10/21/2026
When a mining company talks about “grade,” they mean how much gold is in the rock, usually measured in grams per tonne. One tonne of rock, and how many grams of gold it holds.
The numbers are smaller than people expect. Gold is rare enough that even a handful of grams per tonne can be meaningful, and much of the gold mined today comes from rock measured in low single digits. “High grade” and “low grade” don’t describe good rock versus bad rock. They describe concentration, and what counts as workable depends on the deposit, the depth, and the cost of getting it out.
So when you see a grade quoted, the number alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Context does: how the sample was taken, how much rock carries that grade, and how it sits in the ground.
If you follow exploration, grade is one of the first words worth really understanding. It’s the vocabulary everything else is built on.