State gold depositories

Strip the rhetoric and a state bullion depository is a custody arrangement created by statute. The law names a host, usually an existing constitutional office such as a comptroller, treasurer, or auditor, and gives that office authority to hold gold and silver on behalf of the state, its agencies, its political subdivisions, and in the wider versions, private depositors. Around that core sit the ordinary provisions of any custody business: who may open an account, what fees may be charged, how metal is audited, and what a depositor gets back and in what form.

Two further features appear in the more ambitious drafts. One is a transactional layer, a card or an electronic system that lets a depositor spend against metal on deposit. The other is a reserve function, a direction that the state itself hold some portion of its own money in metal rather than in financial instruments. These are separable. A bill can create the vault without the payment rail, or direct the reserve holding without creating a vault at all.

Three claims attach themselves to depository legislation and none of them follows from it.

It does not make the metal legal tender. Custody and monetary status are different subjects in different statutes. A depository act can be silent on tender, and the first one enacted in the United States was. Where the two arrive together it is because a later bill added the tender language, not because one implies the other.

It does not create a tax exemption. Whether a purchase of bullion is taxable is decided in the revenue title, and a depository act does not go there. Some depository states had their exemption for years beforehand and the two have no relationship beyond appearing in the same news cycle.

It does not, by itself, produce a vault. An authorization is permission plus a plan. Between the authorization and an open facility sit appropriations, a vendor, a physical site, an audit regime, and a custodian willing to take the liability. Legislative records show several authorizations that never reached any of that, and this site classifies a state by what its record establishes rather than by what a bill contemplated.

The list below is the set of states whose record carries a depository, read out of the records when this page is built. 1 of the 24 states this site has researched so far, out of 50 nationwide, qualifies today.

Texas is the case where the sequence is unambiguous. House Bill 483 of the 84th Legislature created the Texas Bullion Depository as a division of the Comptroller's office in 2015, to hold and administer bullion and specie for the state, its agencies, its subdivisions, and private depositors. That act made nothing legal tender. It provided custody, and Texas already had a broad sales tax exemption on coins and bullion at the time, unrelated to it. A decade later House Bill 1056 attached legal tender recognition and a transactional currency to the same chapter of the Government Code, on a staged commencement that had not fully arrived when the Texas record was last checked. The Texas page carries both acts with their dates.

A list that short is a claim about this record and not a claim about the country. It reflects a research set in which most states have not been read, and it will grow if a state already carrying a depository turns out to be among the unresearched ones. The about page gives the current coverage.

These are the measures across every state file whose long title, the legislature's own one line statement of what the bill does, mentions a depository. Enacted ones first, then the ones that did not make it. The gap between the two groups is the point of this page. Each row below links to the state's own record, where the bill's full summary, its dates, and the documents behind it are set out at length; nothing here repeats them.

The heading says what the query says and no more. A bill that a state record discusses in prose without filing it as a measure will not appear below, and at least one does: the 2020 Wyoming depository bill in the section after this one is described in the Wyoming record and is absent from this table for exactly that reason. Read the two tables as a complete index of the depository measures on file here, not as a census of every depository bill ever introduced in the United States.

Read those against each other and they are not the same kind of law. One creates a state operated facility inside a constitutional office. The other builds a regulatory frame around privately accredited vaults, so that a payment system vendor has somewhere to hold metal. The second kind is often reported as a state depository. It is not one, and the Arkansas record sets out what the enacted text does and does not require of the state.

Arizona is the one state in this table that tried twice. Senate Bill 1096 passed the Senate 17 to 12 in 2025 and a House committee reported it favorably, but the House itself never scheduled a floor vote and the official record closes with "Held in House." House Bill 2123 carried the same idea into 2026, cleared two committees and a Committee of the Whole, then failed on the House floor 24 to 28 and failed again 26 to 28 after a motion to reconsider. A second filing under a new number is the ordinary way a sponsor keeps an idea alive across sessions, not evidence the idea gained support.

New Hampshire took the opposite approach, folding a depository into the same bill as a legal tender declaration rather than filing either alone. House Bill 1674 never reached a passing vote on either question. The House committee recommended interim study instead of passage, the full House adopted that motion, and the committee closed its file within the year rating the bill unfit for future consideration. Bundling the two ideas together did not carry the bill any further than Arizona's narrower attempts got on their own.

Two patterns produce a state being described as having a depository when it does not.

A reserve holding is not a vault. Wyoming has been through both halves of this, and the later half is the documented one. Senate File 96 of 2025 directed the state treasurer to hold at least ten million dollars of specie within the permanent mineral trust fund the state already runs, as an investment diversification measure, on a delayed commencement. That is an instruction about a portfolio, not about a building.

The earlier half was a 2020 bill that would have created a state operated bullion depository as a division of the auditor's office, and that died without ever reaching an introduction vote. The Wyoming record describes that bill in its legislative history but does not carry it as a measure, so no document is filed against it anywhere in these records and none is offered here. The two efforts are sometimes summarized together as progress toward a Wyoming depository. No Wyoming depository exists, and the Wyoming record carries the divergence note that says so.

A resolution is not a statute. A chamber can resolve that it supports an idea, unanimously and at length, without creating an agency, appropriating a dollar, or binding the next legislature. Tennessee is the case where this site declines to describe the record at all: the General Assembly's own bill system refused connections during verification and the aggregator mirrors were unavailable, so the Tennessee page leaves that state's depository and legal tender bills undescribed rather than citing pages nobody here could read. That is an account of a retrieval that failed, so there is no document to cite for it, and citing a mirror instead would be the precise move the paragraph exists to refuse.

• Which office hosts it, and does that office have an appropriation for it? A division of an existing agency with no funding line is a name in a statute.
• Is the vault operated by the state or by an accredited private custodian the state merely regulates? Both can be lawful. Only one is a state depository.
• May a private individual open an account, or is the authority limited to the state and its subdivisions? The wider drafts and the narrow ones read alike in a headline.
• Has the commencement date arrived? Depository and legal tender provisions travel together in recent bills, and recent bills stage their effective dates.

The legislative wave guide tracks how often that last question is the one that matters, and the methodology page sets out how this site decides that a measure is in force rather than merely signed.