Federal Reserve New York: The Gold Vault Beneath Manhattan
The gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is, by its own account, the largest known repository of monetary gold in the world. In 2024 it held around 507,000 bars weighing about 6,331 tonnes in total – almost all of it on behalf of foreign governments and central banks.
Where is the vault and how deep is it?
The vault is located in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York building in Manhattan. It was built when the building was constructed in the early 1920s.
According to the New York Fed, it lies 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level, around 24 m and 15 m respectively. It rests directly on Manhattan’s bedrock.
How much gold is stored there?
According to the New York Fed, the vault held around 507,000 bars with about 6,331 tonnes of gold in 2024. The peak was over 12,000 tonnes in 1973, shortly after the United States stopped converting dollars into gold for foreign governments.
Holdings have been falling since then. Several central banks have withdrawn gold. The Bundesbank, for example, brought a total of 300 tonnes to Frankfurt between 2013 and 2016.
Who owns the gold?
Neither the New York Fed nor the Federal Reserve System owns any gold in this vault. The bank acts only as custodian. Account holders are the US government, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organisations.
Private individuals and companies cannot store gold there. By far the largest part of the holdings belongs to foreign countries. The US Treasury reports only around 416 tonnes of its own gold at the New York Fed (as of 31 October 2026).
The largest known foreign customer is the Bundesbank. It stores 1,236 tonnes there, around 37% of Germany’s gold reserves (as of 31 December 2025).
How is the gold held?
The vault is divided into 122 compartments. Each compartment belongs to exactly one account holder. It is secured with a padlock, two combination locks and an auditor’s seal. The compartments carry numbers instead of names so that customers remain anonymous.
The New York Fed does not treat gold as interchangeable. Anyone who deposits bars gets exactly those bars back. That is allocated storage in the strictest sense. On deposit, every bar is weighed, and its refiner and fineness are checked against the customer’s records.
When gold changes hands, staff carry the bars from one compartment to another. Three people must be present for every movement and every opening of a compartment: two from the vault team and one from internal audit.
How does the gold get into the vault?
A lot of gold came to New York during and after the Second World War. At the time, many countries wanted their reserves in a safe place close to the dollar market.
New bars are brought down from the street into the vault by lift. According to the New York Fed, a bar weighs about 27 pounds, just over 12 kg. The bank occasionally places small holdings in shared compartments, which it calls the “library”.
In the books, the gold is carried at the official value of $42.2222 per ounce, not at the market price. For customers this does not matter, as they own the bars themselves.
How is the vault secured?
The only access is through a rotating steel cylinder weighing 90 tonnes. It sits in a 140 tonnes steel and concrete frame that seals airtight and watertight when closed. Time locks keep the vault shut until the next business day.
Cameras monitor the room around the clock, with motion detectors added at night. On top of that comes the armed Federal Reserve police.
The bank charges no fee for storage itself. Costs arise only when gold is deposited, withdrawn or moved between compartments.
