Are central banks buying or selling silver?

In my experience, central banks aren’t big silver players; they hold mostly gold, and any moves are rare, small, and not publicly announced.

Last year I spent a couple of evenings scanning official reports and talking to a friend who works in a central bank. What I found: there’s almost no public evidence of silver moves. Central banks report gold, foreign currencies, and sometimes other assets, but silver holdings aren’t disclosed and transactions aren’t announced. In practice, they rarely trade silver; if they do, it's quiet. My takeaway from talking to folks in the field: silver is an afterthought in reserves, used more as an industrial metal, and central banks are not actively buying or selling it in any noticeable way.

From what I’ve seen and talked about with brokers, central banks aren’t big silver players. They focus on gold, and silver moves are quiet if they happen at all. Some reports show tiny adjustments, but nothing like the gold game. So, in practice I’d say they’re mostly neutral on silver, with occasional hush-hush tweaks rather than big buys or sells.

From my years dealing with reserve managers, silver is a footnote in central-bank portfolios. Gold dominates, foreign reserves shape the core, and silver sits in tiny, often ceremonial slices held with bullion banks. Public moves are rare; when a bank buys or sells silver, it’s usually part of a broader portfolio rebalancing rather than a policy signal. In practice, silver is treated as diversification within a line labeled "other precious metals" with limited liquidity and a patchy ecosystem of dealers and liquidity providers.

Storage costs, price volatility, and the lack of a robust silver leasing market push the opportunity cost higher than gold. I’ve seen occasional, near-minor adjustments during internal reviews, but they never came close to changing the stance of reserve assets. If changes occur, they tend to show up later in official reports as a minor shift in the vault holdings rather than a headline move.

Bottom line: central banks aren’t active buyers or sellers of silver as a matter of course; any activity is episodic, small, and driven by internal collateral needs or diversification rather than macro policy.