XAUUSD Hourly Spread and Volatility, 2025-2026

One year of gold (XAUUSD) bid-ask spread and volatility aggregated by hour of the broker trading day, built from 70,546 five-minute MetaTrader 5 bars across 312 sessions, 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026. MetaTrader records the spread on every bar. Almost nobody publishes it, so most advice about when spreads widen on gold is folklore. This is the measurement. Columns hour — hour of the broker server day, not UTC bars — M5 bars observed in that hour coverage_pct — bars as a share of the busiest hour spread_median_usd — median bid-ask spread in US dollars spread_p90_usd — 90th percentile spread range_median_usd — median high-minus-low of the M5 bar volume_median — median tick volume spread_pct_of_range — spread as a percentage of typical movement Findings Median spread is $0.16 and identical in all 24 hours. It exceeded $1.00 in 3 bars out of 70,546. Median daily range is $76.12 (10th percentile $25.84, 90th $162.62). Median five-minute range varies from $2.86 to $6.97 across the day — roughly 2.4x. Median weekend gap is $7.60 across 52 breaks; 48% exceeded $10. The practical consequence: spread is flat, so the cost of trading as a share of the move is driven almost entirely by the denominator. Limitations One broker, one account type (raw spread), one year. A standard account folding cost into the quote will look completely different. Hours are broker server time and the daily maintenance break leaves two hours with reduced coverage, which are not comparable like-for-like with the rest. Gold ran from roughly $3,288 to $4,044 over the period, so dollar figures are not directly comparable to a period at a very different price level. build.py is the script that produced the CSV and reproduces it byte for byte, so the arithmetic is auditable rather than asserted. Source and write-up: techkick.me/research · github.com/tech-kick/xauusd-hourly-data