Fort Knox: What’s Inside the Gold Vault, and Has It Ever Been Robbed?

Fort Knox holds about 147.3 million troy ounces of US government gold, roughly 4,580 tonnes, in a granite vault finished in 1936. There’s no record of anyone robbing it, and outsiders have been let in only twice. Here’s what the Treasury’s own records say is inside, and how it’s checked.

Fort Knox at a glance

Why the US built a gold vault at Fort Knox

The vault exists because of a change in the law. In 1933 and 1934 President Roosevelt’s government took the United States off gold coin, and the Gold Reserve Act of January 1934 made the Federal Reserve banks hand their gold over to the Treasury. Private citizens could no longer hold gold coins, gold certificates or bullion. The coins were melted into 400-ounce bars, and the Mint needed somewhere to keep them.¹

In August 1935 Congress moved part of the Army’s Fort Knox reservation in Kentucky to the Treasury, for use as a depository for the country’s bullion reserves.² So the name people know is an Army post’s. The building itself is the Bullion Depository, and it belongs to the Mint, not the Army. If you’re searching for the base and its soldiers, this page isn’t about them: it’s about the granite box the Mint runs there, and what’s inside it.

Building the depository, 1935 to 1937

Construction was finished in December 1936. The Mint lists 16,000 cubic feet of granite, 4,200 cubic yards of concrete, 750 tons of reinforcing steel and 670 tons of structural steel, and a bill of $560,000.² An older Mint description, quoted by the Hamilton historian Jim Blount, calls it a 105 by 121 foot “two-story basement and attic building of granite, steel and concrete”.¹

The first shipment, from the Philadelphia Mint and the New York Assay Office, arrived on 13 January 1937.² It came, as the Mint puts it, “by U.S. Mail”.² The photograph shows a later delivery by mail, in 1941, with the bullion boxes going from railway mail cars into army trucks at Fort Knox.

Timeline

• 1934 The Gold Reserve Act brings the Federal Reserve banks’ gold under Treasury ownership.
• Aug 1935 Congress transfers land at Fort Knox from the Army to the Treasury.
• Jun 1936 Mosler ships the vault door from Hamilton, Ohio.
• Dec 1936 The depository is completed for $560,000.
• 13 Jan 1937 The first gold arrives.
• 26 Dec 1941 The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution leave Washington for Fort Knox.
• 28 Apr 1943 President Roosevelt inspects the depository.
• 23 Sep 1974 Members of Congress and the press are let into the vault.
• 21 Aug 2017 Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin leads the second outside visit.

The vault and its door

The Mint doesn’t say who built the vault, but Hamilton, Ohio has never been shy about it. On 19 December 1936, the month the depository was finished, the Hamilton Journal-News named “the building of the vaults for the United States gold reserve at Fort Knox” as the Mosler Safe Company’s most prominent recent job.³ Mosler reported the main door as 20 tons and 21 inches thick, built of seven laminations of “the latest tool and torch resisting materials” interlayered with cast and open-hearth steel. It was shipped from Hamilton in June 1936.¹

Those are a maker’s numbers, not the government’s. We found no government figure for the door at all, so treat them as Mosler’s claim. Mosler went on to build other doors for Washington, including the vehicle blast doors of the secret congressional shelter under the Greenbrier resort, one of them 19.5 inches thick and over 20 tons; that story is in our page on the Greenbrier bunker.⁴

The split combination

What the Mint does describe is the rule. “The actual structure and content of the facility is known by only a few,” its fact page says, “and no one person knows all the procedures to open the vault.”² An older Mint description quoted by Blount went a step further: “no one person is entrusted with the combination”, and “various members of the depository staff must dial separately combinations known only to them”.¹ It’s the old two-key rule of the bank strongroom, taken further: no single person, however senior, can open the door alone.

The door is also widely said to be on a time lock, and figures such as a “100-hour” lock circulate online. We couldn’t find a Mint, Treasury or Mosler source that describes the Fort Knox time lock, so we don’t repeat any number here. How the clockwork in a vault time lock works, and why banks adopted it, is in our history of time locks.

Inside, the gold isn’t one big room. In 1974 the Mint said the Fort Knox gold was stored in 13 vault compartments.⁵ Once a compartment has been audited it’s closed with an official joint seal, and opening or sealing one requires three people to be present.⁶

How much gold is in Fort Knox?

The Treasury publishes the answer every month. On 31 October 2026 its status report of US government gold listed 147,341,858.382 fine troy ounces at Fort Knox, with a book value of $6,221,097,413.⁷ That’s about 4,583 tonnes. The same report lists 54.1 million ounces at West Point, 43.9 million at the Denver Mint and 13.4 million in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault, about 261.5 million ounces in all, so Fort Knox holds a little over half (our arithmetic: 56%).⁷ The Mint rounds it to “about half”.²

The figure hardly moves. In September 1974 the Mint gave 147.4 million ounces at Fort Knox,⁵ and its fact page says that, apart from tiny samples taken to test purity during audits, “no gold has been transferred to or from the Depository for many years”.² The peak came much earlier: 649.6 million ounces on 31 December 1941.²

Book value versus market value

That $6.2 billion looks oddly small, and it is. By law the Treasury carries its gold at $42.2222 a fine troy ounce, the rate set in 31 U.S.C. §5117.⁸ The market is far above that. In its latest audit the Inspector General used the LBMA afternoon price of $4,176.30 an ounce on 30 September 2026.⁸ At that price the Fort Knox gold would be worth about $615 billion. That’s our multiplication, not an official figure, and the gold price changes every day; the number on the government’s books stays at $42.2222.

How much does a Fort Knox gold bar weigh?

The Mint’s standard bar is 7 inches by 3⅝ inches by 1¾ inches and weighs approximately 400 troy ounces, or 27.5 pounds (about 12.4 kg).² That’s a little smaller than a house brick, and far heavier. If every ounce at Fort Knox were in standard bars, it would come to roughly 368,000 of them, but that’s only our division: bars vary in weight and the Mint doesn’t publish a count.

Not only gold: the Constitution, Magna Carta and a crown

Less than three weeks after Pearl Harbor, on 26 December 1941, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution left Washington by train for Fort Knox, guarded by Secret Service agents.⁹ A 1215 Magna Carta in the Library of Congress’s care went with them; the British and the Library had agreed to keep it at Fort Knox for the duration of the war.¹⁰ The Mint’s timeline adds the Bill of Rights, and says the documents went back to Washington in 1944.² The full wartime story, with Britain’s gold and the Reichsbank’s salt mine, is in safes and vaults of the Second World War.

The list of lodgers is longer than most people realise. A Mint fact sheet from 2011 names the Articles of Confederation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and second inaugural address, and three volumes of the Gutenberg Bible among the things once stored there.¹¹ The crown, sword, sceptre, orb and cape of St Stephen, King of Hungary, also spent time at the depository before they were returned to Hungary in 1978.²

The two visits: 1974 and 2017

The first break with the no-visitors rule came on 23 September 1974. Rumours persisted that all the gold had been removed,² and Treasury Secretary William E. Simon invited members of Congress to inspect it, under what the Mint called President Ford’s “new open door policy”. The press was invited to watch, and for the first time photographs were allowed inside. “The Mint is clearing away cobwebs,” said the Mint’s director, Mary Brooks, “and re-assuring the public that their gold is intact and safe.”⁵

A real audit followed. It was scheduled to start on 24 September 1974, run by a committee of auditors from the General Accounting Office and the Treasury, with Mint technicians trained in assaying and weighing bullion.⁵ GAO selected 3 of the 13 Fort Knox compartments for audit and reported no differences from the depository’s records.⁶

The second visit was on Monday 21 August 2017. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led a delegation that included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Representative Brett Guthrie and Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin. Mnuchin said he was only the third Treasury secretary to view the gold there.¹² The Mint’s timeline dates the visit to 24 August,² but the Associated Press reported it on the day, and the Treasury’s own photograph shows “8/21/17” chalked beside Mnuchin’s name on the vault wall.

That wall is our favourite detail in the whole story. It’s a dark surface covered in hand-chalked names, years and initials, more like the back of a theatre door than a national treasury. McConnell told the AP he held a gold bar in his hands, and that it reminded him of Goldfinger.¹²

Is the gold still there? What the audits say

Every few years someone asks again whether Fort Knox is empty. We’ve kept this section to what auditors have actually reported, because that’s the only evidence anyone outside the building has.

After the 1974 count, the Treasury set up a Committee for Continuing Audits in 1975 to direct further audits of the gold. By 30 September 1986 about 92% of the government’s gold had been audited by GAO or the committee. From fiscal 1993 to 2008 the Mint and the Treasury’s Office of Inspector General audited the compartments not yet covered, checking them against the Mint’s records for bar counts, melt numbers and stamped fineness, and weighing and assaying a statistical sample of bars; they noted no material differences. Each audited compartment was then closed with an official joint seal. Since fiscal 2008, the Inspector General’s work has mainly been to inspect those joint seals every year on all 42 sealed compartments.⁶

The latest report, OIG-27-017 of 29 October 2026, found the Mint’s schedules of deep-storage gold and silver “presented fairly, in all material respects”, with no material weaknesses in internal control. Deep-storage gold at Fort Knox, Denver and West Point together stood at 245,262,897.04 ounces at the end of both fiscal 2025 and 2026, and the Mint didn’t use any of it to make coins in either year.⁸ By GAO’s account in 2011, the Inspector General had given the Mint’s custodial gold schedules a clean opinion for every year it had audited since it started in 1995.⁶

So what does an audit prove? It proves that independent auditors checked the records, the seals and, over the years, samples of the bars themselves, and found nothing missing. It doesn’t mean every bar is weighed every year; nobody claims that. If you want a firmer answer than the auditors’, you’d need to be inside, and only a handful of people have been.

Has Fort Knox ever been robbed?

No. We found no record of any theft or break-in at the Bullion Depository, in official sources or in the press, since it opened in 1937. The Mint says the only gold ever removed has been the very small samples taken to test purity during scheduled audits.² The 1974 audit found no differences from the records,⁶ and the stock in 2026 is within a fraction of a per cent of the 1974 figure.⁵⁷

It’s also a classified facility where “no visitors are permitted, and no exceptions are made”,¹¹ which is why the most famous raid on Fort Knox took place on a film set near London.

Goldfinger: the film versus the real vault

In Goldfinger, which opened in New York in December 1964, Bond learns that Goldfinger plans to rob Fort Knox by paralysing its defenders with gas from Pussy Galore’s flying circus and then setting off an atomic bomb. The US government wouldn’t let the crew film at the real depository, so a replica of the building went up in Middlesex and the interiors were built on a soundstage at Pinewood.¹³

The production designer, Ken Adam, only ever saw the depository from the air, and he wasn’t impressed by the architecture. The interior had to be “pure speculation”, so he built it as a “cathedral of gold”, over 40 feet high and right up to the studio roof, with ingots given a special lacquer to look better than the real thing.¹⁴ Real bars are stacked in compartments behind sealed doors, as the 2017 photograph shows, not in shining towers. Adam’s version is the one most of us still picture, and as McConnell’s remark shows, that includes some of the people who’ve seen the real one.

Fort Knox versus the New York Fed gold vault

People often mix up the two. The biggest store of gold in the United States isn’t at Fort Knox but under Lower Manhattan, in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vault, 80 feet below the street on bedrock. In 2024 it held about 507,000 bars weighing 6,331 metric tons, and none of it belongs to the Fed: it’s held for the US government, foreign governments, central banks and international organisations.¹⁵ The US Treasury’s own share there is 13.4 million ounces.⁷ We explain how these deep vaults are built and guarded in how bank vaults work, and you can see the York Safe and Lock Company boasting about the Fed’s vault entrances in its 1924 Federal Reserve advert.

Fort Knox and the New York Fed both appear, with seed banks, formula vaults and a salt mine, in our list of the world’s strangest vaults. Norway’s seed vault on Svalbard guards barley, not bullion.

Fort Knox myths and facts

Frequently asked questions