Gold has overtaken US Treasuries as the largest single asset in global official reserves, turning a long-running central-bank hedge into a visible challenge to the market’s safest benchmark debt.
The shift is striking but not clean-cut. The European Central Bank said gold represented 27% of total global official reserves at the end of 2025, ahead of US Treasuries at 22%. A year earlier, gold stood at 20% and Treasuries at 25%, meaning the ranking reversed in just 12 months as bullion prices surged and central banks kept adding to their holdings.
But the ECB’s own stress test makes the story less clean than the ranking suggests. If gold were valued at end-2023 prices, US Treasuries would still lead at 26% of reserves, while gold and the euro would each stand at 16%.
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Gold’s rally turned a long-running diversification trade into a visible challenge to Treasuries’ reserve ranking. The ECB said gold prices rose about 60% in 2025 after climbing roughly 30% in 2024. FT reported that bullion reached more than $5,500 per troy ounce in January.
That market move amplified years of official-sector buying. The World Gold Council said central banks bought 863 tonnes of gold in 2025, a level it described as historically elevated and geographically widespread, though slower than the pace seen in recent years.
Central-bank demand also finished the year with momentum. Net official-sector gold demand rose to 230 tonnes in the fourth quarter of 2025 from 218 tonnes in the third quarter, according to the World Gold Council.
The buying has a policy logic that price alone cannot explain. After Russia’s reserves were immobilized in 2022, reserve managers had a clearer reason to ask whether assets held inside another country’s financial system carried political risk. Gold, unlike a Treasury security, has no sovereign issuer and no promise of repayment attached to it.
That makes the 2025 shift both symbolic and fragile. Gold has taken the top single-asset slot in the ECB’s reserve breakdown, but the dollar still runs the system that central banks use when they need liquidity fast.
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