How Much Money Can You Make Gold Panning? (Dollar Answer)

Many people dream about quitting their day job to take up a more free and rewarding occupation. Gold panning is indeed a popular option, and many newcomers have a go at it and try to make enough money to support themselves and their families. If you are one of those people aspiring to make money gold panning, be it as a side giggle or to achieve a full-time income, you are doing the right thing by asking yourself what amounts of money you can realistically make.

As a new gold panner, it would be realistic to expect to make an average of 0,5 – 1 gram of gold per day. If the gold spot price is $1800 per troy ounce, and you can sell your gold for 70% of spot value, you would make $630 to $1260 dollars per month.

An experienced miner could expect to make perhaps 2 grams per day on average, but it’s important to note that it’s an average and not a daily production number. Even the most experienced gold panners will have days when they find no gold whatsoever. In contrast, other days they might strike some really rich and well-paying pay streaks that drag up the average for months to come.

Let’s look closer at how much money you can make gold panning, and what you can do to increase your chances of actually

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Setting Realistic Expectations

Unfortunately, many new to gold panning have got a rather skewed perception of what amounts of money can be made gold panning. Many people believe you just have to head out to the nearest river or stream, start panning, and retrieve the gold in masses.

The truth is that gold panning is a rather laborious way of making money, and might not be worth it for many people.

However, most hobby prospectors who head out into rivers and creeks also do it for the fun of it, and to have an excuse to spend time outdoors. In addition, becoming part of a gold mining club is a really nice way of getting to know new people and becoming part of a community.

Several panners I know see prospecting as a recreational activity but still try to finance their outings with the gold they find. It keeps them motivated and turns it into a game, which makes the whole experience a little more fun.

You Can Still Make Money Gold Panning!

From the discussion above it might seem like gold panning for money is an activity doomed to fail. That’s certainly not the case.

There are individual gold panners who do make nice money. However, most of them either:

Focus on crevices: A gold pan is very limited with regards to the amount of gravel it can process. Therefore, some prospectors turn to clean out crevices in the bedrock where gold concentrations can be extremely high. I’ve heard about several gold panners who make some serious money using this method.
Use other equipment: Many panners use other gear to speed up their production rates. Again, the gold pan is just too slow to let you make significant money if you don’t happen to strike really rich deposits on a regular basis. We’ll look at such a tool in just a bit!

In addition, making several grams per day requires skill and knowledge about the geologic conditions of your area. You don’t need to be an expert, but you have to least understand the basics of how gold deposits in rivers, and some basic geology. This is covered in my guide to prospecting, as well as in my article explaining how to read rivers and streams.

How to Make More Money Gold Panning

Gold panning in a river with a sluice box

When wanting to make more money from gold panning, you are looking to find more gold and perhaps get a better price for it. Here are three solid tips that I hope will be valuable to you!

Buy a Sluice Box

Gold pans are great prospecting tools that are owned and used on a daily basis by virtually every gold miner. However, as a production tool, it won’t take you very far. For that purpose, a sluice box is a much better option.

A sluice box is a narrow plastic channel made of plastic or aluminum, equipped with riffles and/or mattings that capture everything from gold nuggets to fine gold. The device is submerged into the river so that water flows through the sluice, trapping the heavy gold while lighter materials pass right through.

Sluice boxes are lightweight, portable, and relatively cheap, and the fact that they let you process many times the streambed material compared to a gold pan makes them an ideal choice for most prospectors.

If you want to get one for yourself, do check out my guide to portable and light sluice boxes!

Research before heading out there

By researching a location thoroughly before heading out there, you will make sure that you’re as prepared as you can be, which in the end will result in more gold in the pan!

Now, the situation with regards to lands available to gold miners has changed a lot since the gold rushes of the 19th century. Many of the rivers that are known to yield good gold have been claimed up, meaning that new prospectors often will have to venture to less profitable locations where there are no active claims, or seek out more remote places that yet have not been fully explored.

In addition, most of the easy gold was taken by the old-timers. And although we have much better and more efficient equipment than before, the days of heading out into rivers retrieving gold in masses are mostly over. Not saying that it was always the case before! It was not!

In order to find good gold locations, you need to do your own research and get out there prospecting. Here are some good resources I recommend starting with:

Old Mining Town Newspapers: Once new gold finds became common knowledge, you can be sure that they had them featured in the local newspaper! Just be aware that many places have might have been nicknamed, which can make them quite hard to find at times.
Government and state reports: There are a lot of government reports from the USGS that contain loads of useful information about placer gold in states across the country. While they are perhaps not as detailed as the local and state government reports, they are excellent when it comes to getting a general idea about the gold production in a state.
MDRS Records: The MDRS is a database that’s maintained by the USGS, and contains various records of gold findings throughout the US. Some locations shared might not be available anywhere else, and with the GPS coordinates being included, finding the site is really easy!MDRS can be accessed here

Sell to the right person!

Finding the right buyer for your gold is essential to get a fair price. While a pawn shop might pay 40-50% of the gold spot price, a local dealer specialized in placer gold can pay up to 85%! That’s a massive difference right there!

If you have happened to find gold nuggets or other beautiful gold pieces, they can command en even higher price. The right buyer may very well pay several times the gold scrap value!

If you want to learn more about to whom you should market your gold, I recommend checking out my complete guide to selling placer gold.

Conclusion

Making a good living from gold panning is very hard, and few manage to find enough amounts of gold to be able of supporting them and their family. The easiest gold has already been recovered by the old-timers, which makes prospecting harder for those of us who want to give it a shot today!

However, with new tools such as metal detectors and sluice boxes, we can find the gold that the old-timers missed. Indeed, some people are still making a living mining for gold today, and it should be remembered that some rivers that were rather depleted of gold 100 years ago have now been replenished to some extent, as the river current continually brings more gold to those previously depleted spots.

If you want to learn more about prospecting and gold panning, I have several guides that I think will be of interest to you:

Happy prospecting!