My Electronics Repair Shop Has a Lot of Old Circuit Boards, What Are They Worth?
We get this call all the time. A repair shop owner has been pulling boards out of broken equipment for months or years, stacking them in the back room, and they've finally decided to do something with them. They've heard there's gold in electronics. They want to know what they're sitting on.
Here's the problem: most of what repair shops accumulate isn't worth refining.
It's All About the Date
If your boards came from anything made after 1990, you're probably looking at material with minimal precious metal content. Manufacturers figured out decades ago how to build circuit boards using tiny amounts of gold—just enough plating on specific contacts to make the connections work. Modern electronics use surface-mount components and manufacturing processes that require far less precious metal than older equipment.
Before 1990? That's different. Electronics from the '70s and '80s used gold and silver liberally because that's what worked reliably. Nobody had perfected the alternatives yet. Those older boards can actually have enough recoverable metal to make refining economically viable.
But here's where it gets frustrating for repair shops: even old consumer electronics don't cut it.
Consumer Boards Are Worthless
That stereo receiver from 1985 sitting in your pile? Not worth refining. The VCR from 1988? Same story. Consumer products were built to a price point even back then. Manufacturers couldn't load up circuit boards with expensive precious metals when they were competing on retail shelf prices.
What actually works for refining is industrial equipment, telecommunications gear, older server hardware, specialized testing instruments. Equipment that was built for performance first, where cost was a secondary concern. Those boards used precious metals because reliability mattered more than saving a few dollars per unit.
Most repair shops don't see much of that equipment. They're fixing modern consumer devices—laptops, monitors, phones, tablets. All post-1990, all consumer-grade. The boards from that work have trace amounts of precious metals at best.
The 2,000-Pound Minimum
Specialty Metals requires 2,000 pounds for circuit board refining. That threshold exists because precious metal recovery is an expensive, multi-stage chemical process. Below certain volumes, the operational costs exceed whatever value you might recover from the material.
Most repair shops never accumulate anywhere close to 2,000 pounds of qualifying boards. And even if they hit that weight, it doesn't matter if the boards are modern consumer-grade material. You could have 5,000 pounds of post-1990 laptop motherboards—still not worth processing.
Why We Can't Quote Prices
Precious metal markets move constantly. Gold prices shift throughout the trading day. Silver and palladium do the same. Any dollar figure we quoted today would be outdated by tomorrow.
Beyond that, not all circuit boards are equal even if they're from the same era. A pound of 1982 telecom switching equipment and a pound of 1989 consumer electronics weigh the same but contain vastly different amounts of recoverable metals. We evaluate based on actual composition and current market prices, not generalized estimates.
What Repair Shops Actually Have
Look honestly at what you've accumulated. If you're running a typical electronics repair business, you're working on modern equipment. The boards you're pulling came from devices manufactured well after 1990. They're consumer-grade. That material doesn't meet the criteria for refining, regardless of quantity.
Every once in a while, a repair shop gets called out to handle older industrial equipment or does a facility cleanout that includes legacy systems. Those situations might produce boards worth evaluating. But that's the exception. Most of what comes through repair shops is recent consumer electronics.
The Internet Makes It Confusing
There's a lot of misleading content out there about circuit board values. People see videos of someone extracting gold flakes from boards using household chemicals and assume all their material is valuable. Or they find online buyers advertising per-pound pricing that sounds attractive but only applies to specific high-grade material these buyers rarely actually receive.
Professional refining operates on different economics than hobbyist recovery or scrap yard middlemen. We're looking for material that genuinely contains enough precious metals to justify industrial-scale chemical processing. That's a much narrower category than most people realize.
We'd rather be straight with repair shops from the start than have them ship us material we'll ultimately reject. It wastes their time and ours. The reality is that most circuit boards from modern electronics repair work don't have refining value, and accumulating 2,000 pounds of qualifying pre-1990 industrial boards is harder than it sounds.
If you think you have a valuable collection of circuit boards, contact Specialty Metals at 800-426-2344 or email sales@specialtymetals.com. Include pictures of your items for a more accurate assessment. The team at Specialty Metals can provide advice on the best way to proceed, ensuring you get the best return on your materials.
