at Fort Knox?

How to get close to this number

Take the global total and apply a share. This site's companion question puts all gold ever mined at a couple of hundred thousand tonnes; a single national reserve holding a few thousand tonnes is a low single-digit percentage of that, and converting tonnes to troy ounces multiplies by roughly thirty-two thousand.

The accounting detail in the explanation is the genuinely strange one: the holding is carried on the government's books at a fixed price set in 1973, wildly below market value. Public accounts frequently value assets at historic cost rather than market price, which means a balance sheet can understate a holding by an order of magnitude and still be correct by its own rules.

That gap matters politically because revaluing the holding at market price would create an enormous paper gain on the government's balance sheet without anything physical changing. Accounting conventions that sit unexamined for fifty years become, eventually, a policy lever — which is why the fixed price occasionally resurfaces in budget debates.