What does the hallmark on my silver mean?

A UK hallmark is a sponsor’s mark, a figure, a town symbol and sometimes a picture and a letter. This reads the figure and names the symbols, from the Hallmarking Act 1973.

It cannot tell you the year, and the Act is the reason. The date letter exists in law; the alphabet that gives it meaning is directed by the Goldsmiths’ Company and is not in the Act. This page says what the law says and stops there.

Which office struck it

Four assay offices operate in the United Kingdom, and each has its own symbol:

What the figures mean

17 standards of fineness across 4 metals, in parts per thousand. The figure is the proportion of precious metal: 925 is 925 parts silver in every thousand.

The figure struck is not always the standard

Two of the 17 are marked with a different number from their own fineness: Gold 916.6 is struck 916; Silver 958.4 is struck 958.

The Act truncates rather than rounding. 916.6 rounds to 917, and 917 is not a hallmark and never has been. So a piece marked 916 is very slightly finer than its own mark suggests, and a decoder that read the struck figure as the fineness would understate two metals out of seventeen.

And one figure can be several metals

950 is a standard for Platinum and Palladium; 999 is a standard for Gold and Silver and Platinum and Palladium. The figure alone does not say which metal you have. The tool above lists every metal a figure could be rather than choosing the commonest, for the same reason the piano page shows every overlapping table — except here the overlap is the law’s.

Three standards have no picture at all

Silver 800, Platinum 850, Platinum 900 are listed in the standards table and appear nowhere in the pictorial one. That is the Act’s doing, not an omission here: those standards get figures and no symbol.

What year is it from?

This page does not say, and that is a decision rather than a gap. Paragraph 4 of Schedule 2 creates the date letter and then hands the alphabet to somebody else:

“Such distinct variable letter of the alphabet to denote the year in which the article is marked as may be for the time being directed in writing by the Council.”

So the letters are directed in writing by the Council of the Goldsmiths’ Company. They are not in the Act, which means reproducing a chart of them would mean taking it from whoever compiled it — and the compilers of those charts are exactly the people this site has sixteen outstanding letters to. The boat page takes the same position on hull numbers before 1984.

A missing date letter means nothing

The date letter has been optional since 1 January 1999. A modern piece without one is not unmarked, not suspect, and not undated by accident: the letter simply stopped being compulsory.

Sch. 2 Pt. I substituted (1.1.1999) by S.I. 1998/2978 , reg. 2(15) . That date is not recalled here — it is read out of the Act’s own amendment record, which legislation.gov.uk publishes alongside the text.

The one thing these marks can date

Palladium was brought into the Act on 22.7.2009. A UK palladium hallmark cannot be older than that.

Act modified (22.7.2009) by Hallmarking Act 1973 (Application to Palladium) Order 2009 (S.I. 2009/2040) , art. 2(1)

It is a small piece of dating and an honest one: it comes from when an Order commenced, not from anything struck on the metal.

What this page is not

It is not an authentication. It reads what the Act says the marks mean. Whether the marks on a particular object are genuine, and whether the metal matches them, is a question for an assay office.

It also covers only the marks the Act sets out for UK assay offices. Convention hallmarks struck abroad and recognised here, and marks struck before the Act, are outside what this source describes.

A note on where this came from

legislation.gov.uk publishes the revised text of the Act under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial reuse with attribution. It also serves the Act as XML with its amendment history attached, which is where both dates on this page come from.