Diamond Price Per Gram: What a Gram of Diamond Actually Costs

Last updated: September 2026

One gram of diamond is five carats, and VYKA does not stock a five-carat stone. What we do stock, and price openly, starts at SAR 2,290 (AED 2,240) for a complete certified one-carat lab-grown ring and SAR 8,120 (AED 7,950) for the natural equivalent, 18K gold setting included, VAT and customs already paid. Those are live catalogue floors verified on 5 September 2026 against 1,735 ring variants, not estimates, not starting-from teasers. If you arrived here typing a per-gram question, this page gives the conversion in one line, explains why no jeweller publishes a diamond rate the way the souq publishes a gold rate, and then prices the weights people actually buy, so you leave with a real number instead of a shrug.

One carat is exactly 0.2 g, so one gram is 5.00 ct. Prices are for a complete ring with VAT and customs included, verified 5 September 2026 against 1,735 live ring variants.

One gram is five carats: the conversion

A metric carat is exactly 200 milligrams, which is 0.2 grams, fixed by the fourth General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris in October 1907, and it is subdivided into 100 points of 2 milligrams each. Divide one gram by 0.2 and you get 5.00 ct. That is the whole conversion, and it runs both ways: multiply carats by 0.2 for grams, grams by 5 for carats.

One distinction rides on that. Five carats in a single stone and five carats of total carat weight, spread across a centre stone and its side stones, weigh the same gram but are different specifications. Every weight on this page means a single stone unless it says otherwise; a total-weight brief we answer against specific stones.

A 0.30 ct stone weighs 0.06 g. One carat is 0.20 g. A 1.50 ct is 0.30 g, a 2.00 ct is 0.40 g, a 2.50 ct is 0.50 g, and a 3.00 ct is 0.60 g. No ring on the ladder below reaches a full gram: volume stock stops at 3.08 ct, which is 0.62 g, and there is no 5.00 ct stone in the catalogue at all. Two exceptions sit far above it: the catalogue holds a pair of 10.00 ct lab-grown stones, 2.00 g each, identical in weight and 4.3 times apart in price, listed at AED 27,474 and AED 117,858. That gap is the plainest demonstration we own that weight does not set a diamond's price. They are single stones, quoted one by one against their own grading reports rather than rungs on a ring ladder, and like every weight here priced by the carat, never by the gram.

That exactness is recent. The United States adopted the metric carat in 1913, the United Kingdom in 1914. Before the 1907 conference local carats ran from roughly 187 to about 215 milligrams depending on the trading city, which is why standardising it reached the agenda of a conference that otherwise governs the international system of units.

One spelling trap matters in the Gulf. Carat is a weight for gemstones; karat is a gold purity out of 24. Both are written carat in British usage, so 21 carat gold on a souq board is a purity, not a stone weight.

Why no one publishes a diamond rate per gram

Gold is fungible. One gram of 21K is interchangeable with any other gram of 21K, so its value is weight times purity times a public spot price. Nothing is left to appraise, which is why a rate can be printed on a board and refreshed through the day.

Diamonds are not fungible. Two stones of identical weight can differ on cut quality, colour, clarity, fluorescence and grading laboratory, and those differences move the price by a multiple, not a rounding. Carat is one input out of four; the other three set the per-carat rate the weight is multiplied by. A published diamond rate per gram would have to assume every stone is the same stone, and no two are.

Grams price a commodity; carats index a graded object. That non-fungibility, with wide bid and offer spreads, is the standard reason diamonds never became an exchange-traded asset class the way gold did.

The trade's nearest equivalent to a rate board is the Rapaport Diamond Report, the benchmark wholesale list. It is quoted per carat, not per gram, and banded by weight and quality grade rather than as a single continuous number. Retailers discount against it and add their own costs, but even that list cannot tell you what your stone is worth until it has been graded.

So if a shop quotes you a diamond rate per gram, they are pricing something else. Usually the gold. Occasionally a simulant.

The gold souq habit, and where diamonds break it

In Riyadh and Dubai, buying gold jewellery is a per-gram transaction and everyone knows the arithmetic. Diamonds break it: the metal in a piece is sold by the gram, the stone set into it never is. In the UAE, gold is quoted in dirhams per gram by purity, 24K, 22K, 21K and 18K, with the Dubai Gold and Jewellery Group publishing the benchmark that shop boards track. The formula in general use is the per-gram rate times the weight, plus a making charge, plus 5% VAT, which the UAE introduced in January 2018.

The making charge is the line that varies, and the line to interrogate. It is quoted either as a flat amount per gram or as a percentage of the gold value, with handmade and Jadau work carrying far more than machine-made. We print no rates for it here, because we cannot verify another shop's numbers the way we verify our own. Ask for it in writing, for your piece, on the day; it is negotiable, and Gulf buyers negotiate it.

Saudi Arabia runs the same convention in riyals, with two differences that matter. The cultural default purity is 21K, meaning 87.5% gold, hallmarked 875, rather than the 22K that dominates in South Asia. And the tax line is heavier: Saudi VAT has stood at 15% since 1 July 2020, raised from the 5% introduced in January 2018, so the same piece carries triple the UAE tax rate. Hallmarking is not one of them: it is mandatory on both sides of the border. In Saudi Arabia SASO requires the fineness stamp, the manufacturer's mark and assay identification on the piece itself; in the UAE the same duty sits with the federal precious metals regime, with Dubai Central Laboratory the assay office for pieces hallmarked in Dubai, where our rings are built. So the stamp is a check you can make in either market. No authority in either country publishes a making charge, which is why it must be asked for rather than assumed.

The result is a culture of self-verification: weigh the piece, read the board, check the stamp, reconstruct the quote yourself.

Then a diamond enters the same piece and the verification stops working, because the metal has a published per-gram rate and the stone has no published rate of any kind. That asymmetry is where opacity gets into a Gulf jewellery quote, and it is why searching for a diamond price per gram is rational: an attempt to restore a check gold gives you and diamonds do not. The honest replacement is not a fabricated rate board but an itemised quote plus a grading report you verify with the laboratory rather than with the shop.

What the weights people actually buy cost

Every figure below is a complete ring: a certified centre stone in an 18K gold setting, all-in, with VAT and customs duty already inside the price. The lower number is the live catalogue floor, the cheapest ring we currently list at that weight. The upper number is the 75th percentile, meaning three in four rings at that weight sit at or below it. Both were verified on 5 September 2026 against 1,735 live ring variants. Riyal figures are converted at 1 AED to SAR 1.0211.

Lab-grown, complete ring: 1.00 ct runs SAR 2,290 to 5,240, which is AED 2,240 to 5,130; 1.50 ct runs SAR 2,790 to 6,220, or AED 2,730 to 6,090; 2.00 ct runs SAR 4,480 to 7,510, or AED 4,390 to 7,350; 2.50 ct runs SAR 5,400 to 10,110, or AED 5,290 to 9,900; and 3.00 ct runs SAR 8,160 to 12,300, or AED 7,990 to 12,050.

Natural, complete ring: 1.00 ct runs SAR 8,120 to 13,730, which is AED 7,950 to 13,445; 1.50 ct runs SAR 16,250 to 32,560, or AED 15,910 to 31,890; 2.00 ct runs SAR 34,740 to 62,890, or AED 34,020 to 61,590; 2.50 ct runs SAR 44,960 to 73,100, or AED 44,030 to 71,590; and 3.00 ct runs SAR 58,900 to 84,700, or AED 57,680 to 82,950.

What is absent from that ladder matters too. The weights we hold in volume run from 0.30 ct up to 3.08 ct, but we publish from 1.00 ct upward, where we hold enough live variants for a floor and a percentile to mean anything. Below a carat we quote against a specific stone, and a lighter ring can land under the one-carat floor. The catalogue holds zero 0.50 ct lab-grown variants and zero 0.75 ct variants of any kind, so we print no price for either, and you should be sceptical of anyone who prices stock they cannot show you.

Why five carats is not five times one carat

A gram of diamond is not five times a one-carat ring, for two reasons that our own ladder shows. The first is rarity. Larger rough is exponentially scarcer, so the price per carat itself climbs as weight climbs: more carats multiplied by a higher rate. In our natural ladder the one-carat floor is SAR 8,120 and the two-carat floor is SAR 34,740. That is 4.3 times the money for twice the weight. The three-carat floor is SAR 58,900, which is 7.3 times the money for three times the weight.

The second is the threshold effect the trade calls magic sizes. Prices step at recognised thresholds, 0.90, 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00 ct among them, with further steps below a carat that we do not publish. GIA states plainly that a 0.99 ct stone is visually indistinguishable from a 1.00 ct and that the price difference between them can still be significant. The structural cause is that the Rapaport list is banded rather than continuous, with one per-carat price covering 1.00 to 1.49, another covering 1.50 to 1.99, a third covering 2.00 to 2.99, and the next band opening at 3.00. The list's own edges hard-code the jumps a retail buyer feels, which is why our 2.00 ct rung sits where it does.

Lab-grown behaves differently. Our lab ladder runs from SAR 2,290 at one carat to SAR 8,160 at three carats, 3.6 times the money for three times the weight, close to linear, because lab supply is not rarity-constrained the same way. A lab price and a natural price at the same weight are not comparable either: different materials, not a discount on each other.

A 5.00 ct natural is not five times a one-carat, and it is not 1.67 times a three-carat. It sits well above the top of this page, and we will not print a number for it: every figure here is a live catalogue price, and we hold no 5.00 ct stone in either material. The two 10.00 ct lab-grown pieces named earlier are a different material at a different weight, not a substitute.

The practical takeaway: if you are flexible on weight, ask what we hold just under a band edge. The diameter difference is a fraction of a millimetre and the price difference is real money. The edges worth shading are those just below 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00 ct.

The other one gram ring: the light everyday ring

There is a second buyer typing the same six words. In Gulf English, a one gram diamond ring usually does not mean a five-carat stone. It means a light everyday ring where the gold weighs a gram or two and the diamonds are small. In India the phrase one gram gold jewellery has drifted further and now generally means gold-plated imitation, a meaning that travels with the workforce across the Gulf. So the same six words carry a unit question and a budget question, which deserve different answers.

VYKA does not sell plated or imitation jewellery, so if that is what you meant, we are not your shop. Every setting we build is solid 18K gold, hand-built to order in Dubai, around a certified centre stone. We meet the budget honestly rather than by changing the material. The lightest entry point we publish is the one-carat lab-grown ring at SAR 2,290, which is AED 2,240, complete and all-in. Below that we go smaller on the stone rather than thinner on the truth, quoting a specific certified centre against your number.

If your budget is set the way gold budgets are set, as a figure rather than a specification, tell us the figure in riyals or dirhams and we will build to it.

How to read a diamond quote the way you read a gold quote

You can read a diamond quote with the habits you use on gold: any honest quote decomposes into three lines.

The metal line is grams multiplied by the published per-gram rate for the stated purity. Ask for the gold weight and the karatage in writing, because both are checkable against a public number and a hallmark.

The stone line is carats multiplied by a per-carat price, and it should arrive with a grading report: the laboratory, the report number, and the cut, colour and clarity grades. The report number matters most: you verify it on the laboratory's own website, a check the shop does not control.

The making charge line should be itemised, per gram or as a percentage of the metal value, and it is negotiable in the souq for the same reason it should be visible online.

If a seller will not split those three lines, that is your answer. A single number with no metal weight, no report number and no making charge is not a price, it is a position.

VYKA prices are deliberately all-in, which is not the opposite of itemised: ask, and we will show you the three lines behind the single figure. The independent record is there too: Judge.me holds 23 real reviews at an average of 4.83.

Currencies across the Gulf, and what all-in includes

This page leads in riyals because most people asking this question are in Saudi Arabia, and shows dirhams alongside because the rings are made in Dubai. The riyal and dirham cross is stable at 1 AED to SAR 1.0211, which is why the two ladders track each other.

We quote elsewhere in the Gulf too. Taking the one-carat lab-grown floor of AED 2,240 as the worked example, that is roughly QAR 2,220, BHD 229, OMR 235 or KWD 187 at today's crosses. The natural one-carat floor of AED 7,950 works out at roughly QAR 7,880, BHD 814, OMR 832 or KWD 664 at the same crosses. One caveat on the Kuwaiti figures: since June 2007 the dinar has been managed against a basket of currencies whose composition the central bank does not disclose, rather than held at a fixed rate, so treat a dinar conversion as today's number rather than a permanent one.

All-in means what it says, and in this region that needs saying, because so many quotes are built the other way. The figure on the product page includes VAT. It includes customs duty, which VYKA absorbs rather than passing on. There is no further charge collected when the parcel arrives. The price you see is the price you pay, delivered.

That matters when you compare us against a counter quote. A souq price is a gold rate plus a making charge plus tax, added up at the counter; an online price from outside the region is often a stone price with duty and tax still waiting behind it. Neither compares to a single all-in figure until you finish the addition yourself.

What you get, and what we will not do

Rings are hand-built to order in Dubai rather than pulled from a tray, which is why the ladder describes weights and bands rather than finished pieces. Centre stones arrive with grading reports, and the report travels with the ring.

Getting a real number out of us takes one message: a budget in your own currency, a carat weight, or a photograph of a ring you saw elsewhere. If the weight you want is on the ladder above, you already have the answer. If it is not, because it sits below one carat, between the rungs, or at a special-order size like the 5.00 ct that started this page, we quote against a specific stone and its report.

Four things we will not do on this query, worth naming because they are what makes these pages feel like bait. We will not quote a diamond rate per gram, because no such rate exists. We will not price a 0.50 ct lab-grown or a 0.75 ct stone, because we hold neither. We will not steer you to moissanite as the affordable version of the diamond you asked about; it is a different material, and answering a diamond question with a substitute is the oldest trick on this term. And we will not promise you a lifetime warranty, on this ring or any other; what we stand behind is written down at the point of sale.

Every VYKA price on this page was verified against live stock on 5 September 2026. They are catalogue floors and percentiles, not estimates, and they move as stone supply moves. The figures we do not set, the Gulf conversions among them, are today's numbers. When ours move, we re-verify and republish rather than leaving an old number up to catch traffic.

Frequently asked questions

How many carats is one gram of diamond?

Exactly five. A metric carat has been fixed at 200 milligrams, or 0.2 grams, since the fourth General Conference on Weights and Measures met in Paris in October 1907, and it divides into 100 points of 2 milligrams each. So one gram is 5.00 ct, half a gram is 2.50 ct, and a one-carat stone weighs 0.2 g. Five carats in one stone is not the same specification as five carats of total carat weight spread across a centre stone and its side stones, and VYKA stocks no 5.00 ct single stone in either case. The weights convert, but the prices do not: you cannot double a 2.50 ct price to reach a gram, because the price per carat itself rises with size.

What does one gram of diamond cost in Saudi Arabia?

There is no honest single figure. A gram is five carats: five carats in a single stone is a weight VYKA does not stock at all, and five carats of total carat weight, made up of a centre stone plus smaller stones, is a different specification again, which we quote against specific stones rather than by weight. The largest weight we publish a verified price band for is 3.00 ct, which is 0.6 g, well under a gram: it runs SAR 58,900 to 84,700 natural, or AED 57,680 to 82,950, and SAR 8,160 to 12,300 lab-grown, or AED 7,990 to 12,050. Those are three-carat prices, not gram prices, and a five-carat costs a multiple of a three-carat rather than 1.67 times it, so we quote that weight per individual stone against its grading report. The only larger stones on our books are two 10.00 ct lab-grown pieces, 2.00 g each, identical in weight and 4.3 times apart in price, listed at AED 27,474 and AED 117,858, which is the plainest demonstration we own that weight does not set a diamond's price. Each is quoted as an individual stone against its own grading report, by the carat and against its grades, never per gram, and neither is comparable with the natural band above, because lab-grown and natural are different materials. Halving AED 27,474 does not produce a price for a gram.

Is there a published diamond rate per gram, like the daily gold rate?

No, and there never has been. Gold is fungible: one gram of 21K equals any other gram of 21K, so weight times purity times spot price gives the value and a board rate works. Diamonds are not fungible, because two stones of identical weight differ on cut, colour, clarity, fluorescence and grading laboratory. Carat is only one input of four. The trade's nearest equivalent is the Rapaport Diamond Report, which is quoted per carat and banded by weight and grade, never per gram. Anyone quoting a diamond rate per gram is pricing the gold, or a simulant.

What is the cheapest certified diamond ring VYKA sells?

Our cheapest published price is SAR 2,290, which is AED 2,240, for a complete one-carat lab-grown ring: certified centre stone, 18K gold setting, VAT and customs duty already included. That is the floor at one carat rather than the floor of the whole catalogue: below a carat we stock from 0.30 ct and quote against a specific certified stone rather than a published band, so a lighter ring can land under it. The natural equivalent starts at SAR 8,120, or AED 7,950. Both published floors were verified on 5 September 2026 against 1,735 live ring variants, and both are genuine listed prices rather than starting-from estimates.

Does a 1 gram diamond ring mean a gold-plated ring?

Often that is what the searcher means. In India, one gram gold jewellery generally refers to gold-plated imitation, and the phrase travels with the Gulf's South Asian workforce, so it usually describes a light everyday ring rather than a five-carat stone. VYKA does not sell plated or imitation pieces. Every setting is solid 18K gold, hand-built to order in Dubai, around a certified centre stone. If you did mean the weight, the conversion is fixed: one gram is exactly 5.00 ct, and VYKA does not stock a five-carat stone. The lightest complete ring we publish is a one-carat lab-grown at SAR 2,290, or AED 2,240, one carat being 0.2 g rather than a gram; the natural equivalent starts at SAR 8,120, or AED 7,950. Both are published floors at one carat rather than the least we can build: below a carat we quote against a specific certified stone.

Why is a two-carat ring more than twice the price of a one-carat?

Two effects stack. Larger rough is exponentially scarcer, so the price per carat itself rises with weight, and the Rapaport wholesale list is banded rather than continuous, with separate per-carat bands running 1.00 to 1.49, 1.50 to 1.99 and 2.00 to 2.99, which hard-codes steps at magic sizes such as 1.00, 1.50 and 2.00 ct. Our own natural floor shows it plainly: SAR 8,120 at one carat against SAR 34,740 at two carats, which is 4.3 times the money for twice the weight. Lab-grown climbs more gently, from SAR 2,290 at one carat to SAR 8,160 at three, because lab supply is not rarity-constrained in the same way.

Do your prices include VAT and customs duty?

Yes. Every VYKA price on this page and on our product pages is all-in: VAT is included, and customs duty is included because VYKA absorbs the duty rather than passing it on. Nothing further is collected when the ring is delivered. That is deliberate, so a Gulf buyer can compare our single number against a souq quote built as gold rate plus making charge plus tax.

Can I buy a 0.50 ct lab-grown or a 0.75 ct ring?

Not from our current catalogue. We hold zero 0.50 ct lab-grown variants and zero 0.75 ct variants of any kind, so we publish no price for either. The weights we stock in volume run from 0.30 ct to 3.08 ct, plus two 10.00 ct lab-grown stones, 2.00 g each, listed at AED 27,474 and AED 117,858 and quoted one stone at a time against their grading reports, by the carat and never by the gram, rather than as a ring size on our published ladder. One gram would be 5.00 ct, a single-stone weight we do not hold at all. Below one carat we quote against a specific certified stone rather than a published band.