What It Costs to Explore for Gold

The numbers investors need to judge whether a raise is sized like a discovery engine or a spending plan, benchmarked across the recommended exploration programmes of 424 gold projects.

Every junior gold company that raises money frames it the same way: a budget to advance the project. But how much should a gold exploration programme cost, where should the money go, and what does an efficient drill budget look like? We pulled the recommended programmes from the technical reports of 424 gold projects to build the benchmarks below.

A $25M gold programme is top-decile

The typical recommended programme is $4.4M. Spend climbs fast at the top: only 30% of programmes exceed $10M and just 10% clear $25M.

The shaded band is the middle 50% of programmes ($1.7M to $11.7M). Size a raise against it: a “$50M exploration budget” is a statistical outlier, usually development capital wearing an exploration label.

Exploration is a drilling business

Drilling is the largest itemised line at 24%, and another 52% sits in mixed, multi-activity programmes that are almost always drill-led. Combined, well over three quarters of every gold exploration dollar chases the drill bit.

A programme light on drilling metres is buying time, not testing a discovery. The share of budget in the ground is the tell.

≈ $200 a metre: the number nobody publishes for juniors

Across gold drill programmes, the median all-in cost is $204 per metre, with the middle 50% running $150 to $300/m. Divide any drill budget by its planned metres and compare.

Far above $300/m hints at padding, deep holes or hard ground; below $150/m is often optimistic. It is the fastest reality-check on an exploration raise.

Spend rises 4× from early exploration to pre-feasibility

Programme size tracks project stage, a readable proxy for how far a story has advanced. Early-exploration budgets cluster near $1M; once a project has a defined resource, medians step up to the $5 to $6M range and rise again into pre-feasibility.

The big money moment for a junior is proving that first resource: budgets step up 4× when it happens. But after that they flatten: Resource Update, PEA and PFS programmes all cluster in the $5 to $7M band. A company past that resource milestone asking for $15M+ isn’t buying “the next stage.” The numbers don’t support that story.

The median programme buys ~17,400 metres

A typical gold programme budgets ~17,400 m of drilling, with the middle 50% running 7,000 to 48,000 m. At ~$200/m that is roughly $3.6M, most of a $4.4M programme. The numbers reconcile.

Reverse-engineer any raise: planned metres × ~$200/m should land near 80% of the stated budget (the remaining 20% covers reports, permits, geophysics and admin). If drilling isn’t soaking up most of the raise, the money isn’t chasing discovery.

Four checks on any exploration raise

The numbers above are only useful if you can point them at a specific company. Four one-line tests any non-mining investor can run against a press release or prospectus:

None of these tests requires mining expertise. They’re arithmetic against a corpus-wide benchmark, and they catch most of what’s worth pausing on in a junior’s raise.