More central banks than ever expect to increase their gold reserves this year after recent pressure on the gold price.

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More central banks than ever expect to increase their gold reserves, a sign one of the key forces behind bullion’s record-breaking rally remains intact despite this year’s pullback.

In a survey of 74 central banks, 45% said they plan to buy in the coming year, the biggest-ever share in data collected by the World Gold Council and YouGov since 2018. Just one said it planned to cut holdings, the WGC said in a report Tuesday.

Gold prices more than doubled over the past three years, with the rally underpinned by a sharp acceleration in central bank buying. Some of those gains have been erased this year after the Middle East conflict lifted energy costs and fueled bets that interest rates will need to stay higher for longer, dimming the appeal of non-yielding bullion.

Speculators have been abandoning the trade, with prices recently hitting their lowest point since November.

“I think the fall in the price is an opportunity for some central banks to start buying in,” said Shaokai Fan, global head of central banks for the WGC, a trade body representing gold miners. In 2025, “we did detect a number of central banks saying, ‘Oh, the price is a little bit high right now, I want to wait to see if there’s an opportunity for us to buy,’” he said.

The pace of gold buying by central banks sped up in the first quarter, even as Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan began offloading metal.

In the coming year, emerging-market and developing-economy central banks make up most of the prospective buyers, according to the WGC’s survey. About 53% of those respondents said they expect their holdings to increase, compared with 18% of advanced-economy central banks.

Much of those purchases come through domestic accumulation programs, whereby countries snap up gold from their own miners with local currency, rather than using scarce hard currency reserves. Half of the central banks planning to buy said they would fund purchases this way, while 38% said they would sell existing reserve assets.

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The Bank of England, in the middle of the world’s biggest bullion hub in London, remains the most popular vaulting location for central banks, used by 57% of respondents. Still, 9% said they had stored more within their own borders over the past year and 10% moved to diversify their holdings across different locations, up from 5% and 2%, respectively, in last year’s survey.

Political risk is “definitely on the minds of central banks,” said Fan, and the shift could create opportunities for alternative hubs such as Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which are pitching to store central bank gold to bolster their own bullion markets.