Central Banks Plan Largest Gold Buying Surge Since 2018 Survey

Published by James Harris on June 17, 2026June 17, 2026

A record 45% of central banks surveyed by the World Gold Council plan to increase their gold holdings over the next twelve months, the highest share since the survey launched in 2018 and more than double the 20% recorded in 2020. The shift is not just quantitative: the reasons central banks give for holding gold are changing in ways that matter for every asset competing for reserve status.

The 2026 survey, which drew 76 responses collected between February and May, found that over 90% of reserve managers now cite crisis performance as the primary reason to hold gold, while the “historical legacy” rationale has dropped from 62% to 46% in a single year. That is a meaningful rotation in institutional logic. Central banks are no longer holding gold out of inertia; they are holding it because it has a specific job in a world where 74% of respondents expect the dollar’s share of global reserves to decline over the next five years. Gold’s share has already overtaken U.S. government bonds as the top reserve asset, according to the Council. The accelerating accumulation of gold by sovereign institutions reflects a structural re-rating that predates any single geopolitical event, even if the Middle East conflict gave this year’s respondents an unusually sharp prompt.

Eighty-three percent of central banks now expect gold to represent a larger share of total reserves in five years. That consensus, at that scale, is not a sentiment reading. It is a procurement signal.

For Bitcoin, the survey is a useful reality check on a decade-old thesis. The “digital gold” narrative has always rested on the assumption that institutional reserve managers would eventually recognize Bitcoin’s scarcity and sovereignty properties as functionally equivalent to gold’s. They have not, at least not in any measurable allocation sense, and the survey data shows no central bank is treating BTC with comparable weight. Ray Dalio’s argument that Bitcoin’s public ledger makes it traceable and therefore controllable, countered by Michael Saylor’s position that transparency is a feature rather than a flaw, captures a genuine unresolved tension: reserve managers optimizing for crisis resilience in a geopolitically fragmented world may view auditability differently than retail holders do. Bitcoin’s correlation with risk assets like the Nasdaq also complicates its safe-haven credentials precisely when central banks most need them.

The Federal Reserve’s first rate decision under incoming chair Kevin Warsh arrives this week, and rate expectations will likely move both gold and Bitcoin more in the short term than any survey data. The structural question for 2026 is whether Bitcoin’s institutional case gets made at the sovereign reserve level before the current cycle matures, or whether it remains a corporate treasury and ETF story while gold consolidates its position as the default non-dollar reserve asset.