The chart on this page provides a quick overview of silver’s price progress over the past 30 years. You’ll find yearly summaries for every year since 1995.

Much has changed over the course of three decades. In fact, an ounce of silver was available for less than five dollars as late as 2003, and it only surpassed the double-digit barrier in 2006—the early days of the Great Recession.

Although the overall rise in silver’s price is notable (regardless of what happened in 2025), the more important aspect to consider is the volatility that the chart indicates. Silver is much more prone to fluctuation than gold and has experienced several years of decline during its 30-year journey.

So, use this chart to understand the wild ride that silver offers its investors. However, it may also be possible to gain a sense about what world events might cause silver to swing one way or the other.

You’ll notice that we have not included information about the current year’s silver prices. We have elected not to do so because, by definition, the data is incomplete.

However, 2025 has been quite an eventful one for the performance of the white metal. In fact, silver’s price in September 2025 has put the possibility of a new all-time record on the table.

On September 22, silver closed at a business value of $44.31/oz. This price, the highest for the year, is the closest to the April 2011 record ($48.46) that silver has achieved in the 14-year period since then.

For the chart, though, we used the following metrics:

• Year Open: The closing price at the end of the first trading day of the year. For the most part, this price is based on January 1 of the year in question but may sometimes be drawn from a day or two later.
• Year High: The highest closing price achieved over the course of the year. The peak price is instructive for understanding the volatility and range that the price experienced over the 365-day period.
• Year Low: The lowest closing price achieved over the course of the year. Together with the high price, you can get a clear picture about the amount of variation the price exhibited during the 12-month period.
• Year Close: The closing price at the end of the last trading day of the year. In contrast to the Year Open, the price is typically based on December 31 but may be adjusted to reflect a day or two earlier, depending on how weekends and holidays are observed.
• Annual Percentage Change: The amount of change between the Year Open and the Year Close. This metric is the most effective way to gauge the overall movement of silver’s price over the course of the year. In a sense, it exhibits the amount of profit or loss that someone who purchased their silver at the beginning of the year could realize.

More: Today’s Silver Price – 1 Year Silver Price Chart – 5 Year Silver Chart – 10 Year Silver Chart – 20 Year Silver Chart

Key Dates

Over the past three decades, several significant dates have marked milestones in silver’s price. The bullets below are some of the closing prices we’ve identified as especially noteworthy.

• February 5, 1998 – $7.59: Although quaint by the standard of today’s prices, this mark represented a new record high for silver’s price. Even more quaintly, the rise occurred due to the actions of a single man: Warren Buffett. The “Oracle of Omaha’s” investment in silver was large enough to move the entire market.
• October 28, 2008 – $8.94: The February 1998 record stood until 2004 but was shattered in March 2008 by more than $13/oz due to the onset of the Great Recession. So, this $4 swoon a few months later seems odd, at first glance, as the recession had certainly not improved during the period. However, it indicated something much more dire and sad about the state of the economy – investors were selling off their silver assets in a last-ditch attempt to recoup their losses in other asset classes.
• April 28, 2011 – $48.46: Less than three years later, the effects of the financial crisis had ravaged the world’s major economies, particularly in the Eurozone. Government spending and quantitative easing had further prompted investors to turn to gold and silver due to concerns about inflation. The result was this new record high price for an ounce of silver. This record price remains the titleholder to this very day.
• March 19 – August 6, 2020 – $12.12 – $29.78: We’ve chosen to give a range of prices during 2020 here. First, this swoon-and-spike occurred due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated shutdowns or drastic limitations of most of the world’s economies. This pattern closely resembled the one that silver’s price took during the Great Recession but occurred in a much shorter timeframe. The reason behind the swoon was also different here. Rather than an indication of investor panic, the primary driver was the decline of industrial demand for silver, a byproduct of the economic shutdowns.
• September 22, 2025 – $44.31: When silver breached $37/oz in June 2025, it was a significant moment because it was the closest to the all-time record high that silver had achieved in more than a decade. However, we had no idea that the escalation of geopolitical tensions since that moment would only drive silver higher and make it possible that a new all-time record might be in play.

Historical Context of 30-year Silver Charts

Here are the different reasons why it’s instructive to look at the 30-year gold charts:

• Long-term perspective: Looking at the past 30 years of silver’s price performance is a key method to consider modern silver investing. The sample size (roughly 12,000 datapoints) means that you are seeing a true representative sample, and you can make reasonable assumptions about the patterns that you see. So, you can observe, for instance, the dip-and-spike combination that occurs when economic times grow extremely tough.
• Performance evaluation: 30 years of silver prices also allows you to understand how silver typically behaves. Silver diverges significantly from gold in that it is much more volatile due to its lower trading volume. The low relative price of silver belies how much the price can move in a short amount of time. For instance, silver moved above $31 in 2024 for the first time in more than a decade, but the real story is that the day before, silver had traded for $29 and change – roughly 6% of difference in a 24-hour period.
• Correlation with economic factors: Silver is correlated with economic factors, though much less strongly than gold. There were clear moves in the past 30 years that reflected the economic situations of the time – the Great Recession, the pandemic, and even Brexit were all trackable by the movements of silver’s price.
• Monetary policy impact: Monetary policy can certainly make a difference in the price of silver. The dip visible in 2022, for instance, correlated with increasing interest rates and a particularly strong US dollar. Although gold is more directly tied to these metrics, it is still possible to see significant movements in silver’s price – especially if monetary policies somehow figure into the aggregate industrial demand for silver.
• Global economic health: As mentioned elsewhere, silver’s price movements can indicate the health of the global economy. We’ve already discussed the spikes in silver’s price during economic downturns, but we can also see good economic times, too. Any prolonged periods of lower silver prices, such as the middle portion of the 2010s and around 2022, indicate that the economy is performing relatively well. Ironically, very sharp dips usually mean the economy is in such a terrible state that investors are selling off their silver assets to try to stay afloat elsewhere.