Global central banks are removing gold from vaults in London and New York as they become more skittish about storing bullion outside their own borders, according to a new survey.
The central banks of India and France are among those that have relocated huge volumes of gold out of the US and UK in the past year to store more domestically — part of a trend of the institutions bringing bullion home and also diversifying the storage location of their reserves.
For years, central banks have been increasing their holdings of gold, which recently surpassed US Treasuries to become the world’s top reserve asset, as many seek alternatives to the US dollar, the world’s de facto reserve currency.
However, increasing geopolitical conflict, sanctions regimes and a decline in trust have put strains on a gold trading system that relies heavily on London — where huge vaults at the Bank of England store more than $700bn of the yellow metal — and on New York, the world’s largest gold futures market.
According to an annual survey published on Tuesday by the World Gold Council — an industry body that represents gold miners and administers a bullion-backed exchange traded fund — fewer central banks say they are currently storing the yellow metal in London and in New York than said so a year earlier.
Meanwhile, 19 per cent of respondents said they had increased domestic storage or diversified overseas storage locations over the past 12 months, compared with 7 per cent in last year’s survey.
Shaokai Fan, global head of central banks at the World Gold Council, said “geopolitical concerns” and “fears about maintaining full access to your gold at all times” were driving the trend to repatriate bullion and diversify storage locations.
“Those concerns have been simmering for a long time, of course, but I think that central banks are now taking this a little bit more to heart, thinking more about where they should store their gold,” said Fan. “They are looking to mitigate risk even if it doesn’t necessarily mean bringing the gold home.”
The news comes as Singapore and Hong Kong have been working to offer vaulting services to central banks that are looking to diversify their storage. Singapore’s deputy prime minister on Monday said the city-state would launch an over-the-counter clearing system for gold this year, along with a vaulting service for central banks.
One of the biggest recent repatriation programmes has been in France, which removed 129 tonnes of gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026 and now stores all its gold domestically.
The Banque de France sold those gold bars in the US, then bought equivalent bars in Europe, netting a profit of €11bn in the process, in part because of a premium on bullion in the US resulting from tariffs. The bank said the move was part of efforts to upgrade its gold stock to a higher standard.
Over the past three years, India’s central bank has also repatriated most of the gold it held overseas with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements.
The share of its gold held overseas by the Reserve Bank of India dropped to 22 per cent in March 2026 from 55 per cent in March 2023, according to the central bank’s data. The RBI did not respond to a request for comment.
Junlu Liang, senior analyst at consultancy Metals Focus, said the movements show how central banks are reassessing the role of gold in reserve management.
“In some countries, domestic political considerations have further strengthened calls to relocate gold holdings closer to home,” she said, adding that Austria, the Netherlands and Germany had all repatriated some of their holdings in recent years.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
While the UK’s dominance in gold trading may be hard to shake — the London gold market had turnover of more than $200bn per day last month, making it the most liquid market in the world — the survey, which was answered by 76 central banks between February and May, shows fewer respondents store gold there.
The survey asked banks where they vault their gold, and of those that responded to the question, 57 per cent store it at the BoE, down from 64 per cent last year.
Meanwhile 14 per cent said they store gold at the New York Fed, down from 17 per cent last year. The number of respondents who said they store gold at the BIS has increased slightly.
The BoE remains the world’s largest storer of central bank bullion, with total holdings at the end of May 8.6 per cent higher than a year earlier. Officials have previously said the bank holds gold for about 70 countries. It declined to comment.
Central banks known to store gold at the New York Fed include those of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece and Sweden, according to Metals Focus research.
Official Fed data shows a slight decline in US holdings of foreign official gold, which fell 2 per cent from the end of 2024 to April 2026.
Political pressure has been rising in Germany and Italy to relocate some of those bars. Last year, politicians in both countries called for a review of their gold storage because of concerns over potential US political interference. The New York Fed declined to comment.
US President Donald Trump was strongly critical of former Fed chair Jay Powell, raising concerns about the independence of the US central bank.
Ross Norman, chief executive of gold website Metals Daily and a veteran gold trader, said “many central banks may question the need to hold significant amounts of metal in the US in the current environment”, although he added that in London the deep liquidity of the market would remain highly attractive.
“It’s a politically charged subject as well as an economically important one,” he said. “There is a degree of political theatre around where you hold your gold.”
