Median gold AISC rose from $924/oz in 2020 to $1,695/oz in 2025, across 81 producers Pulse researched.
That is +83% in five years.
The gold price rally has dominated every conversation at every conference this cycle. Rightly so. Few people foresaw the pace or the breadth of the move.
But the cost side has been moving in the same direction, and at a rate that changes the margin calculation for a meaningful portion of the industry.
In 2025, the interquartile spread ran from $1,411/oz at the 25th percentile to $1,900/oz at the 75th.
The top quartile of producers spent $1,900/oz or more just to sustain existing output. That is not a small cohort. It is roughly one in four of the producers we track.
The headline price masks what is underneath it — a tale of two cost curves: the efficient operators widening their margin, and the cost-challenged ones watching it compress.
For mining analysts and PE/investment banking associates building comp tables on producer cash flows or royalty companies evaluating asset economics, this distribution matters as much as the median. A portfolio of streams acquired against one cost assumption can perform very differently if the underlying producer sits in the top quartile rather than the bottom.
The industry is in a strong cycle. But strong cycles do not eliminate cost discipline as a variable. They just obscure it for a while.
This AISC series is built directly from quarterly and annual filings across producers. The data is sourced and validated, not estimated. Less searching. More strategising.™
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