Good Delivery Rules

This document contains a complete description of the rules governing the specifications for good delivery bars and the application procedure for listing.

The Good Delivery Rules for Gold and Silver Bars

This edition of the rules was published in January 2012. Click on the link below for details of changes made to the rules between 2009 and 2012.

Summary of the Main Changes in Recent Editions

Bar Numbers for Russian and Uzbek Bars

The common approach adopted by LBMA Good Delivery refiners in Russia and Uzbekistan is to use a 4 digit bar number plus a 2-Cyrillic letter code (which changes with each resetting of the bar number to 0001) and a separate 4-digit year code. The combination of the company's brand mark, the two Cyrillic letter code and the 4-digit bar number provides a unique identifier for every bar.

Some London vaults have used the nearest Roman equivalent to the two Cyrillic characters as part of the bar number. These provide a unique identifier and such bar numbers will continue to be used as bars move within the London vaulting system.

But other vaults have ignored the Cyrillic letters when recording the bars in their information systems. This can result in the same 4-digit bar numbers appearing more than once in bar lists (though each of them has a different Cyrillic code).

In order to avoid this apparent duplication, LBMA vaults will, from February 2010, record such bars with an 8-digit bar number formed from the 4-digit year concatenated with the 4-digit bar number.

Occasionally older bars with Cyrillic letter codes but no year marks arrive in London. In such cases, the receiving vault should use the nearest Roman equivalent to the Cyrillic characters as the first characters of the bar number.