Maryland gold and silver money law

Maryland Tax-General Article Section 11-214.1 has exempted sales of precious metal bullion or coins priced above 1,000 dollars from sales and use tax for years before this batch's research began, a floor-style partial exemption. House Bill 352 of 2025, the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act, added a second, stacked condition on top of that price floor: the sale also had to occur at the Baltimore Convention Center. Enacted as Chapter 604 and signed May 20, 2025, that change took effect at the start of Maryland's fiscal year 2026, July 1, 2025. For an ordinary retail buyer anywhere in Maryland outside a Baltimore Convention Center bullion show, adding that second condition amounted to a full repeal of the exemption for the following year, which is exactly how national trade press covered it at the time. Industry backlash followed, and two different bills addressed it in the 2026 session. Senate Bill 309, cross-filed with House Bill 500, repealed only the Baltimore Convention Center condition, restoring the exemption to its pre-2025 shape: a bare 1,000 dollar price floor with no location restriction. Both chambers' own official synopses of SB309 and HB500 describe the change identically, "repealing a requirement that the sale occur at the Baltimore Convention Center," naming only the one condition. A separate, more sweeping bill in the same session, House Bill 729, sponsored by Delegate Grammer and several cosponsors, would have gone further and repealed the 1,000 dollar floor as well, exactly as its own fiscal note describes; it never advanced past a committee hearing and did not pass, just as its 2025 predecessor under the same sponsor, House Bill 357, had also died in committee the year before. Governor Wes Moore signed SB309 and HB500 May 26, 2026, as Chapter 730 and Chapter 729 respectively, both effective July 1, 2026. Because that date has passed as of this record's verified date, Maryland's exemption is back to its long-standing pre-2025 form: sales and use tax does not apply to a sale of precious metal bullion or coins priced above 1,000 dollars, full stop, with no location condition and no purity threshold. Because a live dollar floor governs the exemption, this record classes Maryland as a partial exemption under the protocol's mechanical tie-break, the same classification carried by Florida, Louisiana, and Utah, though the underlying threshold and its history differ from all three.

Minimum purchase. $1,000 (the exemption applies only when the sale price exceeds, not merely equals, this amount; between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026 an additional Baltimore Convention Center location requirement also applied, repealed effective July 1, 2026)

Gold and silver are not recognized as legal tender in Maryland as of the verification date above.

Maryland has no capital gains exemption specific to precious metal bullion or coins. Gains on the sale of bullion are taxed as ordinary income under Maryland's graduated individual income tax alongside other capital gains, with no bullion-specific subtraction or credit located anywhere in the Comptroller's guidance or in the Tax-General Article.

Maryland belongs in this batch for a more complicated reason than Washington does, and the complication is the point. Maryland has long taxed most retail sales of precious metal bullion and coins except when the sale price exceeded 1,000 dollars, a floor-style partial exemption under Tax-General Section 11-214.1. In 2025, the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act, House Bill 352, added a second, stacked condition on top of that floor: the sale also had to occur at the Baltimore Convention Center. For any ordinary retail transaction, that additional condition was fatal to the exemption, since almost no bullion sale happens at a convention center. Signed May 20, 2025 and effective at the start of Maryland's fiscal year 2026, meaning July 1, 2025, this was, in substance, a repeal for a full year, and national trade press covered it exactly that way at the time.

What the brief for this batch could not have anticipated is what happened next, and how easy it would have been to get the next step wrong. Industry backlash against the 2025 change produced two different bills in the 2026 session. Senate Bill 309, cross-filed with House Bill 500, repealed only the Baltimore Convention Center condition, restoring the exemption to its long-standing pre-2025 shape: a bare 1,000 dollar floor, no location restriction. A separate bill, House Bill 729, sponsored by a different legislator, would have gone further and repealed the 1,000 dollar floor too, leaving no condition at all; its own fiscal note describes it in exactly those terms. Only the narrower pair, SB309 and HB500, passed, unanimously in both chambers, and were signed May 26, 2026, effective July 1, 2026. House Bill 729 never advanced past a committee hearing, matching the fate of its own 2025 predecessor under the same sponsor, House Bill 357, which also died in committee. Because this record's verified date falls after the July 1, 2026 effective date, Maryland's exemption today is the pre-2025 status quo restored: a 1,000 dollar price floor, nothing more and nothing less.

Confirming which of the two 2026 bills actually passed, and exactly what each one did, took real care, and is worth documenting because an earlier pass at this record reached the wrong conclusion before being corrected. A fiscal note exists describing a bill that would exempt "all such sales" of precious metal bullion or coins, full stop, with no price floor. That language belongs to House Bill 729, the bill that did not pass, not to SB309 or HB500, the bills that did. The two are easy to conflate: both concern the identical statute in the identical session, and Maryland assigns chapter numbers sequentially as bills are signed, so it is coincidental rather than meaningful that HB500 became Chapter 729, a number that closely resembles the unrelated House Bill 729's own bill number. Separately, the enrolled text of Chapter 730 (SB309) itself invites a similar misreading: at ordinary resolution its bracketed deletion of subsection (b)'s conditional clause can look like it removes the 1,000 dollar floor along with the Baltimore Convention Center condition, because the phrase "the sale price is greater than $1,000" sits inside the same bracket pair as the rest of the deleted text without its own strikethrough line drawn through it. Rendered at 600 dpi, that gap in the strikethrough is visible as exactly that, a rendering gap rather than a second deletion, and it is resolved definitively by the bill's own title-page preamble, which shows through its own edit marks that an earlier, broader version of the bill's description was itself narrowed before passage, and by both chambers' official one-line synopses of the enacted bill, which describe it as repealing only the Baltimore Convention Center requirement.

Two of Maryland's own official records have not caught up with the July 2026 change and are flagged here rather than relied upon. The General Assembly's own "Laws - Statute Text" lookup tool for Section 11-214.1, fetched directly during this research, still displays the interim, July 2025 through June 2026 text carrying both the price floor and the Baltimore Convention Center condition, rather than the current text with only the floor remaining. Maryland's codified statute compilations commonly lag session law by months, and this appears to be an ordinary instance of that lag. Separately, the Comptroller's published "List of Tangible Personal Property and Services Subject to Sales and Use Tax," dated February 2024, describes only the pre-2025 rule and reflects neither 2026 change; it is cited here only for that historical baseline. Maryland has never enacted a legal tender law for gold or silver and has no state bullion depository; this record found no primary source suggesting either has ever been seriously proposed.