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COMEX Silver Inventory

By the Silver Market Chart editorial team · Updated November 10, 2026

Quick answer: COMEX silver inventory is the silver held in the exchange's approved depositories, split into two categories. Registered silver carries a warrant and can be delivered against a futures contract; eligible silver meets the exchange's standard but has no warrant. Each depository reports both figures to the exchange every day, and the exchange publishes them daily on its website. The source is CME Group's daily metal stocks report. We don't republish it, because CME's site does not answer automated reading, so every inventory figure on this page is a dated number reported by someone else and labelled with its publisher. The most recent one we could read: Money Metals, writing on FXStreet, put total COMEX silver at 332.6 million ounces on September 25, 2026.

Silver $51.66 per troy ounce · gold $4,033.80 · as of · spot quotes from gold-api.com

The price above is live; the vault figures below are not. Inventory and price are often discussed in the same headline, yet they are measured by different people on different clocks. For the price on its own, with ranges back to 1900, use the silver market price chart.

Registered vs eligible, in the exchange's own words

The definitions here come from the exchange's 2021 rule text: a COMEX filing from February 2021, published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It is the most recent version we could read, so treat the wording as dated.

Eligible silver is metal "acceptable for delivery against the Silver Futures contract ... for which a warrant has not been issued". In other words, it meets the contract's standard and sits in an approved vault, but nobody has turned it into a deliverable title.

Registered silver is "eligible silver for which a warrant has been issued". A warrant is a document of title created through the exchange's electronic system, as a 2026 guide from metalcharts.org describes it; COMEX's own rulebook chapter on warrants could not be read. Registered metal is what can change hands when a futures contract goes to delivery.

Total is the two added together. Because the categories don't overlap, a change in one does not have to show up in the total.

What counts as acceptable is set in the contract rules. In the 2021 rule text, one COMEX silver contract calls for 5,000 troy ounces, with a 10% weight tolerance either way, delivered as five bars of about 1,000 ounces each, assaying at least 999 fine and from an exchange-approved brand. The same filing listed ten approved silver depositories at the time, from Brinks to Scotia Mocatta; that list may have changed since.

Dated figures from 2025 and 2026

Every row below is secondary: a publisher's report of CME data on the date shown. Where a column is blank, the report did not give that figure.

Date of figuresRegisteredEligibleTotalReported by
Oct 23, 2025 (as quoted)not givennot givenabout 501 million oz, down from 530 millionKitco News, quoting Keith Gottlieb (secondary)
Feb 11, 202698,138,005 oz after a one-day cut of 3,256,882 oznot givennot givenCoinWeek, 2026-02-13 (secondary)
Feb 11, 2026same cut of 3,256,882 ozmore than 4.7 million oz withdrawnnot givenKitco News, 2026-02-12 (secondary)
Sep 10, 2026not givennot given337.2 million ozMoney Metals on FXStreet, 2026-09-21 (secondary)
Sep 17, 202697.3 million oz, up 1.4 million232.8 million oz, down about 8.6 million330.1 million ozMoney Metals on FXStreet, 2026-09-21 and 2026-09-24 (secondary)
Sep 25, 2026down 1 million on the weekup 3.5 million on the week332.6 million ozMoney Metals on FXStreet, 2026-10-01 (secondary)

These figures are a few months old by now. For today's numbers, open CME Group's daily metal stocks report itself and read the registered, eligible and total lines for silver.

What a drawdown does and doesn't signal

"Inventory is falling" can mean three different things, and only one of them involves metal leaving a vault.

Total falls. Metal has been withdrawn from the approved depositories. It may have been shipped elsewhere, sold into another market or simply moved to a vault outside the exchange system. A falling total says the metal left the system; it does not say where it went or who now holds it.

Registered falls while total holds. A warrant has been cancelled and the bars moved back to eligible. Nothing physical needs to happen; the silver can stay on the same shelf. The September 17 figures show the opposite move: registered rose by 1.4 million ounces in the same week that the total fell from 337.2 million to 330.1 million, because the outflow came from eligible metal.

Deliveries. When a futures contract is settled by delivery, a warrant passes from seller to buyer. The ounces can sit still while ownership changes, so a busy delivery month does not by itself shrink the figures.

There is also the question of what eligible metal is available for. In its 2021 filing, COMEX said it discounted 50% of reported eligible silver when estimating deliverable supply. So even the exchange did not treat every eligible ounce as metal ready to settle contracts.

What none of these numbers tells you is the direction of the price. Vault figures describe where metal sits and in what legal form; they are one input among many, which our page on why the silver price is dropping makes plain: inventory headlines ran all through a year in which the price fell 57.5% from its record.

Reading the 2026 headlines carefully

In February, reports said registered silver had dropped below 100 million ounces, to 98,138,005. The figure is precise, but the headline round number hides how the change happened: a single-day "negative adjustment" of 3,256,882 ounces in the registered category, as Kitco described it. An adjustment between categories is not the same event as a truck leaving a vault.

In September, Money Metals reported that total silver fell from 337.2 million to 330.1 million ounces between September 10 and September 17. A week later the total was back up to 332.6 million. A swing of a few million ounces in a stock of more than 330 million is worth noting, but it is easy to overstate when a headline counts only the ounces and never the total.

Three habits help. Check the date of the data, not the date of the article. Check which category moved. And check whether a later report reversed the move before drawing a line through two points.

Exchange margins in 2026 (secondary)

Margins are not inventory, but they shape who holds contracts that might go to delivery. CME's own clearing notices could not be read, so these rows are what news outlets reported.

DateWhat was reportedSource
2026-01-13CME sets precious-metal margins as a share of contract value; silver at 9%, or 9.9% for higher-risk accountsFinance Magnates (secondary)
2026-02-02Silver margins rise to 15% from 11%, and to 16.5% from 12.1% for heightened-risk accountsSMM (secondary)
2026-02-06COMEX 5000 silver margins rise to 18% from 15%Reuters via Kitco (secondary)

The step from 9% to 11% is not documented on any page we could read. When margins go up, anyone holding a contract has to add cash or reduce the position. Speaking to Anadolu, one analyst said margin calls and higher liquidity requirements amplified the February decline.

How COMEX fits with London and Shanghai

COMEX vaults are one pool among several. In 2025, US tariff uncertainty pulled physical silver from London to the US, according to ING, cutting London stocks. By October 2025 the flow had turned: Kitco quoted a market participant saying COMEX stocks had fallen to about 501 million ounces as metal shipped back to London. The Silver Institute estimated London's free float at 136 million ounces at the end of September 2025 and identifiable bullion inventories in London vaults and on exchanges at 1,394.5 million ounces at the end of 2025.

Asia is the third pool. The Shanghai silver price was +14.8% against the matching US futures close on November 9, 2026, a gap that partly reflects how hard it is to move metal between markets. Whether all these stocks add up to a genuine shortfall is the question behind our page on the silver shortage, which sets the Silver Institute's deficit figures beside the stocks that cover them.

Two more links help with the jargon. The contract the vaults serve trades under the code SI, one of the silver ticker symbols you will see on quote screens. And because a quote for that contract and a spot quote are two different numbers, it helps to know how they relate: see spot vs futures price. For an older case where deliverable metal and exchange rules sat at the centre of the story, read about the Hunt brothers' silver squeeze.

What this page can't tell you

This page can't tell you today's inventory: only CME's report has that, and we chose not to scrape around a site that blocks automated reading. It also can't tell you who owns the eligible metal, whether a withdrawal was a sale, or what any inventory change means for the price next week. The dated rows above are as reported, and the sources here are scheduled for a re-read by February 8, 2027. For the live price in the meantime, the live silver chart refreshes every six hours.

Information, not financial advice. We do not tell you to buy or sell and we do not predict prices. Figures are reference numbers as of the time shown.

Before you click, our page on Augusta Precious Metals sets out what Augusta says about storage, the kit and its minimum.

FAQ

What is the difference between registered and eligible silver?

Both sit in exchange-approved vaults and meet the contract standard. Registered silver has a warrant issued against it, so it can be delivered against a futures contract. Eligible silver has no warrant. The definitions here come from a 2021 COMEX rule filing, the latest version we could read, and the exchange may have reworded them since.

Where can I see today's COMEX silver inventory?

In CME Group's daily metal stocks report, which the exchange publishes on its own website each business day. We do not copy its figures because CME's site does not respond to automated reading. Any number you see elsewhere, including the dated figures on this page, is someone's report of that file on a particular date.

Does falling COMEX inventory mean silver is running short?

Not by itself. Metal can leave exchange vaults for London, for private storage or for buyers who want it outside the system. A registered figure can drop when warrants are cancelled without a single bar moving. Supply and demand balance is measured separately, by the Silver Institute's annual survey, not by vault counts.

Sources

Each page we drew a fact from, with whether it was the publisher's own page or a page reporting it.