A World Gold Council survey of 69 central banks shows crisis-proofing, not returns, is now the metal's chief selling point

Crisis-proofing tops the list

A record 90% of central banks now cite gold's performance during times of crisis as a key reason for holding it, making it the single most-cited factor in the 2026 survey.

Emerging markets lead the charge

Some 92% of emerging-market and developing-economy central banks point to crisis performance, against 81% in advanced economies, reflecting a wider gap in how exposed reserve managers feel to sanctions and market shocks.

Inflation and diversification still matter

Gold's role as a long-term store of value and inflation hedge was cited by 84% of respondents, while 83% highlighted its usefulness as a portfolio diversifier alongside bonds and foreign currency.

Geopolitics splits rich and poor countries

Some 85% of emerging-market central banks see gold as a geopolitical hedge, compared with just 56% of advanced-economy peers, a gap that has widened since sanctions on Russia's reserves in 2022.

No default risk, no counterparty

Gold carries no default risk and sits outside any government's balance sheet, a feature that keeps drawing central banks even though the metal pays no interest and costs money to store.

Central bankers are not known for sentimentality. Their reserves exist to be spent in emergencies, not admired. Yet a new survey by the World Gold Council (WGC), which polled 69 central banks in early 2026, reveals something close to an emotional consensus: gold's appeal lies less in what it earns than in what it survives. A record 90% of respondents named gold's performance during times of crisis as a relevant factor in their decision to hold the metal, the highest share since the WGC began asking the question. That figure eclipses more conventional arguments for holding gold, such as its use as an inflation hedge (84%) or a portfolio diversifier (83%), and it says a great deal about the anxious mood inside the world's reserve-management departments.

The chart below, drawn from the same survey, lays out the full menu of reasons central banks give for holding gold, ranked by the share who called each one "highly" or "somewhat" relevant. Crisis performance sits at the top, marginally ahead of gold's role as a store of value and inflation hedge, and just ahead of its function as a portfolio diversifier. Notably, the three most popular justifications all relate to defence rather than offence: protecting reserves against shocks, protecting purchasing power against inflation, and spreading risk across asset classes. Further down the list, more tactical considerations — gold's liquidity, its lack of political risk, its role as collateral — matter to a smaller, though still substantial, share of respondents.

Chart 6: How relevant are the following factors in your organisation's decision to hold gold? Source: YouGov, World Gold Council, 2026 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey.

A tale of two reserve managers

Pool all 69 respondents together and a reassuringly tidy story emerges. Look inside the numbers, though, and two rather different institutions come into view: the central bank of an advanced economy, comfortable in the dollar-based financial system it helped build, and the central bank of an emerging market, acutely aware that the same system can be turned against it. The gap is starkest on geopolitics. Some 85% of emerging-market and developing-economy (EMDE) central banks describe gold as a geopolitical-risk hedge, against just 56% of advanced-economy institutions. It is visible again on crisis performance: 92% of EMDE central banks cite it, compared with 81% of advanced-economy ones. Advanced economies are hardly indifferent to gold's virtues, but EMDE institutions treat almost every argument for holding it with greater urgency.

That divergence has an obvious proximate cause. When Western governments froze around $300bn of Russian central-bank reserves in 2022, they demonstrated, in the most vivid way possible, that a sovereign's claim on foreign-currency reserves is only as good as its issuer's willingness to honour it. Gold held in a central bank's own vault, or even in an allied jurisdiction, carries no such counterparty risk. It cannot be frozen by a decree in Washington or Brussels. For central banks in Beijing, New Delhi, Ankara or Riyadh, that is not an abstract concern; it is a live design constraint on how reserves are managed. For central banks in Ottawa, Tokyo or Frankfurt, the same event was alarming but less existential, since they sit on the side of the ledger doing the freezing rather than the side being frozen.

The return of an old habit

None of this is entirely new. Central banks have been net buyers of gold every year since 2010, reversing decades of net selling that ran from the late 1980s through the 2000s, when Western central banks in particular treated bullion as a costly relic. What has changed is the scale and the stated motive. Purchases have topped 1,000 tonnes a year in each of the past four years, roughly double the pace of the 2010s, according to WGC data, driven overwhelmingly by emerging-market institutions such as the People's Bank of China, the National Bank of Poland, the Reserve Bank of India and the Central Bank of Turkey. The WGC's survey work has tracked the reasoning shift alongside the volume shift: five years ago, central banks spoke mostly of diversification and long-term value. Now they speak of insurance.

Economists have a name for this kind of behaviour: precautionary demand. It is the same instinct that leads households to keep cash under the mattress after a banking panic, even at negative real interest rates. Gold pays no coupon and costs money to store and insure, so in a textbook portfolio-optimisation model it should be a marginal holding at best. But textbook models generally assume that all financial assets are exposed to the same kind of risk — market risk, which diversification within the financial system can address. They do not easily capture the risk that the financial system itself becomes the threat, whether through sanctions, expropriation or the sort of counterparty failure that turned a routine bank run into the 2008 financial crisis. Gold's defining property, in that world, is not its return but its independence from every other asset's plumbing.

Store of value, and something more

The survey's second-ranked reason, cited by 84% of central banks, is gold's role as a long-term store of value and inflation hedge. This is the argument most familiar to ordinary investors, and the one gold has made for itself over centuries rather than years. Unlike fiat currencies, gold cannot be conjured into existence by a printing press, and its supply grows by only around 1-2% a year through mining output. For a central bank sitting on reserves accumulated over decades, protecting real purchasing power against the slow erosion of inflation is a legitimate, unglamorous reason to hold an asset that has, on average, kept pace with or outpaced consumer prices over the long run, even if it has gone through painful multi-year stretches of underperformance along the way.

Close behind, 83% of respondents cited gold's effectiveness as a portfolio diversifier — the classic argument that an asset whose price is only weakly correlated with equities and bonds improves the risk-adjusted return of a reserve portfolio taken as a whole. This is the least emotionally charged of gold's selling points and the one most likely to survive a change in the geopolitical weather. It is also, not coincidentally, the argument favoured most heavily by advanced-economy central banks, who are somewhat less exercised by crisis performance and geopolitical hedging than their emerging-market counterparts, but broadly agree that a bit of gold smooths out a reserve portfolio's ride.

What the buying spree means for markets

For gold's price, official-sector demand of this magnitude has been a genuine structural support, arguably more important than the swings in speculative futures positioning or exchange-traded-fund flows that once dominated the metal's short-term moves. Central banks do not trade gold the way hedge funds do; they buy steadily, hold indefinitely and rarely sell, which removes a meaningful chunk of the free float from a market that is already fairly thin relative to its symbolic importance. Should even a modest share of the roughly $13trn held in global foreign-exchange reserves continue rotating toward gold, which still accounts for well under a fifth of many EMDE central banks' reserves, the metal's bid would remain well supported regardless of what happens to American interest rates or the dollar.

The more interesting question is what this buying pattern implies about the international monetary order more broadly. A world in which official reserve managers increasingly discount the safety of foreign-currency claims, and increasingly prize an asset that sits outside any national jurisdiction, is a world quietly hedging against the possibility that today's dollar-centred system will not always function the way it has since 1944. Few central bankers would put it in such stark terms, and the WGC survey itself found only 23% of respondents flagging "anticipated changes in the international monetary system" as a relevant factor — a reminder that most gold buying remains defensive rather than revolutionary. But taken together with the 90% who cite crisis performance and the 85% of EMDE institutions who cite geopolitical hedging, the survey paints a picture of reserve managers who no longer take the permanence of the current system for granted, whatever else they say in public.

An old asset for a new anxiety

Gold has survived the gold standard's collapse, the end of Bretton Woods, and decades of predictions of its irrelevance in a digital financial age. It now finds itself back at the centre of central-bank strategy for a reason that would not have surprised a 19th-century banker: when trust in institutions and counterparties wavers, an asset that answers to no one becomes valuable precisely because of that fact. The 2026 survey's headline number — a record 90% citing crisis performance — is not really a story about gold at all. It is a story about how many of the world's reserve managers now believe a crisis, of one sort or another, is coming.

The factors that barely register

It is worth dwelling on the bottom of the chart as well as the top, since the least popular reasons for holding gold are almost as revealing as the most popular ones. Only 20% of central banks cite domestic gold production as relevant to their reserve decisions, and a mere 4% point to concerns about sanctions specifically, even though sanctions risk plainly sits behind the much larger share citing geopolitical hedging in general. This suggests that reserve managers think in terms of broad categories of risk rather than particular political disputes; gold is bought to insure against a class of bad outcomes, not to send a signal about any one adversary. Similarly, only 23% cite anticipated changes to the international monetary system, and just 25% cite domestic citizens' perceptions of gold, suggesting that public sentiment and grand structural bets on a post-dollar order remain secondary to the more immediate calculus of resilience and diversification that dominates the top of the list.

Will the buying continue?

The WGC's survey also asked central banks about their intentions for the year ahead, and the answers were consistent with the reasoning laid out above: a large majority expect global central-bank gold reserves to keep rising over the next twelve months, and almost none expect them to fall. Central banks tend to move reserves the way large ships change course, slowly and with long lead times, so a sharp reversal would require an equally sharp change in the perceived risk environment — a durable thaw in great-power tensions, perhaps, or a period of such calm in financial markets that crisis-proofing drops down the list of priorities. Neither looks imminent. Trade disputes, sanctions regimes and doubts about fiscal sustainability in several large economies show few signs of resolving quickly, and each new episode of financial-market stress tends to reinforce, rather than undermine, the case for holding an asset that answers to no government.

For private investors, the lesson is not that gold is about to double, nor that it should form the core of a retirement portfolio. Central banks operate under different constraints and different objectives than households or fund managers, and their buying, however large in aggregate, unfolds over years rather than days. But the survey does offer a useful corrective to a common assumption: that gold's main audience is retail investors chasing inflation headlines or geopolitical drama. Increasingly, the metal's most important buyers are institutions whose job is to plan for the worst, and who have concluded, in ever larger numbers, that a bar of gold in the vault is still the simplest insurance policy money can buy.