The United States left the gold standard in 1971.
Last checked · Aug 26, 2026
What the record actually says
On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon directed the Treasury Secretary to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. Executive Order 6102 had already required people and businesses in the continental United States to deliver specified gold coin, bullion, and gold certificates by 1 May 1933, subject to explicit exceptions. The United States' departure from gold therefore occurred in stages, and saying it simply left the gold standard in 1971 collapses legally and economically distinct measures.
Why it matters to ordinary people
The one-date slogan can make monetary exit rights look like a dispute only among governments and banks. The 1933 order reached people's property directly, but not without exceptions; precision shows who was constrained, when, and how.
How it is usually mis-stated
“Nixon ended the gold standard.”
This compresses the 1971 convertibility suspension and the 1933 domestic gold-delivery order into one event, and it can erase the 1933 order's explicit exceptions.
The primary record
Qualifies · Aug 15, 1971
Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: The Challenge of Peace15 August 1971 address; directive to the Treasury Secretary on gold convertibility
Qualifies · Apr 5, 1933
Executive Order 6102: Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold CertificatesSections 2-4; delivery requirement, deadline, compensation, and exceptions
The strongest account that disagrees
institutional
The administration presented the 1971 measure as a temporary defense of the dollar and monetary stability, not as a declaration that every United States gold arrangement began or ended on that date.
Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: The Challenge of Peace
Corrections to this claim
Aug 26, 2026 · Evidence revised · verdict unchanged (Oversimplified)
The first public worked example was not ledger-derived and linked Executive Order 6102 to 1 FR 1, an unrelated 1936 Federal Register page. This reviewed row replaces that citation with the order text, removes the unsupported 1974 restoration assertion, preserves the order's explicit exceptions, and replaces the seeded identifier with the deterministic ledger id.
A claim may only be marked verified, verified with precision, or false when at least one primary record supports that verdict. Commentary and analysis, however respected, never settle a factual claim. A claim about monetary history or monetary theory may not reach a settled status until the strongest opposing account has been recorded, or until the search for one has been described and come back empty. A status change is recorded as a dated correction on the claim and every published piece that relied on it is re-checked.