Central banks are buying gold like it's 2022 all over again

The world's central banks are loading up on gold at a pace not seen since the early post-Cold War era, and a new survey suggests the trend is nowhere near finished.

According to the @GOLDCOUNCIL's 2025 Central Bank Gold Reserves survey, a record 43% of central banks plan to increase their own gold holdings over the next 12 months, up from 29% in 2024. Notably, not a single respondent expected their holdings to fall. Zooming out, 95% of the 73 central banks surveyed expect global official gold reserves to keep rising, the most bullish reading in the survey's eight-year history.

The numbers behind the rush

The scale of recent buying is striking. Central banks have purchased more than 1,000 tonnes of gold in each of the past three years: roughly 1,136 tonnes in 2022, 1,037 tonnes in 2023, and 1,045 tonnes in 2024. That pace is more than double the 473-tonne annual average recorded between 2010 and 2021. In other words, institutions that once treated gold as a relic have quietly made it a cornerstone of modern reserve management.

Alongside the surge in buying, a growing share of central banks is choosing to keep gold closer to home. Domestic storage rose from 41% of respondents in 2024 to 59% in 2025, a signal that physical control of the metal matters as much as ownership itself.

Geopolitics is the real driver

The motivation is not hard to find. The 2022 decision by Western governments to freeze roughly $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves sent a clear warning to reserve managers worldwide: assets held inside someone else's financial system can be immobilised overnight. Gold, stored domestically, cannot. That lesson has since been reinforced by recurring Middle East tensions and broader anxieties about dollar dependency.

The World Gold Council's survey was conducted between February and May 2025, meaning many responses arrived after the latest flare-up in Middle East conflict, adding weight to the geopolitical reading of the data. Separately, 73% of respondents expect the US dollar's share of global reserves to shrink over the next five years, while 76% project gold's share of total reserves to rise over the same period.

For reserve managers, the calculus is straightforward: gold is liquid, politically neutral, and cannot be seized remotely. Until those fundamentals change, the buying is unlikely to stop.

Sources:
World Gold Council: Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025
Central Banks Bought 1,045 Tonnes of Gold in 2024, Third Year Above 1,000
Visual Capitalist: A Decade of Central Bank Gold Purchases