Reviewed August 2026 against Gemfields Group auction announcements, the North Carolina Geological Survey and NCpedia.

Try it: Emerald rough-to-cut value bridge →

Emerald Price Per Carat: What Zambian Stones Really Fetch

There is no public price index for a finished Zambian emerald. Any per-carat figure you see quoted for a 13-carat or 70-carat stone is an estimate somebody built from comparables — it is not a market print, and nobody publishes a daily fix the way they do for gold. The one hard, published number is the wholesale rough benchmark: Gemfields’ higher-quality Kagem emerald auction of 4–21 May 2026 realised an average of USD 146.08 per carat across 183,385 carats sold, down from USD 160.78 per carat at its 25 August–11 September 2025 auction, per the company’s own auction results announcements.

Everything above that number — cut, certified, single stones — is priced from comparables. This page gives you the four benchmarks that actually exist, the arithmetic that bridges rough to cut, and the places you can go to get a fresher figure than the one printed here.

Table of Contents

1. The four emerald price benchmarks that actually exist
2. What Zambian rough sells for, auction by auction
3. Why 99.6% of Kagem’s output is not fine emerald
4. Pricing a 13-carat Zambian emerald
5. Pricing a 70-carat Zambian emerald
6. The policy variable: Zambia’s 15% export duty
7. The American emerald: North Carolina’s deposits
8. Emerald country in North Carolina, county by county
9. Where satellite mineral data fits
10. A verification checklist that outlives any price
11. FAQ

The Four Emerald Price Benchmarks That Actually Exist

Most emerald “price per carat” content collapses four completely different markets into one number. They are not interchangeable, and a valuation that quotes the wrong one is wrong by two orders of magnitude. Here is what each benchmark measures, its most recently published value with its date, and exactly where to go for a fresher one.

What Zambian Rough Sells For, Auction by Auction

Kagem, in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, is the reference mine for Zambian emerald pricing. It is 75% owned by Gemfields Group and 25% by the Industrial Development Corporation of Zambia, holds a 41 square kilometre licence area, and runs three open pits — Chama (2.3 km strike length), Chibolele (550 m) and Fibolele (630 m), per the company’s Kagem asset page. Gemfields states that Chama alone supplies approximately 25% of global emerald production.

Because Gemfields sells by sealed-bid auction and publishes the realised average afterwards, the Kagem series is the closest thing the emerald trade has to a transparent wholesale print. The four most recently published results:

• 4–21 May 2026, higher-quality: USD 26.8 million total; 183,385 of 185,135 carats sold; USD 146.08 per carat; 36 of 37 lots sold.
• 25 Aug – 11 Sep 2025, higher-quality: USD 32.0 million; USD 160.78 per carat; 38 of 38 lots sold. This auction included Imboo (“buffalo”), an 11,685-carat crystal, per the Gemfields announcement of 12 September 2025.
• Closing 5 Dec 2025, commercial-quality: USD 25.4 million; USD 7.46 per carat; 45 of 46 lots sold.
• Closing 30 Apr 2025, commercial-quality: USD 16.4 million; USD 6.87 per carat; 32 of 36 lots sold.
• Try it: Emerald rough-to-cut value bridge

The September 2025 announcement put cumulative Kagem auction revenues at USD 1,122 million across 52 auctions since July 2009. That running total is updated with each new result, so the auction update page is the place to read the current figure rather than this sentence.

The direction of travel matters more than any single print. Gemfields’ half-year group revenue — which spans Zambian emeralds and Mozambican rubies — fell from USD 154 million for the six months to 30 June 2023, to USD 128.0 million for the same period in 2024, to USD 64.2 million for the six months to 30 June 2025, with an EBITDA loss of USD 4.9 million, according to the interim reports listed on the company’s financial reports page. A seller reading a 2023-vintage price guide is reading a different market.

Why 99.6% of Kagem’s Output Is Not Fine Emerald

This is the single number that explains why large fine emeralds cost what they cost. Gemfields reports that during 2024, Kagem produced 40.3 million carats of emerald and beryl — and of that, 159,351 carats qualified as premium emerald. That is 0.40% of total output by weight. The other 99.6% is beryl and lower-grade material that feeds the commercial-quality auctions where the average clears under $8 per carat.

Now scale that down to a single stone. A 70-carat rough crystal of premium grade is a fraction of a fraction of one year’s premium production. That scarcity, not a demand narrative, is what a per-carat premium for size is actually pricing.

Pricing a 13-Carat Zambian Emerald

A 13-carat stone is the size at which the question stops being academic and starts being a real transaction — big enough to be a centre stone, small enough that comparable sales exist. The honest position: no free public index gives you a per-carat price for a 13-carat Zambian emerald. What follows is the method that produces a defensible number, and it is the same method a credentialed appraiser will use.

Step 1 — Establish origin and treatment before anything else

Zambian origin is a price factor, and so is clarity enhancement. Emerald is routinely fracture-filled with oils or resins; the degree of filling (“none”, “minor”, “moderate”, “significant”) is stated on major laboratory reports and moves value materially. A stone described as Zambian by a seller, without a laboratory origin determination, is an unpriced stone. Commission the report first; every subsequent number depends on it.

Step 2 — Build comparables from public lot archives

The major jewellery auction houses publish past lot results free of charge, including carat weight, laboratory report details and realised price. Filter for emeralds within roughly 20% of your weight, with the same origin and a comparable enhancement grade, over the past 24 months of sales. Divide realised price by carat weight for each. That distribution — not a single headline sale — is your comparable set.

Step 3 — Decide which value you are asking for

Insurance replacement value, fair market value and orderly liquidation value can differ by a factor of three for the same stone. Replacement value answers “what would it cost to buy another one at retail”; fair market value answers “what would a willing buyer pay a willing seller”; liquidation value answers “what if it must sell in 90 days”. Specify the purpose in writing before an appraiser starts.

Run your own rough-to-cut bridge

If you are holding rough rather than a finished gem, the value hinges on yield — and yield is the input nobody else can supply for your stone. Put your own figures in.

Pricing a 70-Carat Zambian Emerald

At 70 carats the comparable set thins out to almost nothing, and that is the defining problem. A stone this size is not priced against a market — it is priced against a handful of prior sales, most of them privately negotiated and unpublished. Three things change relative to the 13-carat case:

• The comparable set may be empty. If no Zambian emerald of comparable weight and grade has sold publicly in the past 24 months, an appraiser must extrapolate, and the appraisal should say so explicitly in its limiting conditions.
• Cutting is a strategic decision, not a technical one. A 70-carat rough can become one collector stone or several commercially saleable ones. The single stone carries a scarcity premium; the multiple stones carry liquidity. The calculator above lets you test both by varying yield and per-carat price together.
• Buyer pool shrinks to double digits. Liquidation value diverges sharply from replacement value when the number of plausible buyers worldwide is small.

For context on what "very large" means in emerald terms: the Imboo crystal recovered at Kagem and offered in the auction closing 11 September 2025 weighed 11,685 carats — described by Gemfields as the largest remarkable gemstone found at the mine. A 70-carat crystal is not in that league. It is, however, well beyond the size at which parcel pricing applies.

The Policy Variable: Zambia's 15% Export Duty

Zambian emerald prices are exposed to a fiscal switch that has been flipped twice in recent statutory instruments, and any US buyer sourcing rough should track it. The sequence, documented by Gemfields:

• 19 December 2019: Zambia suspends the 15% export duty on precious gemstones with effect from 1 January 2020.
• 30 December 2024: Statutory Instrument No. 88 of 2024 revokes that suspension, reinstating the 15% duty from 1 January 2025.
• 18 February 2025: The Minister of Finance, Dr Situmbeko Musokotwane, suspends the duty again through Statutory Instrument No. 4 of 2025, effective immediately.

The suspension took effect on 18 February 2025 and remained in place at the time of writing in August 2026. Because a suspension is an instrument that can be revoked by another instrument — as 2024 demonstrated — treat it as a live variable rather than a settled fact. Gemfields publishes changes affecting Kagem on its operational updates, which is the fastest place to see whether the position has moved. A reinstated 15% duty is a direct addition to landed cost for anyone importing Zambian rough.

The American Emerald: North Carolina's Deposits

Buyers in the United States often do not realise there is a domestic comparable. North Carolina holds the only significant emerald deposits in North America, and the state's finest cut stones give you an American reference point for what a fine emerald fetches per carat.

The North Carolina Geological Survey records that the state "ranks first in the east in the mining and marketing of gemstones and mineral specimens", and names the main gem-collecting counties as Alexander (emeralds and hiddenite), Macon (rubies, sapphires and garnets) and Mitchell (emeralds and aquamarine). NCpedia dates the three emerald discoveries to Alexander County in 1874, Mitchell County in 1890 and Cleveland County in 1897, and records a 1,869-carat crystal found in 2003 near Statesville — thought to be the largest ever found in North America.

The North Carolina General Assembly adopted emerald as the official state precious stone under Session Laws 1973, Chapter 136, effective 28 June 1973, the day the National Gem Show opened in Charlotte, per the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The same department records that the Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences acquired four exceptionally large emeralds in 2012, all from the same property, three found on the same day.

NCpedia also records the Carolina Queen at 18.88 carats, the Empress Caroline at 858 carats, and the Carolina Emperor as a cut stone of 64.82 carats — styled after an emerald once owned by Catherine the Great and displayed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The Carolina Prince, at 7.85 carats, sold for $500,000, which works out at $63,694 per carat. That is the most useful single American data point in this article: a documented sale of a documented stone, with weight and price both published.

Emerald Country in North Carolina, County by County

North Carolina has 100 counties, and a small number of them carry the state's gem geology. If you are planning a trip around emeralds rather than a purchase, these are the ones that matter — plus one disambiguation that catches people out.

That last row answers a question people genuinely search: what county is Columbia, NC in? It is Tyrrell County, per NCpedia's Tyrrell County entry, which also records the 110,000-acre Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge established in 1990 and one of the last large black bear habitats on the eastern seaboard. Good for birding and fishing; geologically irrelevant to emeralds. If you were planning a gem trip and typed "Columbia", you want Hiddenite in Alexander County instead.

Digging for one yourself

The Department of Natural and Cultural Resources' highway marker entry for Hiddenite records that the Emerald and Hiddenite Mining Company formed in 1881 and employed roughly 100 workers by 1885; that the largest emerald found there was a 1,438-carat crystal now owned by Tiffany and Company; and that the Emerald Hollow Mine at Hiddenite remains the only US emerald mine open to the public for gem searching. The same entry notes hiddenite itself was valued at "$100 or more per carat" when William Earl Hidden identified it in 1880 — a figure from 1880, quoted here as history, not as a price.

Where Satellite Mineral Data Fits

Prices are downstream of supply, and supply is downstream of what gets found. Emerald mineralisation sits in specific structural settings — the contact zones between beryllium-bearing pegmatites and chromium-bearing host rock — and those settings leave surface expressions that multispectral and hyperspectral satellite imagery can pick out over large licence areas before anyone puts a rig on the ground.

That is the work Farmonaut does for exploration teams. Our satellite based mineral detection platform screens licence blocks for alteration signatures and structural targets, so a field programme starts on the highest-ranked ground rather than a grid. For teams that need to go from a screening pass to a drill plan, our satellite driven 3D mineral prospectivity mapping deliverable adds depth-resolved prospectivity surfaces and interpreted geology.

Two things this cannot do, stated plainly: it cannot tell you the grade of a stone, and it cannot value one. Satellite screening narrows where to look. Grading and valuation stay with a laboratory and an appraiser.

Map your licence block: mining.farmonaut.com
Draw your area of interest and get a first-pass target ranking without ground disturbance.

If you want a scoped assessment for an emerald or coloured-stone licence, request a quote from our mining team, or contact Farmonaut directly with questions about coverage and data sources. For the extraction-side picture, our companion piece on earth-mined emerald mining practice covers what changes on the ground.

A Verification Checklist That Outlives Any Price

Every figure on this page will age. This sequence will not. Work through it in order — each step is a gate, and skipping one invalidates the ones after it.

1. Get a laboratory report before a price. Identification, origin determination and clarity-enhancement grade. A stone without one is not priceable.
2. Name the value type in writing. Insurance replacement, fair market, or liquidation. State it before the appraiser starts, not after.
3. Check the appraiser's credential. The American Society of Appraisers publishes AM, ASA and Master Gemologist Appraiser designations for gems and jewellery.
4. Demand the comparables. Which sales, what dates, what adjustments. If none exist at your weight, the report should say so in its limiting conditions.
5. Anchor to the published wholesale print. Pull the most recent Kagem parcel average from the Gemfields auction update page and note its date. If your valuation implies a rough value wildly out of line with it, ask why.
6. Check the export-duty position on the day you transact. The 15% Zambian duty has been suspended, reinstated and suspended again since 2019.
7. Re-date everything annually. Rough auction averages moved from $160.78 to $146.08 per carat between September 2025 and May 2026. A price memo without a date on it is worthless.

FAQ

What is the current Zambian emerald price per carat?

For rough, the published benchmark is Gemfields' realised auction average: USD 146.08 per carat for higher-quality Kagem parcels in the auction closing 21 May 2026, and USD 7.46 per carat for commercial-quality parcels in the auction closing 5 December 2025. For cut stones there is no index — see the method above. Gemfields publishes each new result on its auction update page, so check there for a figure fresher than these.

What is a 13-carat Zambian emerald worth?

There is no published per-carat figure for that weight. Build it from three inputs: a laboratory report confirming Zambian origin and enhancement grade, a set of comparable public auction results within roughly 20% of the weight from the past 24 months, and a stated value type. An appraiser who gives you a number without those three has not done the work.

Why is a 70-carat emerald harder to value than a 13-carat one?

The comparable set may be empty. Kagem's 2024 output of 40.3 million carats of emerald and beryl included 159,351 carats of premium emerald — 0.40%. Stones of 70 carats at premium grade are a small fraction of that, and most large-stone transactions are private and unpublished.

Are Zambian emeralds better than Colombian ones?

Different, not better. Zambian material is generally described as bluish-green with fewer inclusions on average; Colombian material as warmer green. Price follows the individual stone's colour, clarity and enhancement grade, plus the buyer's preference — not the country label on its own. Origin determination still matters because it is a stated fact on a laboratory report that buyers pay for.

Are there emeralds in the United States?

Yes — North Carolina holds the only significant emerald deposits in North America, in Alexander, Mitchell and Cleveland Counties. The state adopted emerald as its official precious stone effective 28 June 1973. The 1,869-carat crystal found near Statesville in 2003 is thought to be the largest ever found on the continent.

Where can I dig for emeralds in North Carolina?

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources records the Emerald Hollow Mine at Hiddenite, Alexander County, as the only US emerald mine open to the public for gem searching. Check the operator directly for opening season and fees before travelling.

What county is Columbia, North Carolina in?

Tyrrell County — Columbia is the county seat. Tyrrell was formed in 1729, covers 389.04 square miles on the southern shore of Albemarle Sound, and had a 2020 population of 3,245. It has no emerald deposits.

What Would Change These Numbers

Three things would move Zambian emerald prices meaningfully from the position described here, and each has a specific place to watch.

• Auction sell-through and realised averages. The May 2026 higher-quality auction cleared 99% of carats offered but at a lower average than September 2025 — strong demand at a softer price. Two consecutive auctions moving the same way is a trend; one is noise. Watch the auction update page.
• The Zambian export duty. A reinstatement of the 15% duty adds directly to landed cost for importers and pressures mine-gate economics.
• Supply discipline at Kagem. Gemfields has previously suspended and restarted mining points in response to market conditions; the half-yearly operational updates are where those decisions are disclosed.

The durable lesson is narrower than any of those. Emerald has no fix, no futures curve and no daily print. What it has is a small set of published wholesale averages, a handful of documented cut-stone sales, and a professional appraisal process. Use all three, date every number you write down, and re-check the sources rather than the summaries. That method works whatever the price does.