Central bank gold reserves are the gold that a country's central bank or other monetary authority owns and holds as part of its official reserves. In official statistics this gold is better known as monetary gold, the entry that covers the full definition and how it is counted.
Central banks hold gold alongside their foreign exchange reserves because it carries no credit risk from any issuer, cannot be created at will, and can be used in a crisis when other assets are frozen or hard to sell. Most of it sits as bullion in national vaults or with large custodians such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, held as allocated gold. According to the World Gold Council, central banks together bought more than 1,000 tonnes a year in 2022, 2023 and 2024, a pace not seen in decades, after the freezing of Russia's reserves led many countries to review where they keep their wealth. Reserves can also be lent, or swapped for cash through a gold swap, without selling the metal. A full list of reserve-holding institutions is in the list of central banks of the world.